Movie Review

  • The Age of Innocence (1993)

    The Age of Innocence (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, February 2011) Subtle, nuanced and character-driven, The Age of Innocence nonetheless never has to struggle to keep our interest.  As a piece of American Victoriana, it’s almost endlessly fascinating: the New-York upper-class of 1870 had issues to work through, and director Martin Scorsese lavishly places us in the middle of that society.  As a drama of manners, The Age of Innocence carefully establishes the rules than bind the characters, then follow them as they try (or don’t try) to rebel against them.  Given that this is a Scorsese picture, both script and direction are self-assured and surprisingly timeless.  Even the voiceover, usually a sign of lazy screenwriting, here adds another layer of polish to the film.  Production credentials are impeccable, with careful costuming, set design and even split-second glimpses at elaborate dishes.  Daniel Day-Lewis is exceptional as a deeply conflicted man of his time, while Michelle Pfeiffer reminds us of how good she was in her heyday and Winona Rider turns in an underhanded performance as a constantly-underestimated ingénue.  It all builds up to a quiet but shattering emotional climax that amply justifies the picture’s sometimes-lazy rhythm.  Worth seeing and pondering as one realizes that the protagonist pays for the right crime but for the wrong reasons.

  • Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987)

    Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, February 2011) Considerably inferior sequel to 1984’s original Revenge of the Nerds, even though it’s quite a bit more assured in terms of budget and direction.  This time, the action moves south to Florida for spring break, but the script becomes dumber in a hurry.  If the first film was silly, this one is just stupid, and you can tell by the amount of time characters act like their own caricatures rather than real characters.  None if it is meant to be taken seriously, but the laziness of the script is such that even lame gags (like a metal detector finding a buried… metal detector) look like genius among the rest.  Much of the first half of the film is spent re-hashing the best moments of the first film, and while it’s fun to see Robert Carradine and friends laughing it up and James Cromwell return briefly as an unrepentant elder nerd, that’s not quite enough to make up for the rest of the picture.  There is, at least, enough colourful mid-eighties fashion to look at whenever the rest of Revenge of the Nerds 2 fails.  The DVD contains no special features of note.

  • Revenge of the Nerds (1984)

    Revenge of the Nerds (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, On DVD, February 2011) The early-to-mid-eighties saw their share of college-set comedies, but few of them became part of popular culture.  If Revenge of the Nerds is any exception, it’s probably because of its outright pro-nerd message: Nerds have the fortunate tendency to take over the world’s technical infrastructure, and so it’s no accident if the film would be fondly remembered during an era where the Internet has made intellectuals kind of admirable.  (Nah, I kid: it’s all about the underdog, and everyone thinks they’re the underdog.) As a film, Revenge of the Nerds isn’t much to celebrate: everything about the production shows its age and low-budget origins and the direction is no better from countless other B-grade comedies.  In terms of subject matter, however, the screenplay is clever enough to marry geekery with college debauchery and underdog plotting (sometimes coming a bit too close to trivializing the plight of other minorities): the result hasn’t aged well, but it has held up a lot better than other films of its era.  There are even a few surprises in the casting, from John Goodman as a bullying coach, to James Cromwell as the protagonist Robert Carradine’s very-nerdy dad.  Dramatically, the film falls a bit flat toward the end without a clear climax (the beginning of the third act seems tighter than its end), but with such an amiable film, who’s to nit-pick?  Die-hard nerds may quibble at the questionable nerdiness of some of the members of Lambda Lambda Lambda (and their readiness to take up ordinary college antics), but that’s part of the film’s inclusiveness: Everybody’s a nerd now!  The “Panty Raid Edition” DVD contains the kind of audio commentary track that reflects the good times the filmmakers had in making the film, as well as a few featurettes to reinforce the feeling.  More amusingly, it also has a wretched sitcom pilot from the early nineties that shows everything that’s wrong with cheap scripted TV comedy.

  • Broken Arrow (1996)

    Broken Arrow (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, on DVD, February 2011) I hadn’t seen Broken Arrow since its opening weekend in theatres, but I’m not really surprised to see that it has held up so well as an action film.  The mid-to-late nineties had some fantastic examples of the form (Speed, The Rock, Face/Off, etc.) and Broken Arrow still holds the distinction of being one of John Woo’s better American features.  Structured around a script by Graham Yost, Broken Arrow features a pleasant mixture of military technology, criminal activity and all-out action indulgence.  Christian Slater is forgettable as the hero and baby-faced Samatha Matthis looks completely lost as an action heroine, but John Travolta steals the show as a charismatic scenery-chewing villain, coolly charming as a killer with the best dialogue in the entire film.  (From the seminal “Ain’t it cool?” (dot-com) to the clenched-teeth “Would you mind not shooting at the thermonuclear weapons?”)  Planes, helicopters, trucks and trains are all destroyed along the way, but the clarity of the film’s action sequences still holds up as a fine example of the genre, especially after the erosion of action filmmaking during the last overly-edited decade.  Here, every shot seems meaningful, and we get to appreciate both pending dangers and minute developments.  A few of the night-time effect shots look dated, but the rest is still technically impressive.  Broken Arrow doesn’t make too much sense and definitely feels contrived, but it still carries an action-packed charge with a smile and presents B-grade action films as they should be more often.  The 2010 DVD re-release, sadly, is not even enhanced for widescreen TVs and offers no other features than the trailer –a real shame considering the documentary material available to a logistics-heavy action film.

  • Waiting… (2005)

    Waiting… (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, February 2011) There’s been a welcome eclipse for gross-out comedy since the turn of the century, and Waiting is enough to remind us that even a foul-mouthed slacker comedy can dispense with references to genitalia.  But since one of the first significant laughs of the film comes from the line “If you want to work here, in this restaurant, I really think that you need to ask yourself one simple question: How do you feel about frontal male nudity?” it’s not as if we haven’t been warned.  The nominal plot engine is how a slacker-with-prospects (played by Justin Long) comes to reconsider the time he has spent working at the local “Shenaniganz” chain restaurant outlet.  But the ensemble casts brings together a bunch of oddball characters all having their own fun.  Ryan Reynolds is the most compelling as a hilariously deviant waiter who’s seen everything: It’s a scum-ball character, but he plays it with a winning smile and the film weeks weaker during its third act when it has to spend time away from him: few other actors could have earned such sympathy with that role.  Luis Guzman is another highlight as a restaurant worker obsessed with his own kind of fun and games.  Chi McBride, Alanna Ubach and Vanessa Lengies also make an impression in smaller roles, but everyone has their role to play in making sure that this workplace comedy ends up clicking.  Never mind the inevitable spitting-in-food scene (whose best laugh comes from the relatively innocuous “We almost had to switch to the ten-second rule.”): there’s more fun to be had in the acerbic repartee between workers and the blank-faced realization that much of the served food in America is handled by people waiting for a better life.  The two-disc DVD seems ridiculously loaded with extra features given the triviality of the film itself, but they’re good for a few extra laughs.

  • Haeundae [Tidal Wave] (2009)

    Haeundae [Tidal Wave] (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, February 2011) One of the dangers in trying to review a foreign film is trying to figure out what’s a real weakness and what gets lost in translation.  To western reviewers used to firm tone unity within films, Asian cinema’s genre-blending can be a struggle to appreciate.  While South Korea’s Haeundae aspires to present an experience much like the typical American disaster movie, this may not be obvious from the first hour, which feels like an incoherent comedy featuring far too many ill-defined characters.  Comedy doesn’t always travel well, and it’s an even more difficult sell when the film doesn’t seem in any hurry to get to the disaster, or even tell a story efficiently.  The titular disaster strikes after 70 minutes, and the next fifteen are remarkably enjoyable in depicting a coastal city battered by a tsunami: There’s a series of sequences featuring a cargo ship and its containers that makes no sense, but is awe-inspiring in the ways only stupid action movie sequences can be.  But don’t count on any lasting triumph, because the closing moments of the film are taken up with lengthy body counts of characters that don’t necessarily deserve any retribution.  The end result feels like an incoherent blend of broad comedy, manipulative drama and dumb action: Haeundae lacks focus and direction.  The relatively copious DVD supplements of the US edition are hit-and-miss, but they reveal the filmmaker’s comedy backgrounds and their intentions to do something different.  The result, alas, speaks for itself: sometimes entertaining but generally incoherent, leaving audiences guessing.  How much of this is due to cultural differences and strange translation choices is something else worth reviewing.

  • Carriers (2009)

    Carriers (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, February 2011) One of the best things about Carriers is the way it wisely dispenses with the usual first act of most post-apocalyptic thrillers.  As the film begins with public displays of bad driving and other asocial behaviour, the ultimate pandemic has already happened, leaving only a few scattered survivors fearing for their lives.  While the tricks you in thinking that this is Chris Pine’s film due to a flashy performance, Carriers is really the story of someone else in their four-people group as they travel and see how badly society has deteriorated.  There’s not much of a point to the film but a few disconnected adventures and a gradually decreasing list of characters: as another example of how nihilistic the post-apocalyptic genre can be, it’s hard to do better.  Still, for such a low-profile horror thriller, Carriers is generally well-executed (some of the camera work is very good), and written with a few flourishes of interest: The misdirection in terms of protagonist is gradually revealed and (somewhat unusually for the zombies/infected genre) the film leaves behind more characters than it kills graphically.  Heck, it’s probably the first time I have liked Piper Perabo in a film.  While Carriers never becomes anything more than a disposable, redundant post-apocalyptic film, but it’s not too bad within the confines of that genre.

  • Gasland (2010)

    Gasland (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, February 2011) In looking at environmental issues, there’s often a naïve and comforting tendency to believe that the worst excesses are behind us, somewhere in distant history.  Surely, no one will be stupid enough again to build unfiltered smokestacks leading to acid rain, or expand a residential neighbourhood over buried toxic landfill like what happened at Love Canal.  So it is that one of the most depressing facets of Gasland, Josh Fox’s Oscar-nominated exploration of natural gas extraction by hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is the realization that this has all happened in the past ten years.  Helped along by a deregulatory framework approved by the Bush administration, tens of thousands of fracking sites have been established and Fox takes us on a damning tour of some of them.  The process upsets natural geology to such a degree that it contaminates drinking water with industrial waste and escaping natural gas, condemning ordinary people to pay for alternate sources of water, fall sick to neurological diseases, live under the threat of explosions or see their rural neighbourhood turn deadly for wildlife.  Much of this is happening on public lands, or within tranquil rural communities once people accept payoffs (er, “mineral royalties”) for what’s happening underground.  Fox’s elegantly mournful tone is unexpectedly effective in creating pure outrage, and part of the film’s effectiveness is seeing Fox become more self-assured both in content and in presentation as the film advances.  The natural gas industry is ineffective in presenting a credible defence: on the other hand, Fox traces a clear path between government deregulation, industry lobbying, environmental degradation and grass-root consequences: He build his case from the ground up, and we can’t help but think that one of the reasons why fracking has become such a problem in such a short time is that for the longest time, its consequences have been on isolated and rural ordinary people, far away from the urban centers of environmentally-concerned citizen.  It remains to be seen what can be done to turn this practice around: Official government entities aren’t doing much; some politicians seem comprehensively paid-off by the industry; and there seems to be some outrage fatigue in the US after the overwhelming Bush years.  And that’s not even going into the various ways the US government is structurally corrupt by design.  Even the conviction that natural gas industry executives are due for a heck of a karmic retribution won’t help anyone in the short-term.  On the other hand, Gasland may still help people outside the US: there’s been a lot of discussion about shale gas extraction in Quebec lately, and the wind is definitely blowing toward far-stronger environmental regulations.  Gasland, which circulated widely in 2010 (excerpts of it even being shown on mainstream TV news about shale gas extraction) may have helped.  It’s not much and it’s far too late to help US citizen, but faced with such a bleak portrait of public environmental degradation, it’s best to take all the good news we can find.

  • Incendies (2010)

    Incendies (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, February 2011) French Canadian cinema is best-known for comedies and historical pieces rather than globe-spanning dramas, and that’s a good part of why Incendies feels so satisfying.  Spanning thirty years and two continents, the film is kicked off by posthumous revelations that send Montréal-based twins to the Middle East (specifically Lebanon, although the film is careful to invent place names and never specify countries) where they eventually piece together a set of terrible family secrets.  While borrowing a few tricks from the thriller playbook (Guns! Explosions!  Torture!), this is a serious drama more than anything else.  Bouncing in time between the contemporary odyssey of the twins and the events of their mother’s life, Incendies has scope, dramatic depth and feels like a world-class production.  The actors are exceptional (Lubna Azabal is particularly good, but it’s also hilarious to see Remy Girard show up in another Oscar-nominated film), the direction is solid and the film features some wide-screen cinematography along the way, despite a comparatively small budget and source material adapted from a stage play.  This is a film to chew on for a while, in its operatic themes of redemption and blinding truth.  Deservedly nominated for an Academy Award, Incendies also marks an odd development for Quebec cinema: a film that uses Montréal as a framing device for a story that takes place elsewhere.  It’s good to see the local film industry look outside once in a while.

  • Barney’s Version (2010)

    Barney’s Version (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, January 2011) As much as I like supporting Canadian Content (and there’s nothing more CanCon than an adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s last novel, filmed and set in Montréal), there’s something just subtly off about Barney’s Version.  It’s an accumulation of small annoyances that damage the film, from a scatter-shot episodic narrative to flat performances to overly sentimental moments.  I’ll be the first to note that presenting forty years of a man’s life on-screen isn’t the simplest screenwriting challenge: As an adaptation of a dense and thick novel, you can perceptibly feel the loose threads running over everywhere and be frustrated at the amount of extra detail missing from the screen.  That’ll explain the way the film doesn’t quite seem to hang together.  While Barney’s Version revolves around Paul Giamatti’s exceptional lead performance and Dustin Hoffman’s unrecognizable turn as his father, actors surrounding them are far less credible.  Most of the female characters seem played either without subtlety (I once thought I could watch Minnie Driver all day, but her one-note shrill performance tested that assumption) or without affect (Rosamund Pike, sedated throughout): even assuming that the film is from Barney’s subjective perspective isn’t enough to excuse it.  Humorous in the details and tragic in the whole, Barney’s Version runs off in all kinds of directions, and it’s not in its nature to finish neatly with a big finale.  It’s best, then, to appreciate its small quirky moments, its Montréal atmosphere and the occasional Denys Arcand cameo.  It is, as is the case with so many middle-of-the-road Canadian dramas, amiable but unremarkable.  Barney’s Version is good enough to make Canadian audiences feel better about seeing it, but it’s not worth much commentary otherwise.

  • Winter’s Bone (2010)

    Winter’s Bone (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2011) There are films I won’t see unless they’ve been nominated for Academy Awards, but Winter’s Bone goes father in being a film I wouldn’t have seen all the way to the end unless it had been nominated for an Academy Award.  Taking place deep in the rural Ozarks area, the film is set in a desperately poor way of life where petty crime and family loyalty override more wholesome values: this, clearly, isn’t the virtuous middle-America lauded by social conservatives.  It’s in cold weather that our wise-by-necessity teenage heroine sets out to discover where her missing father has gone, despite violent warnings, the quasi-certitude of illegal activity and the bone-chilling landscape of winter in hillbilly hell.  What could have been an intriguing criminal investigation set against an unusual setting instead turns into an experience of endurance as the film quickly becomes a trek through a place that I desperately wanted to escape.  The harsh naturalistic cinematography, coupled with ugly characters, desperate circumstances and bleak landscapes, does everything to repulse viewers.  Meanwhile, the slow pacing, lack of plotting and repellent circumstances only prolong the agony.  While there are a few nice sequences in the film (the lake scene is brilliantly gruesome), an interesting inversion of the usual city=bad; rural=good clichés, and Jennifer Lawrence is a solid anchor for the film, much of it feels like an endless nightmare: I spent most of Winter’s Bone thinking Get me out of here… even as I was doing something else at the time.  Goodness helps those who see this without distractions.

  • Secretary (2002)

    Secretary (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2011) In certain circles, Secretary is often held up as a mainstream-friendly introduction to the dominant/submissive mindset –not your usual fare for romantic comedies, and certainly its most enjoyable trait.  Whatever shortcomings the film may have, at least it’s willing to celebrate its kinkiness: The main characters don’t play by the usual rules, and neither does writer-director Steven Shainberg: From the first few moments, Secretary delves deep into kink and makes it feel like a perfectly understandable lifestyle.  As a depressive young woman (Maggie Gyllenhall) falls under the spell of her unusual boss (James Spader, patron saint of proud deviants), the film becomes both stranger and more self-assured.  Despite the added spice of dominance and submission, the core of the film is a solid romance between two characters whose psychological issues complement well.  It’s fun, charming, often cute despite some unpleasant material and absolutely non-threatening.  There are a few problems with the third act, which seems to falter and lose control by going for an overly-public absurdist resolution.  Still, it manages a tricky balance for a difficult subject and it ends on a happy note that pleasantly wraps up everything.  Gyllenhall is mesmerizing in the lead role –nearly ten years later, this is still her career-best performance.  Secretary may not be a particularly great film, but it’s certainly striking, unexpected and confident in the ways it dares celebrate its lack of social convention.  No wonder many people still think of it fondly.

  • Adventureland (2009)

    Adventureland (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2011) As far as nostalgic coming-of-age comedies go, Adventureland is a bit better than the average.  Featuring post-teenage characters trying to figure out life from the vantage point of awful summer jobs, this is a film that exceeds expectations while paying homage to familiar material.  Set in 1987, the story centers around an intellectual college-age character forced to take a job at a local amusement park, where he meets radically different people and learns a few things about life outside school.  To its credit, the film understands that characters and actors are the bedrock on which this kind of small-scale drama fails or succeeds, and the script does well in establishing people with whom we’d want to spend 90 minutes.  The film is billed as a comedy, but it’s more affectionately romantic than overly funny –and it features a few plot points played differently than in other similar films.  Seeing Adventureland in early 2011 is already a different experience than upon its release in 2009, if only because its leads actors have been in many high-profile projects since then.  Jesse Eisenberg’s usual nebbish air works well here, whereas Kristen Stewart keeps playing “wounded” effectively and Ryan Reynolds is willing to let go of his winning persona to expose a deeply flawed character.  Writer/director Greg Mottola manages to deliver a retro reminiscence that doesn’t feel of interest solely to people of that time: The result may not be a barrel of laughs, but it will leave you smiling.  The DVD features a few extras, the best of which is a chatty commentary by director Mottola and star Eisenberg that starts out feeling meaningless, but eventually reveals a lot about the film’s autobiographical content, low-budget film-making and on-set shooting details.

  • The Mechanic (2011)

    The Mechanic (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, January 2011) Jason Statham may not be a very versatile actor, but he is very good at the one kind of role that suits him best, and he’s shown himself more than able to keep on doing what people ask of him.  This means that there is such a thing as “a Jason Statham film” even as the concept of the action hero actor has fallen off the wayside lately.  His latest, The Mechanic, is solid middle-of-the-road material for him.  Playing a seasoned assassin taking on an apprentice, Statham stretches no thespian muscle yet still manages to deliver the goods.  As the title of the film suggests, he’s icy precision in a film that seems happy to recycle familiar action-movie clichés with an unhealthy side-order of coincidence and bland cinematography.  To its credit, it doesn’t take on pretentious airs and understands the kind of thrills that the audience expects from “that kind of (Statham) movie”: This is strictly B-grade filmmaking, competent but not exhilarating.  Its bland overexposed cinematography does have a bit of an old-fashioned atmosphere, almost as if this remake was trying to deliver a film-long visual homage to its 1972 original.  Director Simon West has been inconsistent through the years, but here he doesn’t seem terribly interested in delivering anything more than the usual –although a hit in a downtown Chicago hotel does have its moments.  (Plus, there’s the “garbage shredder scene” to deliver at least one solidly unpleasant jolt.)  Otherwise, The Mechanic is strictly routine, down to the accidental airport meeting that precipitates the conclusion and the expected plot beats tied up during the epilogue.  As an action movie, it’s competent without being exceptional –exactly the kind of film that appears, doesn’t disappoint, and then sinks away forever into bargain bins.

  • The Kids are All Right (2010)

    The Kids are All Right (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2011) If you consider this film solely from its pedigree sheet, you may expect something significant: Film-festival’s favourite, lauded by reviewers, nominated for a truck-load of awards, performances by Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo —The Kids are All Right has to be something special, right?  And if you just look at the surface, the film’s two major tweaks on the usual family-drama template may be interesting: As the two kids of a lesbian couple come of age, they reconnect with their biological father, causing the father and one of their moms to have an affair.  Cue the applause for a frank portrayal of what modern families can be.  But beyond that departure from the usual family drama formula, what’s left?  Not much.  So little, in fact, that once you get the “unconventional family” premise, the film struggles to justifies its existence: The dialogue feels familiar, the plotting is a well-worn formula, the characters are all annoying in their own way, and the laughs in this “comedy” are both rare and slight.  By the time the film remembers that it has a serious adultery subplot, the film concludes at a speed it couldn’t bother to reach at any time before that.  The sex scenes don’t rescue the film, and neither do the actors involved.  There’s a self-defeating quality in how The Kids Are All Right manages to make its unusual family seem as boring as any traditional nuclear family elsewhere in America.  Is the film all right?  Sure it is.  But not much more.