Movie Review

  • Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000)

    Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2021) I know just enough about animated Japanese films that I shouldn’t be surprised to find out that a film with terrific art would have not-so-terrific animation and a borderline incomprehensible plot. But Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is not that much of an oddity compared to other animated films of a similar vintage: Take any frame of the film and you’ll be impressed by the visual quality of the result. String them along into a sequence and you’ll recognize the shortcuts taken to keep the production costs down: highly constrained animation, interminable travelling mattes, lengthy segments where nothing moves, and other such common measures with pre-digital animation with a limited budget. Add longer sequences and the plot clearly can’t support the images: We end up with this jumble of plot elements that barely fit together and aren’t structured for any kind of storytelling intensity. It’s also when the demands of a limited animation budget crash into the requirements of a well-paced film: with interminable exposition and people talking over static shots, the film struggles to advance in more than short bursts of action. I still think that the art is often magnificent, and some of the ideas are interesting. The way writer-director Yoshiaki Kawajiri puts everything together, unfortunately, undermines even the best assets of the film. Anyone tempted to bemoan the 3D era of animation may be gently reminded of Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust and what happens when you don’t have the means to do justice to your creative intentions.

  • Island of Lost Souls (1932)

    Island of Lost Souls (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) By now, I don’t really need another reminder about the vitality of Pre-Code movies, but Island of Lost Souls is an eloquent example of how movies of that era can feel modern — you wouldn’t see anything like this until the 1960s. The source material practically begs for grown-up treatment: H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau may be 125 years old at this point, but it’s still a potent exploration of disturbing ideas and visuals, with enough material questioning the idea of a creator and social conditioning to still feel dangerous to authorities both religious and secular. Such material demands artistic freedom, and filmmakers in 1932 certainly tried to get away with a lot — Island of Lost Souls is shot like a horror film, with horrible revelations and the still-surprisingly downbeat finale that the material required. The great Charles Laughton plays Dr. Moreau with his typically compelling style, making him a far more interesting figure than the bland antagonist played by Richard Arlen. But if you’re looking for one reason to see the film, just one — it’s got to be Kathleen Burke as “Lota, the Panther Woman” — clearly coded to be a wild, animalistic figure, she looks amazingly modern with long curly dark hair and a demeanour that’s nowhere near how “proper” actresses were directed at the time — she’s like a piece of 1980 cinema thrown half a century back in time and it’s no wonder if she still has a following nowadays. Skeptics beware: Island of Lost Souls is still surprisingly good—It’s not such a heresy to say that there still hasn’t been a better screen adaptation of Wells’ source material, especially considering the debacle that was the 1996 Marlon Brando film.

  • The Search: Manufacturing Belief (2019)

    The Search: Manufacturing Belief (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2021) Pulling together a documentary is harder than you think, especially when it comes to tackling a big sprawling subject and then making sure that the focus remains on the topic. So it is that while The Search: Manufacturing Belief is interesting in its questioning of religion, belief, awe and control, it often feels so scattered as to defy a cohesive argument. Much of the film is structured around a dramatic recreation of a Catholic youth retreat weekend that writer-director Patrick Payne experienced in his teenage years — the Cursillo movement (aka “The Search”) that uses techniques eerily similar to mind control in order to produce a feeling of awe and attachment to a doctrine. (If you start going “uh-oh” at some of the things that happen, well done — the process is well known among cults, military forces and pyramidal schemes.)  Alongside the dramatic recreation of the weekend retreat are interviews tackling the topic of religion and awe, and trying to pick apart the differences between two often-associated emotions. Perhaps the best thing about The Search is how it tries to bridge an understanding between believers and non-believers — everyone interviewed (whether they’re associated with religion or not) brings a rationalist approach to the conversation, and the documentary deals with ideas in a robust manner. Of course, this ends up meaning going here and there, sometimes with atheist crusaders (one of whom seems a bit too quick severing any link between chunks of carbon and an overall sense of morality) and sometimes poking at new ideas without exploring them. It’s both really interesting and frustrating given the scope of the topic. But perhaps that’s inevitable in considering such an intensely personal topic: despite having been raised Catholic (and mentions of “The Search” had me thinking, “hey, didn’t some of my friends attend one of those…?”), I don’t have much to do with organized religion these says but get me started on libraries, tourism and/or the best science-fiction conventions I have attended and I can guarantee you that the language I’m going to use is going to sound a lot like the one used by believers at the end of their retreat. We all have our truth, and we all have the capacity to be awed when we approach what is central to us. The Search strikes an appropriately sophisticated tone in approaching the topic, but it’s almost by design that it wouldn’t get to its core for everyone… it keeps a sense of mystery!

  • Things I Do for Money (2019)

    Things I Do for Money (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) A strange combination of Canadian Content requirements and pandemic-induced blockbuster drought means that as 2021 unfolds, premium Canadian movie channels are essentially grabbing any interesting Canadian movie produced in the past five years, then putting them centre stage as their big premieres of the week. As a result, we’re exposed to significantly lower-budgeted films on a weekly basis. Some of them are unremarkable to the point of being hardly worth discussing, and then there’s the odd surprise. Things I do for Money is rough, scattered, and quirky… but when it clicks, it’s almost unique in its aesthetics. Proudly and loudly set in Hamilton (ON), it’s a film that revolves around two young cello-playing brothers of Japanese ethnicity as they deal with organized crime gangs. As far as crime genre elements go, there’s a bag of money, an expensive painting, complicated family dynamics, and rival gangs of different ethnicities — all things we’ve seen before. But it’s in the things never (or rarely) seen before that the film distinguishes itself — by making cellos an integral part of its soundtrack, for instance, the film gets two or three suspense sequences with a great foreboding soundtrack (at least one of them played in diegetic sound). The relationship between our two protagonists (played by real-life brothers Theodor and Maximilian Aoki, and eventually with their real-life father) is not commonly seen, the grandmotherly foul-mouthed Jamaican antagonist played by Colette Zacca is wonderful (oh, that bingo scene!), the use of drone cinematography is interesting for what feels like a micro-budget film and the promotional material highlights that this is the first Japanese-Canadian film, with ethnically and musically appropriate leads. The flip side of having so many fun things in the same film is that the entire production doesn’t cohere as much as it should. By the time writer-director Warren P. Sonoda makes his film become family drama, crime thriller, dark comedy, teenage romance, social commentary and then a thievery caper, it’s normal to feel as if all of those components should have co-existed more harmoniously together. The caper, in particular, seems a bit too much. Still, Things I Do for Money can be surprising in its details and exhilarating when the music starts: it’s not perfect, but I’d rather see something rough like this than an inert by-the-numbers production that you can’t remember as soon as the credits roll.

  • Ladies in Retirement (1941)

    Ladies in Retirement (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) It took me some time to warm up to Ida Lupino — she’s wasn’t always a flashy actress and she didn’t go for a strong unified screen persona. (She’s arguably more interesting now as one of the rare female directors of the 1950s than as an actress, but that severely underplays her best and most captivating performances.) But as with many non-superstar actors, sooner or later there’s a film that makes people click with her, after which it any film featuring her gets an “Oh, It’s Ida Lupino!”  So it is that Ladies in Retirement is a good honest thriller that would be interesting in its own right as a natural blend of Victorian setting and noir aesthetics only one step removed from Gothic. But it does have an added dimension with Lupino as a 22-year-old playing a fortysomething protagonist who goes murderously crazy. She also plays against her then-husband Louis Hayward — he as a schemer, she as a housekeeper with a big secret. The almost-comic opening soon turns grim, and while the film (adapted from the stage) is much better in its atmosphere and development than its underwhelming conclusion, there’s a gender-bent domestic thriller here that stands adjacent to material in the vein of the not-much-later Gaslight.

  • A Fine Madness (1966)

    A Fine Madness (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) There have been weird movies throughout all of Hollywood’s history, but the 1960s brand of weird movies was in a class of its own. So it is that, in A Gentle Madness, we find Sean Connery playing a seriously problematic British poet expatriated to New York — someone who likes to punch people in the face at the slightest provocation, and sleep with any willing woman in his vicinity. Any less charming actor than Connery would make the protagonist look a psychopath — and even with Connery, this is really not a protagonist we can cheer for. Not that those opposing him are any better, what with doctors plotting to perform a surgical procedure that looks a lot like percussive lobotomy despite their assurances that it’s something much better. If you’re going down the checklist of “impulsive violence… indiscriminate sex… lobotomy” and wonder how the execution will make it better, the answer is simple: it doesn’t. It’s a film that leaves viewers aghast, dredging up Connery’s troubled associations with domestic violence and leaving everyone thankful that this project would never be greenlit these days. Connery and some fine location shooting keep things barely tolerable, but never compelling. By the time the film ends with the protagonist hitting a pregnant woman on the street (it’s meant to be accidental and funny and she doesn’t look pregnant at all, but eh), that’s quite enough with it all.

  • Gypsy (1962)

    Gypsy (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) It took me far too long to realize that Gypsy was based on a true story, but no matter — even if you don’t know anything about burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee and her impossibly micromanaging mother, the film still works quite well as its own thing. Few movies do the passing-of-the-torch thing as well as this one, either narratively, structurally or in a historical context. While Gyspy’s first moments are almost entirely dedicated to the formidable presence of “the ultimate stage mother” played by Rosalind Russell, almost forgetting the children and especially the eldest one, the film gradually shifts focus as it goes on, giving more and more place to the eldest daughter, as Natalie Wood takes centre stage and needs to put her mother in the background for her own good. Taking a step back, the film itself can be seen as a generational passing of the torch between Russell and Wood — both of them not dissimilar as actresses. (Legend has it that the two did not get along very well on set.) Wood looks really good here even if, to remain a family film, Gypsy considerably sugarcoats burlesque to the point of innocuousness. There’s plenty of good dialogue, strong character evolution and enough colourful background details to make it interesting. The first hour is a bit long — and much of it can be justified by seeing the film as a transition between two characters that could have been rushed had the first hour been snappier. Adapted from a Broadway musical that was itself adapted from Gypsy Rose Lee’s autobiography, Gypsy remains a fascinating character portrait more than a true musical… and it’s still effective even in a far more permissible twenty-first century.

  • The Parent Trap (1961)

    The Parent Trap (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Disney Streaming, April 2021) I’m coming to the original The Parent Trap a few years after watching the 1998 remake featuring Lindsey Lohan. I still think that the premise is among the dumbest, most ludicrous ever suggested on film: Oh sure, what divorcing parents of twins wouldn’t each grab one and raise them on opposite coasts in complete ignorance of each other? But if you go with it, the film does work well. The young Hayley Mills is clearly the star of the film, what with her dual roles as a California tomboy and a Boston debutante. The special effects to put them both on screen at once are crude but effective, and they get the point across. While Brian Keith is serviceable as the dad, Maureen O’Hara does get a few great sequences as the mom, especially when she (softly) declares war on her ex-husband’s fiancée and they go at it with veiled insults and catty remarks. The film actually gets more than its fair share of laughs through some good screenwriting, grounding the idiotic premise into something almost believable and executing it with skill. Even the supporting characters get good moments. The atmosphere of the early 1960s is more charming than you’d think… especially considering that much of the film takes place in settings—summer camp, posh Boston house, California mountain ranch—where the passage of time isn’t as obvious. I was, frankly, a bit surprised at how well The Parent Trap still plays today. Sure, it’s a film of its time, but it still hits its marks.

  • Knights of the Round Table (1953)

    Knights of the Round Table (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) I’m not going to be so bold as to say that Knights of the Round Table is a boring movie, but I will say that it is exactly what I could picture if someone said, “1950s colour take on the King Arthur mythos.”  The tone, style and colours are all very specific to that time and the feeling is that you’ve already seen the film even if this is your first viewing. The pseudo-arch dialogue is about as self-important as the need for this British production to mythologize the Arthurian story, and the atmosphere of unreality is reinforced by a series of sets obviously built in-studio with wild colours and unconvincing props. It’s definitely a result of then-trendy design choices affecting the entire production — amusingly, I almost never criticize certain genres (musicals come to mind) for exactly the same characteristics, but historical fantasy is one area where the difference between now and then is especially striking and never to the 1950s’ advantage. If this review is thin on the substance of the film rather than how it’s presented, that’s not an accident — as I said, you’d probably familiar enough with the Arthurian mythos to imagine it very well poured in the 1950s mould, and that’s exactly what you get: Director Richard Thorpe understood that part of the assignment. More patient viewers may have fun comparing the results to other films with the same characters over the decades. As for myself, the result is too generic, with so few advantages over more modern takes that I’m likely to forget most of the film within days.

  • King of Jazz (1930)

    King of Jazz (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) Don’t bother looking for a story in King of Jazz — as with many musicals of the early sound era, it’s a straight-up adaptation of a Broadway revue show, with segments loosely connected together so that audiences across America could go to the movies and have as good a time as their fellow Manhattanites. It was, in retrospect, a classic case of imitating success: at a time where the cinematographic grammar hadn’t yet adapted to the possibilities of meshing sound with images, this was the surest, least-risky, most profitable way to go. As a result, you have to assess King of Jazz on the merits of its number sketches and novelties. Chief among them is that the film was shot and preserved in two-tone colour, which adds a surprising amount of interest when compared to other movies of the early 1930s. But there are a few other pieces of interest as well: It’s a film that features the first-ever Technicolor animated segment (a curiously morbid/racist sketch), as well as Bing Crosby’s first screen appearance. The titular “King of Jazz” is Paul Whiteman, an interesting figure in the history of the genre who’s remarkably well-captured here. There are more special effects than you’d expect from a 1930 musical film, and the intentional variety of the musical numbers (remember: bringing Broadway to entire families in small-city America) means that the film doesn’t play to a single musical aesthetic — but despite the title, don’t expect much of what we now expect from “jazz” considering the way it has evolved over the decades. I found much of King of Jazz interesting for the raw window it opens on circa-1930 popular entertainment, without the added filter of a plot to get in the way. It has quite a documentary value and a few pleasant surprises even ninety years later.

  • House of Bones (2010)

    House of Bones (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2021) I don’t like how some horror movies somehow end up with faint praise for being bad-but-not-terrible, considering how low the bar can be once you get into low-budget efforts. House of Bones is one of those bad-but-not-terrible things you can catch later at night on cable or on the fifth page of streaming choices. It has a mildly entertaining premise by 2010 standards, as members of a supernatural reality-TV show are attacked by a haunted house. The story is nothing special, but the film gets a few extra jolts of interest from starring forgotten-but-not-unknown Charisma Carpenter and featuring rather more gory effects than you’d expect from a film made for SyFy. What it doesn’t have is the kind of atmosphere than haunted house movie depends on — it’s a series of cheap scares, clearly led by the logic of a bad-but-not-terrible horror movie script rather than any kind of recognizable attempt at creating something more. Anyone stuck watching this rather than anything better may want to focus on the frights and the gore rather than try to make sense of the story, which is lazy enough to keep gaping plot holes without even trying to patch them up. This is filmmaking-for-a-buck at its dullest, and yet not completely terrible. There are times where you want to watch a film but not really watch it all that closely, and that’s probably the best-case scenario for House of Bones.

  • I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955)

    I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) As far as musical biopics go, I’ll Cry Tomorrow is a blend of showbiz drama and addiction memoir, with our protagonist (Singer Lillian Roth, played by Susan Hayward, in a script based on Roth’s own memoirs) first suffering as a child prodigy controlled by her mom, then suffering as her fiancé dies, then suffering as a married woman whose sole shared interest with her husband is alcoholism, then suffering again as she tries to kick all of the bad habits in her life. In other words, this is not a pleasant film — for each mildly entertaining musical number, there’s one ugly scene after another. Unusually enough for the 1950s, alcoholism is portrayed from the inside as a destructive but appealing force, and the film ends up being one of the first depictions of Alcoholics Anonymous. I’ll Cry Tomorrow plays according very familiar lines for modern viewers, but the vintage aspect of it can be interesting. Of course, the film’s best asset has to be Hayward, holding nothing back in a tough depiction of someone familiar to audiences at the time. It’s not necessarily a bad watch even at its most conventional.

  • Interiors (1978)

    Interiors (1978)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) It’s a good thing that Interiors is well known as one of Woody Allen’s most deliberately serious films — an attempt to go over austere Bergmanesque family drama territory in a way that consciously seeks to oppose itself from Allen’s ”earlier, funnier films.”  Even so, I was sorely tempted to giggle through much of the film — Allen’s painstaking approach at re-creating the sparse rhythm, tortured relationships and Scandinavian aesthetics of his model can approach parody at times. I don’t usually respond well to such torpid movies anyway, so you’ll understand if it doesn’t work this time around. (On the other hand, I actually welcomed the final death of the film, considering how annoying I found the character — and how it was telegraphed well before.)  Anyone will be on firmer grounds in considering the film as an actor’s showcase — with special affection for the trio of sisters (Diane Keaton, Mary Beth Hurt and Kristin Griffith) who are the true protagonists of the story. People act badly all around them, whether it’s unreliable partners, a crush who becomes a would-be rapist, or a father choosing to leave their mother after decades of marriage (while not directly telling her that). Maureen Stapleton shines as one of the few expressive characters in the entire film. While Interiors got good reviews at the time and still figures among Allen’s better-rated work, it’s clearly not as special today as it was back then — the filmmaker’s output has grown to be incredibly diverse and not necessarily comic, explaining why Interiors feels far more ordinary (yet more obviously a pastiche) than it did. Modern viewers who, like me, have a strong preference for Allen in comic mode may watch Interiors without the reverence by which it’s seen by many critics.

  • Misbehaviour (2020)

    Misbehaviour (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) The grrl-empowerment drama is a well-established genre by now, and Misbehaviour seems to be following in the steps of half a dozen examples of the form, perhaps most closely the recent Battle of the Sexes. You can check off the elements: a historical recreation a few decades past highlighting unbelievable sexism, plucky heroines banding together to fight the patriarchy, potshots at the institutions’ refusal to move forward, one hissable patriarch as an antagonist, queer characters, lighthearted tone, all savvily wrapped in well-executed crowd-pleasing style. It’s now common because it’s fun, mind you: you can’t be against the message of the film, and the underdog narrative always plays well even if it feels increasingly calculated. Misbehaviour does a little bit than most entries in the subgenre by being slightly more ambivalent about its message than a rote regurgitation of feminist talking points. Largely taking place in 1970 London, it tells us about the protests that targeted the Miss World contest held at the time, featuring a few activists going against none other than emcee legend Bob Hope, who comes to personify the worst aspects of the patriarchal agenda—hero of a generation, villain of the next. Our protagonists, anchored by Kiera Knightley (even though Jessie Buckley has a more striking role), aren’t the only ones with progressive credentials, however, as a very interesting subplot featuring Gugu Mbatha-Raw ends up establishing. Progressivity and diversity are multidimensional movements that have the good luck of all sharing white men as antagonists, and part of what makes Misbehaviour more interesting is in opposing different views about the Miss World contest, and what happens when the contest ends up scoring a victory for diversity even within the confines of the structure that our (white) protagonists are contesting. That kind of complementary complexity is something that reflects real-world tensions within the progressive communities, and something I’d like to see a bit more rather than simplistic underdog fairy-tales. As a result, Misbehaviour does get better as it goes on, and then becomes much better once it hits its final moments. The style is meant to be easily accessible, and the viewing experience reflects that: it’s an easy film to watch and to like even when it plays close to the obvious formula. Despite the film’s hit-job, I still like Bob Hope — but then again, I can pass as a patriarch if I need to.

  • I Remember Mama (1948)

    I Remember Mama (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) A bunch of likable episodes chronicling a period of time in the life of a Norwegian immigrant family in early 20th-century San Francisco, I Remember Mama adopts a familiar framing device — the writer protagonist reminiscing about growing up—in order to serve its short stories and affectionate reminiscences. Clearly meant for comfort viewing, the film is most successful when it relies on its actors: Barbara Bel Geddes as the narrator, an aged Irene Dunne as the titular Mama and especially Oscar Homolka as the grander-than-life uncle who ends up being the focus of many scenes. The black-and-white cinematography portrays scenes of 1900s San Francisco as best as it could in a pre-CGI era — still, the sense of place is evocative. You have to have a tolerance for episodic narratives, but like films such as Meet Me in St. Louis, it all adds up into a portrait of a close-knit family, meant to create a nostalgic view of the narrator’s childhood. The material does have a universal quality, and its impact is still perceptible even today.