Movie Review

  • La boum (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2022) I can’t say I enjoyed La boum all that much, but as far as “French slide-of-life” films go, it’s relatively painless, maybe even amusing at times. Focusing on a thirteen-year-old girl (the film debut of a young and nearly unrecognizable Sophie Marceau, underneath an unflattering haircut) having to balance school, life and love as her parents near separation and divorce, the film is resolutely low-stakes as it follows its family of three (or four if you include the pleasantly uninhibited great-grandmother played by Denise Grey) as they go through quotidian episodes. Occasionally, a scene makes an impression – for instance, the revenge scene of the female lead (the superb Brigitte Fossey) on her husband’s mistress, in which she thoroughly smashes a perfume store. At other times, we’re simply left to contemplate the characters in their imperfections and quirks. La boum, despite being as low-octane as possible, does have the advantage of being likable and watchable – which is a great deal more than one can say about many, many navel-gazing character-driven French films.

  • Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, May 2022) I would be of the right age to be a big devoted Ghostbusters fan, except for one thing: I don’t really go nuts for those intellectual property franchises (in the language of our corporate cultural oppressors) that are being periodically unearthed in the name of big profits. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug when you’re a studio executive greenlighting projects in an ever-more-ferocious entertainment landscape, and I feel an almost-pigheaded instinct to rebel against attempts to regurgitate and repackage older properties as something we should get excited about. (Heck, the last time I was tempted to let go and give in to the nostalgia gave me the mediocre The Matrix Resurrections, which is a lesson that should last me years.)  So, when I approach Ghostbusters: Afterlife, an umpteenth attempt to re-create the success of the original film, it’s almost natural that I would conclude that the film would be much stronger if it got rid of its Ghostbusters legacy to focus on the story it has to tell. Worryingly leaving the urban backdrop of Manhattan for the wide-open expanses of the rural Midwest, Afterlife focuses on the adventures of a brainy teenager (the very likable McKenna Grace) as she awkwardly tries to fit in a small town and starts investigating the legacy of her eccentric grandfather. The film is most engaging when it’s its own thing, following a family trying to figure out what to do next, and uncovering a world-threatening prophecy from a place that couldn’t be farther away than The City That Never Sleeps. But, of course, such a film can’t help but directly tie itself back to the Ghostbusters mythology (even if it ignores the much-maligned 2016 reboot and only pays a minimal acknowledgement of Ghostbusters II) –all the way to bringing back nearly everyone from the original film and lasciviously playing up even the logo reveal. Whom are we trying to fool here? If it doesn’t work (as it didn’t in 2016), we’ll be back with another instalment in 5–10 years. If it works, we’ll keep digging up these corpses for more necrophilia on a regular basis (and this isn’t that outlandish an exaggeration, considering what CGI is capable of doing now). I would have liked Ghostbusters: Afterlife had it stood on its own as simply Afterlife – but then again, it’s an open question as to whether the film would have been made at all had it not vampirized the franchise for funding. You’d think that, as I grew older, I would be both grouchier and more nostalgic – but now it looks as if I’m just overwhelmingly grouchy, even about nostalgia.

  • When Were You Born (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) I’m normally a good sport for 1930s murder mysteries, and an even better sport for any movie featuring Asian pioneer Anna Mae Wong. But horoscope thriller When Were You Born starts on the wrong foot and keeps stepping on its own toes throughout. Even by the standards of 1930s films going nuts for dubious subject matters, this film goes all-out of very strange tangents. The opening of the film, for instance, has noted astrologer and all-around crackpot Manly P. Hall introducing the film by speaking directly to the camera and insisting that Astrology! Is! A! Science! It’s not a random cameo, as Hall also co-wrote the script – which features Wong as an astrologer whose understanding of the discipline gives her near-magical divinatory powers, to the point of predicting deaths. That would normally make her a prime suspect but in this film, she becomes a detective helping the skeptical policemen sift through the twelve suspects, each of them from a distinct zodiac sign. What Wong is doing interpreting western astrology despite being showcased as a mysterious lady of the orient is a mystery for the ages. While murder mysteries with a little bit of the supernatural were not exactly unknown in the 1930s, few were as thoroughly contaminated by the supernatural as this one, as the second of Ronald Knox’s 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction are gleefully jettisoned in favour of astrology hokum – the “investigations” of Wong’s character pretty much consist in asking suspects about their date and hour of birth, from which she can pretty much divine their quirks, fate and breakfast. (It does not make for a satisfying mystery plot.)  Too bad – Wong remains a striking performer even in substandard roles when she’s asked to be overly stiff, and the film does have a few amusing bits of business, suggesting the importance of co-writer Anthony Coldeway in shaping the pseudo-scientific material in a half-competent commercial product. Still, I can’t bring myself to recommend When Were You Born except to audiences knowing what they’re getting into – I mean, it’s interesting that the film’s twelve characters are mapped so that they all fall on a different zodiac sign, with corresponding personality traits – but there’s a large step between this and an actually good film. [June 2022: Manly P. Hall… I knew this name meant something! I actually have a copy of his magnum opus, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, in my library: a thick, lavish book full of hokum that’s nonetheless a wonderful piece of conversation and contemplation. Which might as well be what I think of the film as well.]

  • End of the Line (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2022) I’ve come to pity those movie reviewers stuck in the Hollywood hype machine: those who aren’t close to any local film industry, those who can’t step outside the American cinema system. I’m lucky enough to be exposed to the French-Canadian film community, and it’s amazing to see what else is out there. I’m not sure I would have ever seen End of the Line, for instance, if French-Canadian horror cable TV channel Frissons TV hadn’t gone out of its way to get this film out of mothballs, hype its broadcast, and pair it with a new interview with its writer-director-producer Maurice Devereaux. The tragedy here being that, even fifteen years later, this remains Deveraux’s last film (and last IMDB credit) – as he candidly recognized during the interview, he did too much on his own, exhausted his financing, ran out of motivation and didn’t have the industry contacts to parlay the film’s initial impact into another project. It’s too bad that End of the Line sunk into obscurity (not even having an English-language Blu-ray release) – while it’s hardly a perfect film, it does a lot with little, is effective at creating mystery and suspense, and isn’t afraid to go crazy once in a while. The blend of elements in its premise is enough of a hook – a few late-night subway passengers, abruptly confronted with an eruption of violence led by a world-wide cult. There’s a lot of gore in what follows, some of which certainly pushes the boundaries of good taste. There’s also some ambiguity in the climax that may rub some viewers as provocative and deep, and others as frustrating and begging for a third act that isn’t to be found in the film. (I’m in the latter camp, but not deeply.)  It all amounts to something worth rediscovering: End of the Line remains significantly better than many bigger-budgeted horror productions, and it’s got just enough depth to be worth a look over an endless succession of less ambitious monster movies. And it’s a proud –if almost forgotten—product of the French-Canadian film community.

  • Cet obscur objet du désir (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2022) In looking at legendary writer-director Luis Buñuel’s very long filmography, it looks as if his final film Cet obscur objet du désir was one of the last of his major titles that I hadn’t yet seen. I’m just glad I approached it with some knowledge of the rest of his work, because I’m not sure I would have known what to do with it had I seen it cold. After all, at face value, this is an absurdly odd romance between an older man and a volatile woman, played against a violent background of near-omnipresent terrorism. Interestingly enough, the female lead character is played by two actresses, often switching based on the mood of the character they represent. The script does have an interesting hook in that it features an older man (Fernando Rey, quite compelling) dumping a bucket of water on an unknown woman, then explaining to a small audience the reasons leading to such an outlandish gesture – much of the film that follows takes place in flashbacks, leading back to the water-dumping moment and going on from there. Theirs is not a fun or happy romance, with aggressive gestures from both parties punctuating multiple breakups. It’s all very off kilter, like Buñuel’s best movies. The cinematic technique is accessible (some colour cinematography giving a good period feel as the film travels from Seville to Paris) and the film remains compelling despite its intentional ambiguities and mysteries. Even the casual violence makes sense as a surrealist trope. It’s not my favourite Buñuel (that would remain Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie) but it’s well above most of his other films.

  • Les visiteurs: La révolution (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2022) All right, I give up – Les visiteurs: La révolution is my third dud in a row in the Les visiteurs series, and I have to recognize that the very basics of this trilogy simply don’t grab me. If I had to guess, it would be that the series’ celebration of French history is the sticking point. It’s even more pronounced this time around, as the time-displaced heroes of the series find themselves not in modern times but poking around the French Revolution, mixing time periods and having fun with elements that should be familiar with European audiences… and are utterly baffling to French-Canadian ones. (I can’t even rationalize that I should know about the period as part of my ancestral history, considering that both main trunks of my family tree left France almost a century before the French Revolution.)  Absent any reason to care about the on-screen shenanigans, I’m left with a laborious comedy that can’t even sustain simple gags for too long. It doesn’t help that watching a third (or fourth, if you include the American remake) instalment in a series means that if you’ve missed the onboarding, you’ve missed a lot. It’s easy to recognize that the film is playing jokes with its own mythology (with the characters meeting their own descendants), but it doesn’t help if you care so little about previous films that this one doesn’t spark either. The result, no matter why, is uninvolving, overlong and only fitfully amusing. Apparently, my disappointment is hardly unique – Les visiteurs: La révolution also got terrible reviews overseas. That doesn’t improve anything, but it does make me feel less alone.

  • Cannibal Ferox (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) One unfortunate affection of jaded movie reviewers is to couch even the most primal emotions in overly analytical vocabulary, as if to soften emotions or extreme reactions for fear of appearing less than professional or measured. Well, let’s forget about that for a while, because there aren’t many ways of working around the impact left by Cannibal Ferox:  I hated this film. I hated it. It’s gross and vile and without any merit whatsoever. It’s a net minus on the ledger of the human race. It’s an affront to everything that’s decent and wholesome about the world. It’s an appalling demonstration of the evil that lurks in men’s hearts. It’s irremediable and stains the soul of everyone who watches it. Am I being over the top? Yes. Am I being excessive? No. If this site was PG-13, this is where I’d use my one permissible F-word. A particularly disgusting example of the Italian cannibal horror movie subgenre that dirtied the late-1970s/early-1980s, writer-director Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox is nothing more than a series of excuses to showcase gore, animal abuse and human suffering. The fact that it’s a near-remake of Cannibal Holocaust does nothing to make me feel any better about it – the other film was bad enough that we did not need any imitators, especially one that shears off even the microscopic veneer of philosophy that the other film had. Part of my extreme hatred for Cannibal Ferox is that the gore is not merely special-effect stuff: real animals were deliberately killed as part of the making of this film and that’s unforgivable. Simulated human genital amputation I can take – real animal death I can’t. So, not to put too (re)fined a point on it: damn this movie, and damn it all the way to hell.

  • Gold Diggers of 1937 (1936)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) For a series that gleefully aimed at female characters looking to marry rich, it’s interesting that Gold Diggers of 1937 spreads the cynicism around both sexes, poking fun at upwardly-mobile women as much as commission-hungry salesmen. The familiar opening (as a group of young women discuss their prospects for marriage next to a salesman’s convention) is soon undercut by the glum realization that insurance salesmen aren’t the best prospects – which does stop a train full of girls from getting a free meal. While our lead couple (the likable Dick Powell and Joan Blondell) has met on the train, the action gets going once they find themselves working at the same insurance office, and a wealthy businessman decides to sign a very lucrative policy. But plot progressively takes a backseat to the musical numbers – Powell and Blondell don’t need much more than their own selves to make “With Plenty of Money and You” crackle, but then director Busby Berkeley’s work kicks into high gear right in time for the film’s near-hallucinatory climactic number “All’s Fair in Love and War.” It’s a familiar patten for Berkeley, but at least the film ends on a high note. While it may not be as striking as its two immediate predecessors, Gold Diggers of 1937 is nonetheless a rewarding musical – funny, melodic and visually impressive when it counts.

  • The Killer is Loose (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) As cheap and straight-ahead as B-grade film noir could be, The Killer is Loose doesn’t mess around in its scant 73 minutes. After a prologue in which a veteran helps rob a bank, sees his wife shot dead by a policeman and is sent to prison, the story gets going as the veteran kills a guard and escapes, his target obvious to all: the policeman’s wife. Director Budd Boetticher, working outside his more familiar western genre, turns in a no-frill genre exercise. Joseph Cotton is heroic enough as the policeman hero, but it’s Wendell Corey who’s more interesting as the wronged man on a revenge rampage. The relationship between the hero and his wife is not helped by the heavy dose of 1950s-style paternalism, but the complications are not bad, and it’s interesting for the film to move film noir thrills to the suburbs rather than the streets of the inner city. As a thriller, it still works rather well thanks to the strength of its antagonist. The rest of The Killer is Loose is competent but not overly complex or polished, which is not necessarily a flaw in that genre.

  • The Great Waltz (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Coming from classic Hollywood’s tradition of biographies as pretext for lavish costume drama, The Great Waltz is nominally about the life of Johann Strauss… which even the film itself acknowledges isn’t meant to be faithfully represented by the film. Taking a more entertaining approach, the film goes for broad and obvious tropes, mixing music, romance and professional success into something meant to be enjoyed on a basic level. A lot more effort has been poured into the sets, music, cinematography and costumes – and the money’s all there to see on the screen, with a few Academy Awards nominations (and one win for cinematography) as a result. A few dance sequences bring the film closer to a musical, or at least as close to a musical as late-1930s MGM could go. It’s amazing that director Julien Duvivier, fresh off the success of romantic drama Pepe le Moko, would go on to “direct” this film, even if a number of film historians are skeptical about his true input. Clearly a prestige production for MGM, The Great Waltz is nonetheless not much of a film once you strip away its lavish presentation – a few good scenes help it stay afloat, but it’s liable to be a film of superficial impressions, leaving very little in memory even a few days later.

  • Samson and Delilah (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (archive.org streaming, May 2022) Director Cecil B. DeMille could be counted upon to deliver quality spectacles throughout most of his career. Samson and Delilah is no exception… as long as you’re willing to be patient, that is. Anticipating the biblical adaptation craze that would dominate the 1950s box-office in an attempt to convince people to watch something other than TV, this colourful adventure goes back to the ancient Middle East to tell us about the Samson and Delilah of legend – he is a strongman without peers; she is a rare beauty with a duplicitous streak. DeMille fans are liable to be disappointed by much of the film, as very obvious studio sets act as unconvincing background to several endless discussions. There’s a lion-wrestling sequence to keep things going, but otherwise much of this biblical epic is talk-talk-talk. Let’s not be overly critical: this is a 1940s film after all – decades before the Hollywood spectacle formula was revised to include a big jolt every twenty minutes. It’s not as if there’s nothing to admire in the interval – after all, Delilah is played by none other than timeless beauty Hedy Lamarr, and Victor Mature incarnates Samson… alongside such notables as George Sanders and Angela Lansbury. And then, well, there’s the temple-shattering climax of the film’s conclusion, in which full-scale sets and big models are used to portray the complete collapse of a Philistine temple. If you’ve been waiting for this long, you deserve the treat at the end of the film. I would not recommend Samson and Delilah as one of DeMille’s best films, though – too talky, too fake, too unbalanced in its structure. But it’s watchable – Lamarr and colour cinematography help a lot – and it offers an interesting object lesson in how Hollywood was ready to go for even bigger spectacles in the years to follow.

  • The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Sometimes, the only way forward is through – having recorded a double-bill of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and its sequel, I knew there was never going to be a better time to watch the second film than right after the first one. I still had the (rather bland) characters well-established in mind, didn’t expect much from the conceit of the magically-fitting pants, and still felt reasonably well-intentioned toward the series. Picking up two or three years after the first film, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 once again goes to the same plot template by splitting up our college-aged characters for the summer, each one going away for a specific kind of wish-fulfillment adventure. Yes, we’re back on Greek Islands, but this time around the other characters go to Turkey for an archeological dig (and grand-maternal revelations); to Vermont for a theatrical workshop; and New York City for, well, ordinary life. It all climaxes in picturesque Greece with all four friends pledging once again to be BFFs – we wouldn’t have it any other way. The pants are almost absent here – it’s all romantic and affective subplots. It generally works well – although I had to laugh when the film clearly affirmed that being an actress was far more desirable than being a good backstage technician. (Guess which one reliably makes the most money…)  Like the first film, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 is not a film made for me, but it’s still quite tolerable to “watch” when doing some cleaning within audio/visual range of the TV. “Bearable” may not seem like much of a compliment, but it is – at least if you also saw the much-worse movies I see on a regular basis.

  • The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) My pre-movie warmup routine for films such as The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is simple: I just repeat, “This film is not for you” to myself a few times. It’s really the key to letting go of incompatible expectations. Made for a specific type of audience, this is less a film about magical pants than four subplots patched together, each of them going for a specific kind of teenage wish-fulfillment. The simple structure gets going when four lifelong high-school friends buy a pair of pants that somehow fits each of them perfectly, then vow to send it to each other even through the summer they’re about to spend apart. Then it’s off to the separate subplots until the synthesis of the third act. One sister goes to Greece and falls in love with a young man from an enemy family; one goes to South Carolina and finds out that her remarrying father is the most clueless man alive; one goes to Mexico for nothing of great importance; and the last remains home to film a documentary of sad people like her. Through it all, the pants are hyped as mystical garments able to let them discover and fulfill their destiny. If you’re part of the intended audience, this is really your chance to sit back and enjoy four subplots about early adulthood – a few infuriating moments are there to raise the stakes, but otherwise you know it’s all going to end up well. This being said (and there’s my “this film is not for you” mantra slipping away), anyone approaching this film as a work of magical realism is going to be frustrated – other than the pants fitting everyone, there’s very little about the rest of the film that depends on fantasy. That’s probably not a bad idea – the original novel also used the pants as an excuse for a far more down-to-earth story of friends learning to exist on their own, with some help from each other. It’s ideally suited to teenage girls, or anyone looking for a bit of unchallenging fare. It’s also a decent showcase for the four young actresses in the lead roles – perhaps the most distinctive being America Ferrera, as she’s the one to affirm the magical-pants premise, and because her plot line is more interesting than the others. Otherwise, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is almost exactly what it promises to be: a four-way summer romp, from the spectacle of Greek islands to the reclamation of an estranged father. This film is not for me… but I found it watchable.

  • Megiddo: The Omega Code 2 (2001)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2022) As far as films made for the American Evangelical communities go, Megiddo: The Omega Code 2 does have an interesting wrinkle going for it: It seems to take an almost tongue-in-cheek approach to its topic matter. Unlike such “classics” as Left Behind (both of them) or the first The Omega Code, this sequel seems to be going for an over-the-top approach that, at the right angle, seems purpose-built for chuckles. Michael York certainly delivers as the anti-Christ antagonist of the film, chewing scenery like delicious sacramental bread. The rest of the credit for a semi-watchable film should go to director Brian Trenchard-Smith, who seems positively gleeful at the means at his disposal. Trenchard-Smith, after all, is an Ozploitation legend with a good sense of humour about his own movies – he openly boasted about his intention in accepting to direct the film: playing with the biggest budget of his career and taking the chance to stage some elaborate expensive action. The result is still a terrible film filled with circa-2000s Evangelical obsessions (European Union, return to the promised land, Vatican put-downs, book of revelations, etc.) but one that does have quite a bit of snark potential. It’s horrifying racist (such as the sequence where the white guy kills an audience of black people), theologically dubious, anachronistic in taking aim at the evil EU, badly plotted and cheaply executed, but it has scope, York in fine form and the occasional bit of surprisingly effective dialogue (“I’ll always have a chance in hell,” says the anti-Christ). Even if Megiddo: The Omega Code 2 remains a bad movie, I have suffered through much, much worse.

  • Ransom! (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) I’ll be honest: My interest in watching this version of Ransom! had more to do with dim-but-positive memories of the 1996 remake and an interest in seeing how film noir it could be than any specific interest in the film itself. Under these expectations, it’s not much of a surprise if the film is a slight disappointment. For one thing it takes forever to get going – the lengthy introduction takes its time in setting up our wealthy hero (Glenn Ford) and his family, then how the situation gets going as his son gets kidnapped. Working with police in ineffectual attempts to talk to the kidnappers is next, with plenty of 1950s procedural details about call-tracing and how kidnapping for ransom usually goes. By the time we get to Ransom!’s most interesting moment – the protagonist taking to the airwaves to offer the ransom as bounty on the kidnappers – there’s scarcely ten minutes left to the film: the kid pops up a few moments later, and then we’re done. For twenty-first century viewers, there’s at least one act missing. It’s notable that the film never shows the kidnappers either – the focus is strictly on the protagonist, his family, police and an errant reporter (a young and darker-haired Leslie Nielsen in his big-screen debut). It may explain things to know that the film was based on an hour-long radio drama – such as why it feels padded even at 102 minutes. Ransom! is not a bad film per se, but it clearly feels like a prototype for the much denser and thrilling 1996 remake.