Movie Review

  • The Hurt Locker (2008)

    The Hurt Locker (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, July 2009): There can be such a thing as too much of a good thing, and the second hour of this film is a case in point: What starts out as a tight episodic war thriller with uncanny suspense sequences eventually loosens its grip on the audience and meanders on its way to a meaningful conclusion.  Don’t be fooled: even with its loose and predictable third act, The Hurt Locker still is one of the best action films of the year, and one of the best Iraq war movie so far.  But a better-controlled film would have been even more powerful.  Director Kathryn Bigelow makes a welcome return to the big screen and shows from the start that her action sequences can be as good as anything else: The Hurt Locker’s best moments (including the hair-raising image on the poster) are in the half-dozen action/suspense sequences putting us far too close to American bomb-defusing experts working in Baghdad.  This film justifies the whole quasi-documentary handheld-camera aesthetics to a level of clarity that other glossier filmmakers can’t even imagine: As a depiction of war-driven action, it’s as good as it gets –a fortunate achievement for a film that focuses on the adrenaline junkies for whom war is a continuous peak experience.  There are a few familiar faces among the supporting characters (including Ralph Fiennes as a foul-mouthed English mercenary), but it’s the relatively-unknown main characters that make the strongest impression: In particular, Jeremy Renner is a revelation as a loose-cannon protagonist whose motivations eventually become the crux of the film.  Despite the meandering subplots that shed a lot of energy in the latter half of the picture (and the accumulation of inaccuracies to pump up the drama at the expense of realism –how handy that one of our lead sappers is also a sniper!), The Hurt Locker remains a strong piece of cinema, and one of the rare war films about Iraq to make its point with little partisan content.  It’s both exhilarating yet realistic, reaching out to both the action-movie fans and those who think that war is hell.

  • Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

    Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, July 2009): By the time this sixth instalment of the Harry Potter story rolls in, it’s about as critic-proof as it can be: By now, everyone knows how much they like the series and when they’ll catch the next instalment(s).  For reviewers, there isn’t much else to do but comment on the ongoing story and how well the film does as a movie.  The good news this time around is that the direction is generally well-handled, the story holds up for those who haven’t read the book (aside from a few early missteps) and the film feels too short rather than too long, although much of this impression is given by the absence of a few recurring characters.  The big problem with the film, on the other hand, is how abruptly it veers from fluffy teenage high-school drama (With kisses!  And jealousy!  And hormones!) to dark fantasy verging on horror.  There’s a lot more blood in this instalment, and if the first 90 minutes amble loosely in teenage romance territory, the last half-hour suddenly shifts gears, ditches all attempts at humour and races to a major death.  It’s true that the Potter series has been on a steady “darker, more adult” arc since the first volume, but the shift is more noticeable this time around, and maybe not handled as well as it could have been: as usual, read the book to get the full story.  Still, chopping down a fan-favourite 600-pages book in a coherent film is a tough assignment, and perhaps the most amazing aspect of the series so far is how well it holds up as an ongoing whole story: We’re not yet done with the series, and it’s already a landmark piece of cinema.

  • Public Enemies (2009)

    Public Enemies (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, July 2009): Depression-era Chicago, gangster Dillinger, early days of the FBI, Marion Cotillard as a moll, Michael Mann directing: What can possibly go wrong? Plenty of things, actually, starting with Mann’s increasingly ugly fixation for digital filmmaking: Public Enemies often looks cheap and out of control: a night-time shootout looks as if it’s been filmed on video by amateurs, the handheld camera is constantly used without reason, while several other scenes are insufficiently lit. Meanwhile, though, there isn’t much going on in the tangential and confused script: scenes come and go, but there’s little attachment to the characters, what they’re doing or where they’re going. Among other things, the story touches lightly upon Dillinger’s extraordinary popularity at the time, and messes up the chronology for several members of the Dillinger gang. Johnny Depp and Christian Bale star, but neither of them show the skills they’re best known for. The result is an overlong mess, and an uninvolving one… especially given the elements the film could draw upon. This is the third substantially-digital film by Mann, and after Collateral and Miami Vice, it’s clear that he’s getting less and less successful with each of them. What’s going on?

  • Mamma Mia! (2008)

    Mamma Mia! (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, sometime mid-2009) I’m not that familiar with the original stage jukebox musical, but even I know that it’s a frothy romantic comedy built around a number of ABBA songs. As such, the film adaptation Mamma Mia! does service to the concept: It’s lighthearted, romantic, and features a series of numbers based on ABBA songs. As three older men converge on a Greek island where an ex-flame and her daughter live, it’s the film’s smallest mystery to find out who is the girl’s father. Much of the time is spend singing and dancing, helped along by the inescapable (and somewhat delightful) fact that ABBA’s music has inserted itself deeply into modern pop culture. The result may be kitsch, but it’s familiar and comfortable kitsch without a mean bone and with an inordinate desire to please. It is, in other words, almost impossible to dislike. The actors involved aren’t all good singers, but it’s part of the film’s charm to see Pierce Brosnan croon, even hoarsely, to Meryl Streep. Amanda Seyfried is cute as a Muppet as the daughter with a mystery father, and the fantastic Greek scenery adds a lot to the film’s sunny atmosphere. Mamma Mia! isn’t high art, but sometimes campy pop is more than good enough.

  • The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)

    The Taking of Pelham 123 (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, June 2009): Those looking for a New York crime thriller should be pleased by this latest remake: while the film is good enough, it stops short of being anything more. Director Tony Scott keeps his usual hyper-kinetic tendencies under control, only unleashing them during the credit sequence and a few high-speed interludes. The rest of the film is polished and played generally well by John Travolta and an unglamorous Denzel Washington. Most of the hostage drama is dedicated to a sometimes-contrived actor’s duel, at the expense of the hostages’ characterization. It’s engrossing enough until the third act, when our protagonist keeps volunteering back into a situation that is clearly not his to solve; it all leads to a ridiculously blood-thirty conclusion that hasn’t earned its over-the-top drama and actually diminishes the everyman quality of our tainted hero. As for the rest, well, the remake is generally successful at erasing the seventies origins of the previous film: There are financial shenanigans, high-tech gadgets and plenty of references to contemporary New York. With a stronger and more appropriate conclusion, The Taking of Pelham 123 could have made onto the list of genuinely good thrillers. As it is now, it’s a good-enough choice whenever everything else has been seen.

  • Batman (1989)

    Batman (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, on DVD, June 2009): With the critical and commercial success of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, it’s becoming easier to forget about Tim Burton’s reinvention of the character, before it slid once again in franchise-killing high camp during the Joel Schumacher years. And that’s a shame, because despite some increasingly dated aspects, Batman still keeps an operatic grandeur that resonates even today. The story is thin and eighties-fashion still peeks through the self-conscious blend of historical references, but the entire film remains intriguing. Health Ledger may have taken over the Joker’s look, but Jack Nicholson’s take on the character remains magnetic. Only an underwhelming finale falters visibly: While everyone remembers the Batman/Joker showdown in the streets of Gotham, fewer will recall the following sequence taking place in a cathedral. Two decades after the film’s release, the special edition DVD can afford to be candid about the film’s rushed production, last-minute producer-driven script changes and casting choices. Alas, director Burton’s commentary track could have benefited from judicious editing: His “you know?”s start grating early on and never fade away.

    (Third viewing, On Cable TV, June 2016) I hadn’t watched Batman in more than ten years, but another look was more than warranted given rapid evolution of superhero movies since then. Tim Burton’s Batman turns out to be a significant step in the evolution of Batman’s movie portrayal from sixties silliness to Nolan’s grimmer portrayal. It’s certainly trying to be more serious, but it can’t completely manage it. It doesn’t help that Burton’s vision for his characters (and particularly the joker) is so colourful and exuberant: it’s tough to keep a straight face at what Jack Nicholson pulls off in his completely unrestrained performance. Otherwise, it’s fascinating to see in here the seeds of the modern superhero blockbuster, albeit with pre-digital effects, restrained cinematography and somewhat more silliness. (Not included in the movie, but far more important, are the media tie-in and marketing effort surrounding the film, which I remember more than the movie itself) Michael Keaton is better than anyone may remember as Bruce Wayne/Batman, while Kim Basinger is spectacular as Vicki Vale. The ending is a bit dull (the Joker shooting down the batwing is memorable, but the subsequent cathedral sequence isn’t), but there are enough good scenes along the way to make it worthwhile. It’s probably impossible to overstate Batman’s impact on the modern blockbuster industry, but there’s actually a worthwhile film underneath the hype.

  • Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

    Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, June 2009): The most remarkable thing about this film isn’t nearly as much the near-constant special effects, brute sonic force or always-moving camera: It’s the feeling that a tremendous amount of talent and energy has gone into making one of the loudest, fastest and dullest films of the year. In that, it’s not particularly different from the first film of the series: Michael Bay’s artistic choices (huh?) in portraying robots as an indistinct blur of loosely-coupled pieces still offends my own aesthetic preferences, while the attempts at injecting comedy in an SF/thriller framework feel almost as embarrassing as in the first film. The self-contradictory science-fiction elements (firmly stepped in mysticism) make absolutely no sense, while the steady accumulation of robot-on-robot fights quickly get tiresome, especially when they don’t allow any clean visuals. The film works slightly better when it becomes a military thriller: it’s a surprise to find that there hasn’t been a better recent glossy portrayal of the US military than in this pair of robot sci-fi fest. Still, it’s hard to be entirely displeased by a film that obviously cost so much: All the money is visible on-screen (although sound design often favors robot rumbling over intelligible dialogue), and it’s an education to see some of the insane shots that are now possible via special effects. Alas, it’s the accumulation of those shots that weaken them: There’s no other pacing that full-steam-ahead, which is good since the film becomes lousy whenever the characters speak to each other. But guess what? Once my ears have cleaned up and once I got used to a non-shaky vision again, I have to admit that Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen isn’t quite as embarrassing as the first Transformers. (Well, at the exception of the racist “comedy” robot duo.) Small praise, but there you go. As of this writing, five days after release, the film is already the third-biggest grossing film of the year, and is set to overtake the top spot in the remaining days of its first week in theaters. Do you even think the bad reviews even slowed it down?

    (On DVD, January 2010): Something strange happens when watching Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen at home while doing something else: It almost becomes enjoyable. Part of the answer is that you can pay attention to something else (say, a good book), while listening to the audio commentary and only looking at the screen for the good parts. The other part of the answer is that by being able to opt out of the movie frame, the pummeling effect of Bay’s increasingly nonsensical direction becomes less pronounced. Oh, it’s still not much of a film, but home viewing will allow you to focus on the good parts… and there are a few of those. Whenever Bay’s ADD lets up and he gets to avoid cutting for more than five seconds, the polish of his sequences is admirable. The sound design is incredible. The presentation of military hardware is terrific. Watching the tons of extras in the two-disc special edition (including a documentary that’s almost as long as the film itself) can even give you a renewed appreciation of the logistical challenges of big-budget moviemaking. The looks at editing and the special effects crunch are perhaps too revealing, while discussions of the film’s script-writing process are a reminder that even films with lousy plots have a lot more sophistication than we can take for granted. A lot of time is dedicated to Bay himself, which is appropriate given how charming the man can be –except when turning curiously defensive in discussing how reviews don’t really matter. Hmmm…

  • Up (2009)

    Up (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, June 2009): Will Pixar ever stop surprising audiences? It’s not enough for them to keep producing the best animated films on the face of the planet: They have to take insane chances with what they try to do. Up may be for kids, but it talks to adults by starring an old cranky man who seizes upon his last chance for adventure; it may be a comedy, but it starts with the single saddest ten minutes of film in recent memory. I’ll argue that the film never completely recovers from the strength of this first segment (even the comedy rings hollow when confronting death and loneliness), but I have to acknowledge the insane artistic ambition of the entire thing. The risk-taking never stops: The cast of characters for the entire film is tiny, half of them aren’t human, and the blatant symbolism of a character walking around with an entire house’s worth of baggage never feels forced. (On the other hand, the mean-spirited climax strikes a false note.) Ultimately, I may not love Up (and Wall-E) quite as much as I love Ratatouille, but it’s impossible to take a look at Pixar’s last few films and feel that they’re not trying to do things that other filmmakers won’t even contemplate.

  • Drag Me to Hell (2009)

    Drag Me to Hell (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, June 2009): After the indulgent and bloated Spider-Man 3, one could justifiably wonder what happened to Sam Raimi, and if ever the champion of such films as Evil Dead, Army of Darkness and Darkman would ever find his way back to the kind of superlative B-grade movies that made his reputation. Well, all of those doubts can be laid to rest with Drag Me to Hell, a convincing throwback to the core of old-school horror. Relentless to the point of seeming mean-spirited, Drag Me to Hell has a lot of sadistic fun pitting its blonde heroine against a dark curse that will not stop until she’s gone. The mechanics are unsubtle (everything worth understanding is highlighted about three times), the heroine isn’t distinctive and the stereotypes are rough-hewn, but the jumps are plentiful (the cell phone one is particularly effective) and the pacing seldom slows down. A mixture of occult traditions, shlocko movie-making and over-the-top wackiness, it’s a film that feels reinvigorating not only for Raimi, but for horror fans in general. The third act is marred by an obvious set-up, but most of the film is pure horror gold: Fans will be delighted, and not only because it’s such a refreshing change from the dross passing itself off for horror these days. Just don’t look for a moral message.

  • Striptease (1996)

    Striptease (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, June 2009): Carl Hiaasen’s particular brand of comic crime fiction can be tricky to swallow even on the page, so it’s not much of a shock to find out that this straight-up adaptation somehow fails to click. His usual strategy of surrounding a competent character with a bunch of idiots may be successful in a novel, but here it creates a comedy vacuum around lead Demi Moore, which becomes a problem since most scenes revolve around her. Hiaasen’s all-knowing narration can’t be used, and the uneasy mixture of comedy and violence becomes even more uneasy on-screen (even after toning down the book’s gratuitously blood-thirsty ending) Worse yet are the problems that the film creates for itself: While a film about strip-teasing is expected to show some flesh, the entire club sequences lose their charms quickly, especially when they still grind the film to a halt about three different times: it doesn’t help that Hiaasen’s twisty plot is snipped to a only a few thin threads that don’t create much suspense. Still, the film isn’t the disaster one could expect: Ving Rhames is hilarious in one of his first big-screen roles, whereas Burt Reynolds hits a late-career peak as a particularly perverted politician. The Miami locations are often well-used, and the whole thing is over before anyone has time to be really displeased.

  • The Addiction (1995)

    The Addiction (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, June 2009): It goes without saying that a horror monster is seldom “just” a horror monster, but Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction takes things to a conceptual extreme by cramming vampires in a film chiefly about addition and the philosophical implications thereof. Pretentious? Very much. Intriguing? Definitely. Shot in stark black-and-white, The Addiction features a number of notable names (including an unusually fetching Lily Taylor, and a scene-grabbing cameo from Christopher Walken) and an improbable number of soliloquies that, stripped of their pretentiousness, still manage to deliver a number of fascinating ideas. The vampire here is a junkie who has managed to blame others for his addiction, and whose appetite is only matched by self-loathing. As horror, it’s generally lame (although there is a vampire feeding frenzy late in the film), and yet there’s no denying that The Addiction is a lot more worthwhile to watch than any half-dozen cheap vampire movies.

  • Blood & Donuts (1995)

    Blood & Donuts (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, June 2009): The most frustrating thing about this low-budget Canadian horror film shot and set in Toronto is how uneven it is: Too often settling for a muddy drama somehow featuring a vampire protagonist, it occasionally flickers brightly with a moment of interest, only to fade again. It’s self-consciously ridiculous (David Cronenberg plays a local mob boss with boot-scratching gusto), and yet it also tries to have it both ways as a character study, especially near the unsatisfying ending. (Here’s a hint: Don’t try make us go “Oooh nooo he’s dead” over the film’s most annoying character.) But what do I know? The film was nominated for a bunch of Genies, including for the Best Screenplay award. It’s a bit of a shame to see that lead Helene Clarkson’s IMDB filmography tapered off shortly after this film, because her charm is one of the things holding the rest of the film together. Otherwise, well, fans of Canadian horror will fill a big hole in their cinematography by watching this, and fans of unusual vampire films may as well give it a look.

  • Strange Days (1995)

    Strange Days (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, on DVD, June 2009): You would think that a 1995 film re-casting 1992 racial tensions in then-future 1999 Los Angeles would be irremediably dated fifteen years later. But nothing could be farther from the truth: For once thing, the story (co-written by James Cameron) is a savvy exploration of a seductive SF concept that hasn’t aged a wrinkle since then. For another, Kathryn Bigelow’s exceptional direction keeps things moving both in and out of frame: there’s a terrific visual density to what’s happening on-screen, and the subjective camera moments are still brutally effective. But even the dated aspects of the film still pack a punch, as they now appear to have taken place in an alternate reality where police brutality and memory recording have flourished even as the Internet hasn’t taken off. (History of Science students are free to sketch how one explains the other.) But it’s really the characters that keep the whole thing together: Ralph Fiennes is mesmerizing as a romantic hustler, while Angela Basset’s seldom been better than she is here, all smooth cheekbones, high attitude and shiny dreadlocks. The pacing is a bit slow (how many times do we need to see Lenny pine away for Faith?) and the ending isn’t as snappy as it should have been, but Strange Days is still amazingly peppy for a film with such an explicit expiration date. It measures up against the best SF films of the nineties, and that’s already saying something. The DVD has a smattering of extras (most notably a few good deleted scenes, a twenty-minute audio commentary and a teaser trailer that I could still quote fifteen years later), but this is a film overdue for a special edition treatment.

  • Millennium (1989)

    Millennium (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, on DVD, June 2009): Fans of SF author John Varley often point at this film to explain his silence throughout the late eighties. Varley himself has plenty to say about it (see his short story collection The John Varley Reader for the details), but the result is a pretty poor film. Oh, it starts out well: Despite some unconvincing special effects and moments, the first half-hour creates an effective mystery, and there are a few spectacular scenes detailing the aftermath of a plane crash. Kris Kristofferson isn’t too bad as the lead, although he (like most of the actors surrounding him) look like they have escaped straight from the seventies. But then there’s a time-traveling sequence that, like too many time-traveling sequences, falls in love with the cleverness of showing everything twice when once was dull enough. The result stops the film dead for about twenty minutes, a loss from which it never completely recovers. The film gets worse and worse as it nears its end: despite a few flashes of interest, the film suffers from a disjointed third act that breaks dramatic unity with a few plot jumps weeks ahead before settling for a perfunctory future sequence and a consciously trippy epilogue. Trust me: You’d be better off reading Varley’s 1983 eponymous “novelization” (ie; what he wanted to do, untainted by outside forces) for the better experience. The DVD has a lame “alternate ending” that is suitably hidden deep in the menu system, a few unenlightening production notes, and nothing else.

  • Akira (1988)

    Akira (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, on DVD, June 2009): The world has changed a lot in thirty years, especially in the field of geek entertainment, as so it’s no surprise if Akira doesn’t seem so fresh or eye-popping after three decades of CGI, geek-friendly properties and ever-more-convincing disaster movies. Then there’s the Japanese origins of the film and the adaptation of the story from a much longer manga, both of which don’t help untangle the messy and counter-intuitive story. Still, the amount of imagination on display is awe-inspiring, and there’s no denying that the film still measures up favorably to its contemporaries. While I’ve never been a big fan of some of the back-story (and the end Kaneda/Tetsuo screaming match always makes me giggle for “Canada/Tostitos!” values of immature amusement), the film itself still held my attention throughout, even through the sometimes-lagging pacing and the excessive gore. It’s an important piece of Science Fiction cinema for reference value alone, although viewers coming back to it after a while may find out that they remember scenes and visual images rather than particular plot points.