Reviews

  • Enola Holmes (2020)

    Enola Holmes (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, February 2021) Sherlock Holmes reinterpretations have become something of a cottage industry at this point, so the idea of following Holmes’ younger sister as she wanders in Victorian England having exciting adventures is perhaps not as fresh as it could have been once upon a time. Still, there’s a lot to say about execution, and it doesn’t take long for Enola Holmes to draw us in its enthusiastic take on the mythos. Millie Bobby Brown turns in a winning performance as Enola, with some able support from Henry Cavill (as Sherlock) and Helena Bonham Carter (as their mom). Assigning the detective smarts of Holmes to a teenager does a lot to get away from recent takes’ tendency to indulge in difficult-man worship. The plot, in-keeping with this female-centric reimagining of Holmes, eventually makes its way to the debate about women’s right to vote. Still, it’s the moments and the fizzy rhythm that make the film, as Enola directly speaks to the viewers and the fast-paced editing works to keep up with the deductions and machinations that are de rigueur in dealing with the Holmes family. Harry Bradbeer’s direction is surprisingly assured, especially given the rapid rhythm and busy editing. The historical re-creation is convincing, making good use of CGI and practical re-creation. The one note that annoyed me is the role assigned to Mycroft Holmes, who here plays the shouting repressive antagonist more than anything resembling the character in the accepted mythos. Still, Enola Holmes is not a bad entry in the subgenre, and considering that it’s based on a series of novels, there’s a fair chance that we’ll get a few sequels before the well runs dry.

  • The Nightmare Stacks [The Laundry Files 7], Charles Stross

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2016, 400 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 978-0425281192

    Hello Laundry Files, it’s been a while.

    There’s some heavy-duty irony in how my review of The Apocalypse Codex, the previous book in The Laundry Files series, began with an appreciation of how it was my favourite ongoing fiction series, that I stuck by it even as my reading volume was going down across the board, and how I was lucky to have one more book in the series on-hand to read as quickly as possible.

    That was in 2016. Six years ago.

    Of course, I didn’t plan it this way. Stuff Happened. To borrow from the vernacular of the series itself, 2017–2018 was CASE NIGHTMARE BEIGE time — a culmination of personal catastrophes across many separate domains of my life and I didn’t get much recreational reading done at all during that time. Even the laborious reconstruction that followed did not include much fiction reading. Ironically, it took a global pandemic crisis to bring a bit of personal peace and contentment, and the intention to renew with past hobbies. I played a lot of videogames in 2020, and oversaturation was part of the plan so that I would renew with recreational reading (on paper!) in 2021. Carving out pre-bedtime reading ended up being easier than I thought, and beginning slowly (with scripts, comic books, biographies of classic Hollywood crushes) ended up being a winning strategy. But if my videogame re-immersion experience of last year is any indication, I can expect a fairly long first phase of catching up on series/authors/styles, and The Nightmare Stacks (long purchased, never read) was high on the list.

    I still think that The Laundry Files remains my current favourite ongoing series. As I’ve mentioned before, its blend of high-octane speculation, universe-wide scope, geeky sensitivities, niche humour and public sector thrills intersects with a surprising number of my own personal interests. I’ve bought and read most of Stross’ published output so far and I’ve never been even slightly disappointed by its entries… until now, that is.

    The sixth entry in the series, The Nightmare Stacks, does feel a lot like the previous two books in how it fully pivots the series in weirder and more diverse territory — unlike the opening tetralogy that kept stretching the series’ original novella’s trans-dimensional horror/humour ongoing narrative in a way that spoofed British Thriller writers, the next three books in the series pivoted to include elements of urban fantasy in the Laundry framework, not-so-coincidentally moving away from the first few books’ narrator with the intention of creating a looser framework that could accommodate many more kinds of stories. At the same time, the series also set up the ticking time bomb at the heart of the developing narrative: CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, or the unfolding and possibly unavoidable Lovecraftian extinction-level event that is clearly rushing up to meet the characters.

    But that gets put on hold during most of The Nightmare Stacks, which makes a book out of a semi-comic conceit: What if the Laundry was so focused on avoiding one kind of threat that it missed clues about another kind of threat? Freshly-minted vampire protagonist Alex is at the centre of the unfolding narrative this time around, as his assignment to prepare The Laundry for the coming apocalypse by finding new headquarters in Leeds gets him in contact with the advance scout for another trans-dimensional invasion force. But while the Elfin antagonists of this volume may feel like the C-team to the series’ main threats, they do have the advantage of surprise — by the end of the book, the long-awaited intrusion of occult threats finally makes the front page of British media with a mega-death body count.

    While much of the book does feel like a semi-interlude (which is patently untrue once you get to the next book in the series — but I’m anticipating my next review), it does offer Stross a chance to take a breath, play with new characters, have fun in a semi-romantic comedy narrative (!), slightly reconfigure his universe and ultimately set up the next few instalments on firmer ground.

    I did have a few problems getting into the book. It had been a long time, for one thing, and getting used again to the series’ very specific jargon did take a few pages and reference refreshers. I was also initially unsure about Alex as series protagonist, although that doesn’t last long: While the series’ initial protagonist Bob Howard aged out of his charming wide-eyed innocence a few books ago, Alex is still sufficiently low-level (but skilled at what he does) to be interesting, and meet challenges that can be appreciated at a more relatable level… such as meeting a cute girl that ends up being a trans-dimensional spy. On the other hand, I did have a constant difficulty staying interested in the segments written from The Other’s perspective — those were more successful once The Other got closer to humanity, but most of the time I was tempted to skip entire passages. I didn’t and only half-regretted it — which points at some weaknesses in the result.

    Consider that the book’s best and most enjoyable sequence is a family dinner gone severely awry when the expectations of the parents regarding their progeny are simultaneously and severely challenged: a big comedy of discomfort and half-truths laid bare by a four-ring circus of clashes set around a common dining table. Meanwhile, an aerial engagement between jet fighters and dragons later in the book feels a bit perfunctory. There’s a clash of styles and interest between the novel’s lower-level character drama and its higher-level war narrative that doesn’t quite gel. It feels as if Stross found himself ill-equipped in trying to humanize the big events in the final third, having to introduce many new minor characters in order to describe the events, but without the connection that we have with the recurring characters of the rest of the series. It’s interesting to read, but it’s not gripping or enjoyable like the book’s other passages. It’s also clear that this is meant to be the narrative of a defeat: In The Laundry’s universe, the good guys are (so far!) always fighting to preserve normalcy in the face of intrusion, and no matter if this intrusion is stopped before it got worse, it’s still a resounding loss and shift in the scenery. The Nightmare Stacks ends far too soon to get an idea of the repercussions of what just happened, but it’s clear that plenty of cats have clawed their way out of the bag, some of them are lion-sized and they’re all hungry.

    I also suspect that the book is sufficiently off-rack compared to previous instalments that I wasn’t feeling as much affection for the result. There’s a noticeable down-tick in the humour of the series’ tongue-in-cheek approach that’s not quite compensated by the result. The narrative here isn’t as strong on public service concerns (what with its protagonist being an unwilling civil service recruit), nor does it delve as much in the murky funhouse reflection of spy thriller narratives. Sure, one of the main characters is a one-woman spying agency, but it’s in service of a new and unfamiliar antagonist.

    All of this should explain my somewhat muted reaction to the result. Oh, The Nightmare Stacks does nothing to stop me from getting the next book in the series — I’m still eager to learn what happens next. What’s more, Stross is too canny a writer to keep his series in statis: things change, evolve, inevitably lead to nuclear Armageddon and readers should be prepared to keep up.

    More to the point, it’s not as if The Nightmare Stacks doesn’t have its share of good moments. The titular stacks are a collection of weapons accumulated by the British government to prepare for any kind of eventuality, both conventional and occult. I did like the taming of an alien invader forced to appreciate humanity when she takes over a bubbly drama student. Alex eventually grew on me as a protagonist, with his part in the book’s climax standing out as the best aspect of the book’s last third. We also get a glimpse at new facets of the Laundry universe, although the integration is clunkier than usual — an entirely new “DM” character is presented as if we already knew about him (Stross apparently meant to write a novella introducing him but never got around to it), although the closer look at “forecasting ops” is suitably mysterious and portentous. Stross remains an engaging, hip, compelling narrator (at least in those human-readable passages) and the book has its share of really good lines.

    Ultimately, The Nightmare Stacks does have the advantage of being an episode in a longer series — even a temporary side-step has to be evaluated in a bigger context and may mean something else in the long run. Without spoiling too much about my next review, I’m writing this one while I’m one day and a hundred pages in the next volume — and I can reassure everyone that The Delirium Brief gets the series on familiar tracks, and recontextualizes The Nightmare Stacks as a crucial precipitating factor in a far more unnerving narrative. I suspect that I’ll eventually come to regard this seventh volume as mild bump in the road that sets up far more interesting later instalments.

  • Orphans of the Storm (1921)

    Orphans of the Storm (1921)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, February 2021) When it comes to early film director D.W. Griffith’s work, I should probably take a look at his best-known work rather than more minor productions such as Orphans of the Storm, a film about two orphan girls during the French Revolution. Still, you can often learn more about average entries than masterpieces, and it doesn’t take two minutes for Griffith to start lecturing through opening title cards that “The lesson — the French Revolution RIGHTLY overthrew a BAD government. But we in America should be careful lest we with a GOOD government mistake fanatics for leaders and exchange our decent law and order for Anarchy and Bolshevism.” (Emphasis his.)  This naïve political science lesson sounds stupid coming from someone whose infamously racist Birth of a Nation led to a resurgence of the Klu Klux Klan, but that’s Griffith for you. Cheerfully using the French Revolution to score domestic political points, Orphans of the Storm is perhaps best enjoyed as a showcase for Lillian and Dorothy Gish, as well as for Griffith’s undeniable talent, even at this early stage of cinema history, for re-creating lavish historical scenes with hundreds of extras. The story itself is the kind of melodramatic hokum that was in vogue at the time, adapted from a well-known novel and featuring not only orphans, revolution and anti-aristocratic resentment, but plot-convenient blindness as well. It’s… interesting in the way many first-rate 1920s silent productions are, which is to say that it’s often a slog to get through the historically relevant material. I still have a few more Griffith movies in my future as a cinephile, but I’m not really looking forward to any of them.

  • The Fortune Cookie (1966)

    The Fortune Cookie (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) One of the reasons why Billy Wilder’s films have endured better than many of his contemporaries is the clever wit with which they’re built. Uncommonly smart at working within the confines of the Hays Code, Wilder’s movies still speak to us through their cynicism, imperfect characters and atypical narratives. The same goes for The Fortune Cookie. To be fair, I don’t think that the idea of a man being manipulated by their wily lawyer into faking an injury for insurance purposes is as fresh today as it must have been in 1966 — it’s the kind of thing that has become a cliché. But the way Wilder goes about it remains entertaining and compelling. It does help that he can benefit from some solid actors in the lead roles: The Fortune Cookie is perhaps best known for being the first of many on-screen pairings of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau. Here, Lemmon plays the injured party encouraged to remain bedridden, while Matthau plays the slimy lawyer going after an insurance settlement. (Matthau suffered a heart attack during the film’s production, returning to set weeks later and thirty pounds lighter — he won an Oscar for his troubles.)  The result is a comedy that’s not particularly heavy on the laughs, but still maintains a lighthearted touch throughout. It even ends with a certain moral fortitude while allowing all characters to keep their heads high. Unexplainably shot in black-and-white at the close of that format’s relevance in Hollywood, The Fortune Cookie remains a solid film, clearly showing the Wilder touch as a filmmaker who continues to impress cinephiles.

  • Pathology (2008)

    Pathology (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) If horror movies can get away with one thing, it’s being as unpleasant as possible. Pathology, alluding to the double meaning of its title, delights in making its viewers as uncomfortable as possible, combining the lurid horror of a pathological killer with a clinical depiction of the work performed by its pathologists. It’s a film largely shot in cold antiseptic tones in autopsy rooms, as our protagonist faces down killer colleagues with a penchant for toying with victims and setting up disquieting hypotheticals. Pathology doesn’t have much of a plot, but it does have an atmosphere — the kind of atmosphere fit to make viewers recoil from the gallows humour, caricatural evil antagonists and unflinching surgical procedures. (If you’re the kind of person to flinch at scalpels cutting into bodies, well, Pathology isn’t the film for you.)  Nowadays most remarkable for being written by Neveldine/Taylor with their usual touch of narrative wildness, Pathology is not exactly a good time at the movies but it is more unnerving than most horror films. I’d be surprised if it raked up many repeat viewings, but then again that’s another thing that a horror film can get away with.

  • The Star (1952)

    The Star (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) The more I explore Hollywood history, the more I’m struck by the meta-textual aspect of good casting, where factors outside the confines of the fiction end up contributing to its effectiveness. For instance, you can watch The Star and appreciate, at face value, its story about a washed-up Hollywood star struggling to relaunch her career. You can watch the lead actress and the younger actress playing her daughter and think, “Hey, they’re pretty good!”  But once you’re aware of the vast tapestry of Hollywood history and learn to recognize Bette Davis and Natalie Wood, having them in the lead role gives an added dimension to the entire film — taking advantage of those two actresses’ careers spanning decades of history before and after The Star. It gets wilder once you read the film’s production history and learn that the lead character was based on Joan Crawford — and that Davis, who famously loathed Crawford, was only too eager to play a version of “her rival” rather than a character too much like her. (Davis was rewarded for her honest portrayal in an unglamorous role by an Academy Award nomination.)  As for The Star, it’s actually quite good — if you like Hollywood inner baseball, it’s a credible portrayal of an aging star who comes to grips with fame having passed her by, and it’s not quite as lacerating nor as satirical as similar treatments of the topic have been in other circumstances. But really, it’s the casting that makes the film special.

  • The Final Countdown (1980)

    The Final Countdown (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, February 2021) I’ve known about The Final Countdown for a long time before finally seeing it — even today, its premise (an aircraft carrier sent back in time to the eve of the Pearl Harbor attack) is striking enough to be of interest to anyone with a liking for alternate history. Alas, as so often happens, the execution doesn’t quite measure up to the hype. To be fair, there’s a really interesting techno-thriller built in The Final Countdown: Filmed with the cooperation of the US Navy, this is a film that takes us inside an aircraft carrier during operations, with plenty of naval aviation footage and scenes obviously shot on location. Military personnel are portrayed honourably, and the nuts-and-bolts details of a carrier being caught in a time portal are convincing. As a portrayal of early-1980s naval aviation, it’s quite interesting even today. Unfortunately, the problem comes when the script has to switch from military thriller to actual Science Fiction: Seasoned viewers will spot the opening of a closed loop almost from the first scene, and as the film advances, it’s clear that there will be no major deviations from history, severely limiting its impact. The rhythm of the film becomes increasingly slack, as it spins its wheels while not making any changes to history and waiting until the closed time loop can be established. The meaninglessness of one civilian consultant character who should be significant also becomes apparent, although the impact of that is somewhat diminished by the character being played by Martin Sheen, going toe-to-toe with none other than Kirk Douglas as the captain of the aircraft carrier. By the time the film concludes, the obvious time loop closes with a whimper and the film’s final revelation can be seen coming hours in advance. You can reasonably argue that doing justice to the premise would have required far more time and special effects than was available to the film’s producers, and that’s largely true: When a real Science Fiction author sat down to work out the implications of a modern carrier group being sent back in time to WW2, the result was John Birmingham’s messy “Axis of Time” trilogy. In The Final Countdown’s case, the limited imagination was built in the script from the get-go to prevent the film, largely aimed at military-friendly audiences, from getting too strange. As it went on, it struck me that it wouldn’t be the worst thing to see a modern remake, possibly executed as a miniseries. As a bonus, make sure that the captain is played by Michael Douglas and the civilian consultant is played by Emilio Estevez (or Charlie Sheen) and I think we’ve got a nice high concept going on.

  • Before You Know It (2019)

    Before You Know It (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) If we’re going to chat about movie genre, let’s have a bit of a discussion about how “indie dramedy” has become a genre and how its stylistic quirks often work against itself. Case in point: Before You Know It, a low-budget family melodrama that wastes a good premise, a fascinating atmosphere and some good actors with a script more interested in pointless and irritating tricks than telling a story in a credible fashion. Set in the intriguing world of early 1990s Manhattan showbiz, it features a level-headed woman trying to manage a family-owned off-Broadway theater despite the loopy flights of fancy of a has-been playwright father, an absent mother and a whimsical sister. Things come to a boil when the father dies and the two sisters discover that their mother, long believed dead, is a successful soap opera actress who actually owns the building they live in (and its associated debts). So far so good, and once you throw in the acting talent of Mandy Patinkin as the father, Jen Tullock as a flighty sister (who steals pretty much every single scene she’s in) and Hannah Pearl Utt (who also directs) as the level-headed protagonist, you can reasonably expect something interesting. Alas, the script seems determined to be too cute — even considering the grief and lack of common sense from its over-dramatic characters, some fundamental plot points are manipulated beyond reason, revealing the artifice of the script. (You’d think that “Hey, Dad is dead” would be the first thing a grieving daughter would tell her mother, but the manipulative script somehow doesn’t get around to it until much later. You’d also think that a mom would keep an eye on her daughter while she’s gallivanting around town, but then again: manipulative script). To the dubious plotting, we can also add some irritating character touches: There are at least two hideous examples of terrible parenting here, and neither quite get the scrutiny that you’d expect (but then again: see manipulative script). It doesn’t help that in-keeping with much indie dramedy, Before You Know It thinks that “comedy equals discomfort” — nearly all of its decisions seem designed to annoy audiences, and there’s a limit to the effectiveness of that specific artistic intention. Given that Utt and Tullock co-wrote the script, there’s not a lot of wiggle room to blame some unseen screenwriter or studio interference: this is the film they wanted, notwithstanding production constraints. A less slavish adherence to the quirks of indie dramedy could have polished most of the roughest edges of the result — as it is, it’s simply too irritating to do justice to its likable stars, or to showcase what Utt and Tullock can do on the page or behind the camera.

  • Evil Bong (2006)

    Evil Bong (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) You get no points for guessing that Evil Bong is not a good movie. No points at all. You would even get negative points for hoping that it’s any good even after seeing that notorious schlockmeister Charles Band of Full Moon Features fame wrote and directed the film. Taking place deep into stoner humour subculture, Evil Bong begins once a nerdy young man moves into an apartment featuring, what else, an evil bong. The title device ends up being a portal to another dimension filled with demonic strippers and that’s probably all you really need to know about where it’s going. To be fair, there’s quite a bit of disarming silliness to the result: it’s a film about filmmakers indulging their id on behalf of a very specific audience, and it sort-of-works if you’re in an adjacent category. I’m at the opposite end of the stoner spectrum, but I find nearly anything with nudity and silly comedy to be tolerable, and I wasn’t expecting much more from the film’s pedigree. It is most assuredly not a horror film — despite the gore, the creatures are an unthreatening mix of rubber and CGI and the tone of the film is closer to Cheech and Chong (the latter of which even having a cameo here) than anything truly unsettling. If you’re not part of the stoner subculture, I’d probably suggest watching Evil Bong while doing something else: It’s borderline irritating as a full-attention kind of thing, but just interesting enough to be worth a quick look in-between other activities. There are now more than six sequels, but I’m not in a hurry to see any of them.

  • Il postino [The Postman] (1994)

    Il postino [The Postman] (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, February 2021) As I’m slowly making my way through the list of movies nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award, I can usually understand why they were nominated —The Academy is often predictable, and watching the films is usually enough to see how they correspond to the broad categories most likely to earn a nomination. But there’s a meta-game at play as well, and watching Il Postino is a good reminder that there are often external factors to consider. On its own, it doesn’t seem like such a strong film. As a story about a poor fisherman’s son who befriends famed poet Pablo Neruda, it clearly plays on familiar themes — poor versus famous, self-discovery through art, bucolic boosterism and so on. Philippe Noiret is quite good as Neruda (even if his voice is dubbed in Italian — Noiret without his own specific voice is a disappointment), while Massimo Troisi makes for a likable protagonist as an uneducated man gathering an appreciation for art, romance and the world through bringing Neruda’s mail. But that doesn’t seem as if it’s enough: Il Postino plays with arthouse themes but doesn’t feel like the kind of film that the Academy goes nuts over. Then you look at the film’s production history and its American releasing studio and it all starts making sense. For one thing, it turns out that writer/star Troisi was gravely ill during shooting, even pushing back heart surgery in order to complete the film… and he died the day after principal shooting wrapped. Now that’s the kind of dying-for-your-art story that the Academy loves to nominate. But the final piece of the puzzle is simple: Miramax. At the time Il Postino went to the Academy Awards, Miramax was known as an unusually skilled movie awards campaigner: now-disgraced studio owner Harvey Weinstein was a legend in pushing his slate of movies “for consideration” to Academy voters, and the 1990s are littered with curious Academy Award nominations (and wins!) that all share Miramax as their American distributor. To be clear: Il Postino is not a bad movie, and I suppose that anyone stumbling upon it would be at least halfway charmed by its take on the postman and the poet. But if you come at it, as I did, with an eye on completing your list of 1990s Academy Award nominees, you may feel something missing: the meta-narrative surrounding the film at the time of the awards.

  • Ziegfeld Girl (1941)

    Ziegfeld Girl (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) In some ways, you can see Ziegfeld Girl as the second of an informal trilogy of MGM movies about Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. —or more specifically the Ziegfeld Follies revue productions that he created for Broadway. Their appeal could be summed up in a word: Girls. 1945’s Ziegfeld Follies was MGM’s attempt to re-create his shows with lavish means and the biggest stars in the business. Before that, 1936’s Academy-Award-winning biopic The Great Ziegfeld showed us the man’s life, and produced some of the most stunning musical numbers of 1930s American cinema along the way. Some of those set-pieces are reused in 1941’s Ziegfeld Girls, which foregoes the man himself to focus on the fictional story of three girls who become part of the show. That, in itself, would be a decent-enough backstage musical, but that’s before taking a look at the cast. Not only do you have James Stewart playing a vaguely disreputable truck driver getting annoyed at his girlfriend’s greater fame (a role somewhat less sympathetic than usual for Stewart, who doesn’t sing a line), you also have the girls themselves being played by none other than Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr and Lana Turner — a ridiculously stacked cast, if you’ll pardon the expression. Garland is at her youthful best here, not yet showing the strains of studio life — her “Minnie From Trinidad” is the film’s standout number, as long as you put aside the unfortunate cultural issue of having her perform as a darker-skinned girl. Lamarr and Turner don’t sing, but their roles as still good showcases, and the combined impact of all three is not bad — and I’m saying this a someone who’s usually indifferent to Turner and often unimpressed with Garland. Ziegfeld Girl doesn’t manage to be a great musical, but it does have enough running for it to distinguish itself from the crowded arena of Broadway backstage musicals. Reusing some of the lavish numbers from The Great Ziegfeld must have been great for MGM’s bottom line, and it does add visual impact (as well as the gravitas associated with the earlier prestige production) to Ziegfeld Girl. It’s a nice-enough film, although I suspect that some modern viewers (as I nearly did) may run the risk of thinking they’ve seen it already due to its title being very similar to the two other films in MGM’s informal trilogy.

  • Nighthawks (1981)

    Nighthawks (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2021) Twenty-first century reviews of Nighthawks have generally been kinder to the film than the ones it received at the time of its release, and it’s not hard to see why. In some ways, the film was ahead of its time, by maybe ten or twenty years: As a suspense story of how a cowboy Manhattan cop goes after a terrorist attacking New York landmarks, it shows many of the characteristics of late-1980s/1990s action movies as the form coalesced in the wake of New Hollywood. That it features none other than Sylvester Stallone with a fetching beard as the cop (plus Billy Dee Williams) and Rutger Hauer as the mad terrorist is a clear bonus, considering the career that both of them had later on, especially in the very kinds of movies that Nighthawks announced. The film does manage to get quite a few things right: the atmosphere of wintertime Manhattan is very well presented, and the standout sequence in the film (aside from an opening store bombing sequence that would become a staple of later action movies, such as Die Hard with a Vengeance) is a tense and still rather original sequence set aboard and around the Roosevelt Island Tramway with Stallone’s character talking with the terrorists. I wouldn’t want to oversell the film: Nighthawks may point the way forward that many more action films would follow, but it’s only semi-successful in its approach. Making a protagonist out of a cowboy cop is increasingly troublesome, the ending sequence is nonsensical and the film does feel a bit slow by contemporary standards. But it has aged better than other films at the time, and Stallone isn’t as annoying here as he is in other films. (A look at the production history of the film does reveal that he was already then showing the signs of being a troublesome star, but that’s Hollywood’s problem, not ours.)  Considering how it has faded from cultural memory, Nighthawks is now a bit of a pleasant surprise, and more interesting than expected.

  • La double vie de Véronique (1991)

    La double vie de Véronique (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, February 2021) I’m clearly in no position to properly appreciate films such as La double vie de Véronique: it’s clearly a film with a distinct sensibility that courts arthouse audiences. The story of two women (both played by Irène Jacob) who barely glimpse each other but share a number of similarities, it’s a film of subtle connections, almost itching to delve into magical realism but not quite willing to do so. It’s not exactly dull, but it doesn’t seem to build to anything in narrative terms. The two halves of the film barely connect in tangible ways, whereas the stories take a back-seat to presentation and mood. You can be charitable and call La double vie de Véronique poetry in film form — I’ll fall back on platitudes along the lines of “it’s a good thing that cinema has something for everyone” and call it a day.

  • The Old Guard (2020)

    The Old Guard (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, February 2021) As someone who spent a few years as a film critic professionally slicing apart the sometimes-subtle differences between genres, I’m really tempted to approach The Old Guard as a case study in the differences between Science Fiction and Comic Book sensibilities. Any kind of artistic genre is often best understood as the product of a community rather than a corpus in and of itself. It’s about a group of creators talking to each other, borrowing techniques and sensibilities, and aiming for a specific audience that is attuned to those very specific aspects of a genre. It’s no big revelation that the prose Science Fiction and the Superhero Comics communities have evolved according to different parameters: both were limited by the specifications of their publishing medium and have a different history. Comics tend to be more action-oriented at the expense of believability (sometimes ridiculously so, using fights as structural building blocks), while Science Fiction chose to focus on ideas and narrative more than literary sensibilities. The Old Guard is interesting in that it takes a science-fictional device (immortals living in the margins of history) and filters it through a comic book sensibility, pumping up fights every fifteen minutes and going for big broad narrative strokes rather than stopping to think about what it’s doing. The result definitely reached an audience (it’s apparently one of the most widely-streamed films of 2020, whatever that means in a weird year for movies), but it can be a frustrating film if you’re expecting it to take a more grounded approach. The undisputable highlight here has to be Charlize Theron, once more burnishing her action-movie credentials with a lean, mean performance as a burnt-out immortal (the mythical Andromache) openly questioning why she’s still living in the face of so much evil in the world. Next up are the dynamic fight sequences — not revolutionary, but good enough to keep the film moving even when the plot doesn’t make all that much sense or grace. It’s when we peek more closely at the ideas of the film that The Old Guard gets creaky. Bits and pieces of the exposition (delivered to a newly minted immortal played by Kiki Layne in a breakout performance) are graceless and depend more on rule of dramatic explanations rather than telling it straight. This problem carries through much later in the film, as another character played by Chiwetel Ejiofor takes a rabbit out of narrative hat in suggesting a greater-scope purpose that’s not supported nor foreshadowed in any way by the rest of the narrative. Worse yet is the undiluted sense (carried over from comic serials) that The Old Guard is barely the beginning of the story, so obvious are the plot threads deliberately dangled to set up a series of sequels. Blah — so much for wholly satisfying single-film narratives. There’s little doubt that Hollywood will hold itself hostage to comic book conventions for a long while: the commercial success of such films speaks for itself, and the numerous parallels between comic-book writing and screenwriting are just as obvious. I just wish that comics-inspired screenwriters would stop and think a little bit more and that they’d learn to identify and dispense with the clichés of another medium as they write for another.

  • On Moonlight Bay (1951)

    On Moonlight Bay (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) My well-established fondness for musicals is not unshakeable, and it clearly reached its limits with On Moonlight Bay. To be fair, this is a film that plays on chords that don’t particularly matter to me: As an affectionate look at 1910s small-town America, it played far better to older American 1950s audiences who could recognize themselves in there. (It’s worth mentioning that the film scrupulously avoids any realistic portrayal of the misery of life in the 1910s — this is a musical comedy, after all, and nothing is as important as the romantic fantasy it showcases.)  It also features Doris Day in one of her squeaky-cleanest roles as a young debutante faced with two romantic prospects: not the Day persona I like best, as she was far more interesting in satirical non-musical comic roles. But those are not the movies that On Moonlight Bay tries to be: This, based on a series of short stories, was meant to lull audiences into nostalgia enlivened by a few standard songs and familiar romantic choices. It’s not much and it feels even less interesting now than it must have been back then. The comedy is not that comic, the songs are not that striking and it’s a Technicolor Warner Brothers production— if anyone is looking at why MGM was such a powerhouse musical-making machine in the 1950s, you can do worse than studying the difference between their 1951 musicals and this one. On Moonlight Bay is far duller than I expected, although it earns a defensible place on any Doris Day filmography as an example of her early roles.