Movie Review

  • Sing 2 (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) The motley crew of amateur animal signers is back in Sing 2, and this time the bar gets higher: After mastering the art of musical comedy in their own moderately sized town, the ensemble cast of this musical jukebox series goes for the big leagues in auditioning for their world’s equivalent of Las Vegas. Luck and chutzpah improbably get them going on a sci-fi musical show, but much of the film’s plotting is built on a foundation of lies and “in-progress” work. If you liked the first one, this is more of the same—albeit at a slightly faster tempo, considering that the character introductions are largely completed. Some of the plotting is obviously mechanical, with some characters regressing just so that all can have their obstacles to overcome during the final show. Still, the fun factor of the first film is still there: the jukebox-musical aspect will have most humming along (or wondering how much they’re out-of-touch with the newest hits) and the execution of the animal characters will bring the entire family together. A few highlights for this instalment include Bono voicing a retired rock superstar (with the soundtrack tailored to a few earlier hits), Ms. Crawly turning out to be a competent (if commanding) stage manager, a case of nepotism that’s not completely hopeless, starting the film on Prince’s high-energy “Let’s Go Crazy” and a climactic dance/battle sequence. It’s also surprisingly darker at times, even if the ending makes it clear that this remains a comedy. (Lowlights include a subplot on romantic consent that’s uncomfortable at best.)  Still, it all comes together into a visually impressive, toe-tapping package. Sing 2 may not be exceptional, but it’s solid and makes for a smooth follow-up to the first film, even improving on it in some ways.

  • Tentacoli [Tentacles] (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2022) There were a lot of Jaws-inspired creature-feature films in the late 1970s, but few seem as blatantly calculated as Tentacles, what with its shenanigans revolving around a seaside resort town threatened by the appearance of a sea monster. The other strain of 1970s cinema to be found is the “horror movies at the end of a Classic Hollywood star’s filmography” cliché, with none other than John Huston, Shelley Winters and Henry Fonda all showing up in various roles. It’s not true to insist on this being the end of their careers—all three had a few more good years and significant roles after that—but it puts Tentacles alongside other 1970s horror or disaster films that also provided roles for elderly name actors. Otherwise, there isn’t all that much to say about the film. It does have that stilted quality of Italian films shooting in the United States with American actors—dialogue that feels off, a slap-dash approach to cinematography and directing that suggests a rushed production, and an inappropriate soundtrack. In between the obviousness of the inspiration, the big-name stars wondering what they’re doing there and the unpolished aspects of the result, Tentacles isn’t particularly good despite a sudden burst of energy by the third act. It’s what it says in the title: if you want a movie about tentacles, this is it. Otherwise, keep swimming.

  • Confidentially Connie (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) Meat and family estrangement come together in small-scale domestic comedy Confidentially Connie. Relaying an obsession for red meat that feels very mid-1950s, the film revolves around a husband and a wife expecting their first child—he’s the son of an important Texan rancher who gave up the family ranch to find satisfaction in teaching literature in a northeastern college, whereas she’s trying to put meat on the table while she’s pregnant. Complications arise when the father storms into town and creates a price war at the butcher as a side effect of trying to help his daughter-in-law, with assorted shenanigans regarding tenure for the husband. It’s all quite amusing without being hilarious—the portrait of a small Maine community dominated by its college works as a microcosm of what nutrition was understood to be at the time (especially for pregnant women). Van Johnson and Janet Leigh play the lead couple as likable but rather boring people, while Louis Calhern gets most of the attention as an outsized Texas rancher in a small Maine town. The very definition of a minor comedy, Confidentially Connie works rather well in achieving its modest aims—and the passing of years has added a layer of weirdness that the carnivore-by-default 1950s didn’t quite see.

  • Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) I have been fascinated by Oscar Micheaux’s work ever since seeing Within Our Gates—it’s the film that unlocked the early history of black cinema for me, and the honesty in which he tackled his themes of racism and discrimination finds few echoes until decades later. In other words, if any silent-era movie director deserves a biographical documentary, it’s him. Now here comes Italian filmmaker Francesco Zippel to fill the gap with Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking—not only through excerpts of his films or contemporary interviews with luminaries (a lineup including Jacqueline Stewart, Melvin van Peebles, John Singleton, Chuck D and Morgan Freeman), but rare and much-appreciated footage of Micheaux at work on his movie sets. His formative years are described rather well and the overview of his surviving films feels exhaustive, but this documentary goes beyond hagiography in looking at what happened next in Micheaux’s career—his inability to successfully transition to the sound era, the forces that prevented his budding film empire from progressing further, and the limitations of his admirable attitude that black Americans could improve their situation through hard work and education. (As Stewart recognizes, that viewpoint neglects to address the formidable systemic racism of American society, and that is an argument that goes beyond Micheaux himself.)  Micheaux-as-an-old-man seldom gets mentioned in laudatory snapshots of the filmmaker focusing on his early career, but this film would have been incomplete without it. In fact, you can argue that Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking works best not as an introduction to the man, but as a slightly more substantial exploration of his role as seen from today. (If the film does have one irksome characteristic, it’s found in the “superhero” of the title-an over-the-top reference that won’t age as well as Micheaux’s films.)  It’s essential viewing for anyone working on a serious overview of black American cinema.

  • The Split (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) At first contemporary glance, The Split is enjoyable, but nothing special—a story about thieves mortally fighting each other after a successful robbery. It certainly gets extra points for a strong cast, in between Jim Brown as the protagonist, Diahann Carroll as his girlfriend, Gene Hackman as a dogged policeman and such notables as Ernest Borgnine and Donald Sutherland in supporting roles. Crime fiction fans will note that the film is based on Donald Westlake’s “Richard Stark’s” Parker novel The Seventh and that Quincy Jones does the music. But digging a bit in the film’s historical context reveals a number of innovations that would not be apparent to twenty-first century audiences: The Split was the first film to be rated R under the MPAA’s then-new rating scheme that replaced the old production code—and it does feel a touch too brutal to be a feel-good film with one death being particularly haunting. The casting of Jim Brown in the lead role also had other consequences—Film historians will point out that the film was the first to employ a black stuntman. More interestingly, Roger Ebert called The Split “the first Hollywood film to deliberately, overtly exploit black-white tensions in American society,” and it’s easy to see how this kind of intention paved some of the way to the blaxploitation wave of a few years later. Which does underscore one important aspect of watching older films—you can watch them cold as their own thing, but they’re usually far more interesting as a building block in a much bigger multidimensional tapestry weaving art, culture, careers and history.

  • Carl Laemmle (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) Over time, every significant figure in film history will get their own biographical documentary and that’s a good thing—despite the format’s limitations (and tendency toward hagiography, considering that they’re usually labours of love from friends, family and admirers), they can encapsulate the high points of a life in an easy-to-absorb format. Carl Laemmle (1867–1939) may not be a figure of modern notoriety these days, but his shadow looms large over early Hollywood history, and the eponymous documentary is able to demonstrate why. Having emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1884, Laemmle eventually becomes a figure in the burgeoning American film industry, and is among the first to migrate from the New York area to the sunnier (and less Edison-strangled) skies of California. That’s where he founds Universal Studios, helps create the Universal Monsters franchise (with his son) and eventually loses control of the studio after a few ill-advised financial moves. For most people, this would be the start of retirement—but in Laemmle’s case, it’s a shift toward activism as he engineers ways of welcoming Jewish refugees from 1930s Germany. The documentary has the usual mixture of stock footage, narration and testimonials from historians and descendants—some of the featured guests include Leonard Maltin and Peter Bogdanovich. If you’re just looking for the essentials, Carl Laemmle has it all—greatly expanding the Wikipedia articles about its subject and presenting information in a straightforward fashion with just enough historical context to make it make sense. Where the result has its limits, however, is that it’s a very staid presentation of its topic: just the acceptable minimum, and nothing else. Some of it feels a bit rough or old-fashioned for a 2019 film, which may reflect the film’s limited budget more than anything else. Still, you can imagine Carl Laemmle becoming the first stop for anyone looking to get more information on an early Hollywood mogul, perhaps motivated by seeing his name on some of the most enduring films of the early 1930s.

  • Ville-Marie (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, July 2022) The world of movies is vast enough that even avid cinephiles can miss intriguing titles, and somehow it took me seven years to notice a French-Canadian film featuring no less than the divine Monica Bellucci. That’s not as much as an incongruity as you’d think—Bellucci is fluently trilingual, has often dubbed her own characters, and can boast of memorable appearances in films made in Italy, France and Hollywood. Considering this, it was only a matter of time (and budget) until she made her way to Montréal. In Ville-Marie (the original name for the colonial settlement that became Montréal, now used to designate one of the city’s central boroughs), she doesn’t stretch very much by playing an international movie star coming to Montréal for a film shoot. Alas, she’s nearly the only interesting thing about the result. Writer-director Guy Édoin goes for a delicate slice-of-life ensemble drama here, where all characters are connected in surprising ways in the wake of an opening tragedy. Unfortunately, the result falls far from its potential: the bits of interest are unevenly distributed, the characters remain enigmatic, and the moments feel disconnected even when they’re meant to cohere. The film-within-a-film in which Bellucci’s character comes to play is an over-lit Sirk-like melodrama that’s meant to symbolize character growth but usually falls flat. Some moderately interesting elements (such as the film ending with characters driving out of Montréal) keep the result from being a complete disappointment, but Ville-Marie ends up being far less than what its individual components suggest. Maybe it deserved to be a miniseries. Maybe it didn’t need to exist. Certainly, Bellucci deserves better.

  • Breeders (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2022) Somewhere beyond bad movies lies a horrifying realm of painful films. One where competent filmmakers and adequate actors are nowhere to be found. One where standards of human decency no longer apply. One where logic, coherence or even viewing pleasure are no longer relevant. A realm inhabited by films like Breeders. You would think that, at a mere 77 minutes, this film would be limited in its awfulness, but you really have no idea of how long 77 minutes can be in the wrong hands. The plot is as simplistic as it’s misogynistic, as an alien creature sexually assaults and impregnates women in Manhattan. A quick investigation by a policeman and a doctor soon brings them underground, where they discover the pulsating gooey horror. In the repulsive world of erotic science-fictional horror, Species looks like a work of high art compared to Breeders—and the toxic combination of exploitative tropes with bargain-basement filmmaking makes the result feel that much more obnoxious. The acting is incompetent even in the French dub—and combined with the terrible writing, Breeders frequently fails to create even the most basic sense of disbelief required in watching a film, let alone any scene-to-scene narrative continuity. The acting is so bad that—well, let’s put it this way: I can usually forgive a lot from an actress if I find her cute, and while Teresa Farley is really cute, I have seldom seen a more terrible actress with such a flat affect. (She probably won’t mind—IMDB records exactly two acting credits for her, both of them in 1986 low-budget films. Some people have the grace to recognize early on that acting is not for them.)  I suppose that Breeders can be used as an example of “Here’s how bad movies can get” (indeed, I saw it as part of a series voluntarily seeking out the worst movies.), but that’s a terrible justification for undergoing 77 minutes of cinematic atrocities. It’s a film that makes gratuitous nudity feel bad, and I have no sympathy for that.

  • Labor Day (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2022) I can’t figure out whether Labor Day was going for formula romantic drama or atonal mess. Screenwriter-director Jason Reitman, usually comfortable in far more cynical fare, here adapts a Joyce Maynard novel as straight as possible. This is remarkable considering that the story seems ready-made for criticism—its deliberate use of romantic tropes is about as obvious as it comes, and going through it all in soft-focus languid pacing often brings viewers to ask, “Really? You’re really going to do this?” more than anything else. Manipulative to an exceptional degree, the film starts with a single mother being seduced by an escaped convict (but a really manly one; so manly that he becomes a surrogate father to our teenage protagonist over a single Labor Day weekend) and then plays out a fantasy of a reconstituted family. But, having written itself into a happy ending before its time was up, the film then goes off into another more suspenseful vein until it can pull its cards to set up a ridiculously contrived climax spanning decades. It’s that kind of film, and I suppose that the actors shouldn’t be criticized for playing into archetypes—Kate Winslet does well as the lonely divorcee, while Josh Brolin probably chuckled for days at the chance to play an exemplary man (what’s an accidental murder when you can do everything around the house?) There are more than a few other familiar faces in the cast (J. K. Simmons, Clark Gregg, James Van Der Beek, Maika Monroe), with everyone sticking to the surface requirements of their roles. There’s no doubt that Labor Day is, to put it bluntly, not a film for me—it’s in between a romantic fantasy for lonely women, perhaps a semi-nostalgic wish fulfillment do-over for aimless teenagers, maybe a sort of innocuous date-night kind of film. But it feels bizarre, jumping from romantic fantasy to suspense thriller to bafflingly erotic-subtext sequences and presenting the material in purely straightforward fashion. I get that Reitman saw this film as an occasion to stretch beyond his usual boundaries, but there’s stretching and then there’s capitulation and, in the end, Labor Day seems more like a calculated attempt to slum through easy material than something actually successful at what it tries to do.

  • In This Our Life (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) Many facets of In This Our Life are interesting, but none combine to make it a good movie. A surprising, occasionally progressive film with a highly entertaining production history, sure, but not something with tremendous appeal for viewers. Another entry in the longstanding “Hollywood adapts a salacious, very popular novel into a pale neutered film” tradition, this melodrama follows two sisters through tumultuous melodrama featuring swapping partners, suicide, alcoholism, car accidents (several!) and so on. As if that wasn’t enough, here we have a black character set up to take the fall for what a white woman did. That was sufficiently ahead of its time to be controversial back then! Alas—interesting, but not good. Also interesting: Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland as the sisters, with the usual baggage of behind-the-scenes drama involving Davis. While In This Our Life suffers, in theory, from repeated conflicts between Davis and the film’s two very different directors (John Huston had to leave on war-related business, meaning that Raoul Walsh directed a good chunk of the film), I don’t think you can make a case that the film directly suffers from these disagreements—instead, it’s more fruitful to point at the wild script and recognize that there was probably never a satisfying film to be made from such melodramatic material no matter who would be involved in the production. (Although letting Davis rant freely as the “bad sister” doesn’t exactly help matters.)  In This Our Life is not boring to watch, but it works much better as a slightly trashy potboiler than any kind of serious drama it may have aspired to.

  • Johnny O’Clock (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) In most aspects, Johnny O’Clock is an acceptable film noir that should be much better than it is. Its most noteworthy element is male lead Dick Powell, in what’s one of the best films to illustrate his transition from musical song-and-dance man to noir leading roles—he’s got both the charm of his earlier roles and the growing darkness of his performances to come and this film lands at an interesting junction for him—for me, this is the film that puts Powell’s career in focus despite better performances both before and after. Evelyn Keyes and Nina Foch are also lovely playing sisters brought into the ever-expanding mess of the film’s plot—some rather good lines can’t quite paper over a plot that most will charitably call complex—one step short of saying it doesn’t make sense. (Film historians note that the script was rewritten throughout production.)  The cinematography approaches peak noir, but seems aimless like much of the film. It’s regrettable, really, because while Johnny O’Clock has most of the ingredients for a terrific film, it merely settles for being watchable. It’s a smooth piece of nonsense for noir aficionados, but the untapped potential here is significant enough to be frustrating.

  • The Caddy (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) Often hailed as the best of the Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis comedy duo films, The Caddy shows both performers doing what they do best—being an insufferable comic jitterbug in Lewis’s case, and being a smooth-singing crowd charmer in Martin’s case. (When I was younger, I wanted to be Lewis—now I’d rather be Martin.)  Biographers of the pair tell us that the rift that would blow up the duo a few years later was already apparent by 1953, and indeed The Caddy can be read as a meta-fictional portrayal of two stars finding their chemistry through conflict and very different temperaments. (With a final kicker being the characters meeting the real Lewis/Martin duo.)  The story has something to do about Lewis being a golf instructor to Martin, but that’s not why we’re watching: it’s far more fun to see Lewis being a hyperactive goofball, and Martin strutting out “That’s Amore” (written for the film!) in a rather charming sequence. Viewers aware of the reasons for the Lewis/Martin rift (essentially: Lewis taking more and more space) will recognize the dynamics at play here, with Martin providing the scaffolding for Lewis’s far more noticeable antics. If it wasn’t for “That’s Amore,” Martin would have been sidelined in his own film. While The Caddy is among the best of the pair’s filmography, that doesn’t quite mean that the film itself is all that great—at best, it has a few good moments and plays into the two men’s stage image. But Lewis remains a divisive comic figure, and director Norman Taurog does nothing to stop him from rampaging across the screen. Repeatedly. But that was the shtick, and The Caddy is a polished showcase for both of them.

  • The Strange One (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) The 1950s are not known for disquieting cinema—the Hollywood studios still being under the grip of the Production Code, the audiences not asking for anything more, and the social mores of the time being somewhat (but not entirely) conservative, truly upsetting 1950s cinema is a rarity even in watered-down format. But there was some steam gathering under the staid façade: an intention to adapt more daring novels, frustration at not being able to portray a wider range of stories, and subversion in being increasingly able to suggest disturbing content without quite showing it. One of the enduring appeals of film noir is how close it often came to that edge. By contemporary standards, The Strange One is rather mild stuff—the story of a sociopathic military cadet able to manipulate others into destroying lives through disgrace. But by the standards of the time—whew, there’s some strong material here, as the film portrays homosexuality and dehumanization within the context of a military academy. A few factors explain why the film is so daring—for one thing, it adapted material from a novel turned into a theatrical play (those being “easier” to justify to the censorship authorities); for another, it starred a young cast from the then-revolutionary Actors Studio, eager to push the envelope. The ways in which The Strange One is limited are more obvious to us now—the homosexual character is carefully coded to be deniable if needed, the events are naughty rather than violent and, perhaps more surprisingly, the despicable lead character is punished by the end of the film. Still, Ben Gazzara does leave quite an impression as the sadistic, untouchable protagonist of the film in his screen debut alongside George Peppard. Taken at face value, the film is most remarkable for its portrait of a charismatic evil protagonist—and putting in subtext themes and situations that would be explicitly shown today. Still, The Strange One remains a surprise if you’re not used to the nastier side of 1950s Hollywood and how it went out of its way to bend the Production Code requirements as much as possible.

  • Killing Gunther (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, July 2022) I had a very, very hard time making it through the first half-hour of Killing Gunther, but you probably won’t. Given the film’s low-profile despite starring no less than Arnold Schwarzenegger making fun of his own tough-guy persona, it first popped up on my radar as a French TV channel in a dubbed version. I don’t usually have trouble watching films dubbed in French—while there are a few actors I’d rather hear with their original voices, I’ve been watching dubbed French films all my life, and the level of quality of these dubs (after decades of expertise accumulated in French-Canadian dubbing companies) is usually top-notch. But Killing Gunther was something else: not only had the film been dubbed very, very loosely (with voices obviously not matching the lip movements), it had also been dubbed in colloquial Québécois, which is almost always a poor choice compared to mid-Atlantic French. It took me a few minutes to understand why, and while the film clicked once I did figure out the reasons behind this choice, it still made the first minutes of the film a bit of a slog. As it turns out, the choice turns out to be defensible once you consider the source material—Killing Gunther is a wild dark comedy in which a killer sets out to assassinate the top man in the business—the elusive titular “Gunther.”  Motivated by the desire to make a name for himself, our assassin protagonist hires a film crew to follow them during the entire adventure. So, yes—Killing Gunther is a found-footage hitman comedy with shaky-cam, naturalistic acting, shoddy obvious editing and reality-TV production values. As such, it makes perfect sense that the dub would be terrible, because that’s the way reality-TV shows are dubbed in French Canada. If it took me too long to figure that out, it’s because I don’t watch reality TV in general, and even less of it dubbed. Once that initial bump in the road behind us, Killing Gunther improved. The pleasantly chaotic plotting (in which no one is safe from sudden death, ruining all plans) is intercut with action scenes often executed as extended one-shots (even if the price to pay for that is substandard special effects, such as the endlessly exploding cars sequence) and comedic interludes in which the tropes of semi-competent hitman suspense films clash with the dumb mundanity of a reality-TV shoot. It does have the advantage of getting crazier by the minute, though:  by the time Schwarzenegger shows up as (who else?) the legendary and over-the-top Gunther, the film has long since jettisoned any attempt at being realistic or even credible. The humour, obviously, is hit and miss—it’s sometimes lame enough to be funny despite itself, which is clearly no substitute for being funny enough to be funny by itself. The result is far too flawed to be good, but it does have a certain propulsive narrative, a few chuckles and an action star having fun sending himself up. Writer-director-producer-star Taran Killam doesn’t quite make everything click, but the result is watchable enough—although I would recommend watching it in the original English.

  • Numb (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2022) Is it possible to have too good a cast? Maybe, when it creates expectations that the rest of the film can’t match. So it is that Numb, at first glance, offers an intriguing list of names: Matthew Perry, Kevin Pollak and Mary Steenburgen—not a bad cast for a comedy dealing with serious themes. In this case, we have Perry playing a Hollywood screenwriter who comes to experience depersonalization disorder. What begins as an intriguing premise, however, soon turns into something far more familiar—a low-octane dramedy in which a middle-aged man (well, nearly middle-aged: Perry was around 37 when the film was shot) finds solace in going out with a girl nearly a decade younger than he is. Yes, I’m being a bit too dismissive—but Numb does itself no favours by going back to some very familiar plot beats and mishandling some less obvious ones. The numbness of the main character doesn’t really resurface past the halfway mark of the film, and you could replace it with a generalized ennui without changing much of it. The film does have one high point, and it works to the rest of the film’s disadvantage in offering a glimpse at what a better, more coherent film could have been: Steenburgen shows up as an older therapist who ends up developing unprofessional feelings for her patient—another bit of male fantasy, sure, but one that’s handled at such a higher (welcome) pitch of comedy that it ends up making the rest of the film feel much blander in comparison. In the end, it’s hard to avoid feeling that Numb (even allowing for the fifteen years since its release) is taking us to overexposed territories—oh, no, poor aging white guys in Hollywood, shoving their midlife crises down our throats as if it was the most interesting thing in the world. (Spoiler alert: I am a middle-aged white guy; I had a midlife crisis; it wasn’t interesting at all. )  If Numb leaves you unengaged, let me reassure you: it’s not because you’re dissociating, it’s because the film is honestly just dull.