Reviews

  • Four Days in November (1964)

    Four Days in November (1964)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) The assassination of John F. Kennedy was not even a year old by the time Mel Stuart put together Four Days in November, an incredibly detailed documentary about JFK’s final trip to Dallas, the assassination, and the immediate aftermath all the way to his funeral. Put together from contemporary news feeds, a few dramatizations, a few interviews and a heavy dose of narration with the soothing classical intonations of Richard Basehart, it’s a meticulous recreation not only of the assassination itself, but everything surrounding it, from the reasons why JFK headed to Dallas (seeking to repair a few rifts in the Democratic Party) to the extraordinary preparations for a state funeral that is meant to help a nation grieve. There’s a clear difference in emphasis between Four Days in November and more recent takes on the event — the fetishization of conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination means that we seldom get any objective presentation of the events any more: everything has to be fiction with heavy doses of mysteries and conspiracies and a mad quest to explain the fantasies of generations of conspirationists. Compared to this thickening fog of misdirection, Four Days in May has a straightforward approach to the events that make it feel almost freshly affecting again — the incredible coincidences (what with Joan Crawford and Richard Nixon being at the same party as JFK in the days before the shooting) that pepper real history and the wealth of detail often forgotten in snappier documentaries. It’s quite a summation of a complex series of exceptional events, and perhaps where anyone interested in the JFK assassination should start. It’s missing a few things (the Zapruder film, for instance, would not be revealed for a few more years—not to mention the conclusions of the Warren report) but it’s refreshingly absent from the modern mythology that has grown around the event.

  • The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953)

    The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) I’m not usually averse to goofy whimsical musicals, but even I have my limits and The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. probes at some of them. Written by Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, it’s a musical that stems from the fantasies of a young boy who intensely dislikes his piano lessons — as he dreams about a tyrannical piano teacher and his 500-boy piano, the film goes deep into a fantasy that was probably too far ahead of its time to execute convincingly. It’s certainly weird enough, with outlandish set designs that bring to mind the Seuss books and a fantastical approach that seems exuberant for the 1950s while being too timid for contemporary audiences used to CGI flights of fancy. One thing that does harm the film is a lack of humour to go along with its imagination — the film remains far too serious for its own good, perhaps too preoccupied by the demands of its complex production to allow for moment-to-moment whimsy. There are ambitious musical numbers, but few of them are catchy, likable or memorable — much of the film plays out among too-sparse sets that add a degree of clinical asepticism at odds with what the film should be. I couldn’t help but compare the result to Willie Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, which, while dated by contemporary standards, is far more at lease with its own lunacy. The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. is probably worth a look if only for how weird it is by early-1950s standards… but don’t expect too much.

  • Experiment Perilous (1944)

    Experiment Perilous (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) With Jacques Tourneur at the helm and Hedy Lamarr in the lead, you can go confidently in Experiment Perilous knowing two things: it’s going to be a thrilling ride and she’s going to look great. The film does fulfill its initial promises on both counts: As a psychologist drawn to the dysfunctional lifestyle of a reclusive couple, George Brent plays the role of an amateur investigator uncovering the troubling truth in a way expertly drawn out by Tourneur and the script he’s working from. Ever-beautiful Lamarr shows up quite late in the film, but remains an object of fascination throughout. The result is very much a domestic thriller à la Gaslight (released almost at the same time), with strong touches of gothic romance and even a whiff of noir. Experiment Perilous eventually escalates into a spectacular aquarium-shattering drapes-burning action-packed confrontation in a Manhattan brownstone for a result that should leave anyone at least moderately entertained. (Amazingly enough, there’s even a title drop of “Experiment Perilous” midway through the film.)

  • Blackout (2008)

    Blackout (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2021) I’ve got faint praise and exasperated criticism for Blackout, even when I acknowledge that it’s a horror movie made according to the often-ludicrous standards of the genre. The compliments first: For a film largely focused on three strangers stuck in an elevator, director Rigoberto Castañeda wrings a surprising amount of style and energy to the result. In between Amber Tamblyn, Aidan Gillen and Armie Hammer, the cast is surprisingly well-known. Then, the mild criticisms:  While the film focuses on a trio in an enclosed environment, Blackout escapes strict minimalism: there are enough flashbacks and peeks outside the elevator (not to mention excursions in the elevator shaft) that the entire result escapes the rigour of more high-concept takes, such as Devil. Even at 85 minutes, there’s not a whole lot to sustain the plot, and the style can’t quite compensate. Finally, the exasperation: As this is a horror film, it’s not enough for three strangers to be stuck together in a small box: one of them has to be a serial murderer, and this is actually held back as a revelation for far too long. (Also, once it’s revealed, much of the film stops making sense — “what idiot serial murderer would leave his apartment with a dead body inside?” comes to mind.)  One of the drawbacks of having only three characters in an elevator is that it’s harder to create drama out of only a relationship triangle — even the aforementioned Devil started out with a pentagram of people. This does reinforce Blackout’s very artificial approach to plotting: we’re often reminded that this is a horror movie with little relationship to reality, and by the wilder third act (in which everyone dies at least once, thanks to fantasy sequences) nothing really matters. The ending isn’t really surprising, and any opportunity for deeper thematic commentary takes a back seat to grand-guignol shocks. The result is somewhat redeemed by the style and the actors (although the recent controversies about Armie Hammer have made it much funnier to say, “Hammer plays a character who’s not the serial killer”) but there’s definitely something lacking in order to get Blackout to fulfill its potential.

  • Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)

    Far from the Madding Crowd (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) I am of two complementary minds about the 1967 version of Far from the Madding Crowd. The first, having already been exposed and (mildly) bored by the 2015 version, is a lack of enthusiasm at the freshness of the story. I really didn’t care enough about the twenty-first century version to be able to dig deeply into the differences between the two — it was enough knowing that this is not a kind of story I respond too deeply to (although I note that a similar story in French-Canadian setting, Maria Chapdelaine, has become a bit of a classic) and letting a 1960s-style take on the story take its turn in 169 languid minutes. The other part of me is tempted to point at both versions of Far from the Madding Crowd, adapting an 1874 novel, and say, “See, this is how you learn about how different eras of filmmaking adapt similar non-contemporary material!”  There’s no big reinterpretation à la action-movie rethinking of Les Trois Mousquetaires — while both versions of Far from the Madding Crowd place different emphases on elements of the whole, they’re still very much the same recognizable story set in very much the same kind of setting. While the 1960s version it noteworthy for cast and crew having become famous later on—Julie Christie in the lead role, Terence Stamp as a suitor and Nicholas Roeg as cinematographer—it’s also notable for bucolic rendition of the 19th century English countryside as interpreted by the sensibilities of the time, and that’s not insignificant. This being said, Far from the Madding Crowd is best suited to those willing to sit slightly less than three hours to hear all about romance in rural Victorian England.

  • I Am Richard Pryor (2019)

    I Am Richard Pryor (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) As someone who watched his movies as a 1980s kid, Richard Pryor was the likable goofball who was featured in Superman III and Brewster’s Millions, a kid-friendly comedian who got his laughs by mugging for the camera. That, to put it mildly, is a hilariously erroneous impression of Pryor, who had decades of experience as an edgy comedian before settling down for family-friendly fare. I Am Richard Prior chronicles the very different phases of his life, from clean-cut (and moustache-less) young comedian to his far more provocative period, beginning in the late 1960s and gradually fading away in the 1980s as he took on the family fare I watched as a kid. As you may expect, the film focuses far more on what he brought to American culture in his edgier phase, with album names I can’t even bring myself to write here, and a take-no-prisoners approach to stand-up that mixed incredibly personal material with an unwillingness to comfort audiences. Pryor was a model to an entire generation of later comedians, and the bits and pieces we hear throughout I Am Richard Prior are only the tip of a much funnier body of work. The not-so-different flip side of this public persona was Pryor’s messy personal history, from a sordid childhood to decades-long drug abuse, numerous marriages (although this aspect is not emphasized here, because his last wife, Jennifer Lee Pryor, also produced the film), many children to different mothers, one spectacular injury where he set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine and miscellaneous health problems, perhaps explaining his death from a third heart attack at 65. Compared to other “I am” documentary biopics from Network Entertainment, I Am Richard Pryor is far more honest about the flaws of its subject. I strongly suspect that this is due to the openness of the family and friends participating in the documentary — Pryor made no attempts to hide this part of his life even in public stand-up performances (to the point of joking about setting himself on fire), so it’s not as if there are any lesser-known incidents to leave undisturbed. Jennifer Lee Pryor is unabashedly frank (and often hilarious) in discussing her deceased husband’s issues, which does help round out his portrait. It does amount to a pretty good overview of an interesting person, and one that does not shy away from his less admirable traits. The only remaining warning about I Am Richard Pryor is that a little bit of Pryor’s comedy is liable to make you seek out the rest of his work, and there’s a lot of it.

  • The Enchanted Cottage (1945)

    The Enchanted Cottage (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) If you want a comfort movie, The Enchanted Cottage has to be right up there with the greats. A fantastical romantic drama, it features two drab, wounded newlyweds who arrive at, well, an enchanted cottage that helps both see each other as their idealized selves. Notwithstanding the troubling issues of equating physical beauty with personal values, director John Cromwell’s film is a comforting fantasy in which everything is slated to go right for its well-deserving protagonists. There isn’t much to the story (one suspects that a modern film would cut to the chase, but would anything be left for a feature-length film?), but that doesn’t matter — The Enchanted Cottage is a film made to be re-watched more than watched, secure in the knowledge that everything will be all right. It would have been fun to delve more deeply into the cottage’s history and accompanying mythology, but that’s clearly a wish from someone who’s more comfortable with fantasy tropes than romantic ones — others will argue that The Enchanted Cottage is exactly what it means to be, and that it’s catnip for movie-watching couples. That it has endured for decades as a well-regarded romance says it all — timeless stuff even in comfort.

  • The End of the Affair (1999)

    The End of the Affair (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) I was surprised to realize that I’d never seen The End of the Affair — as a multiple Academy Awards nominee during the period where I was actively chronicling the films I saw, I probably gave it a miss considering how little I cared about sordid affair dramas. I still don’t, but at least I can now go half a review without snidely dismissing the film as mushy claptrap. Or, um, maybe not. Directed by Neil Jordan from a Graham Greene novel and featuring no less than Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore, it’s not as if you can’t figure out from those four names what kind of film you’re going to get — something well-mannered, languidly paced, well-written but never energetic and almost hermetically consumed with the navel-gazing of two adults behaving badly. The End of the Affair is romantic drama given maximalist treatment with plenty of pauses, delays, torpid pacing and moments meant to evoke erotic tension. It does sort-of-work — There’s a lot more nudity than you’d expect from Moore or Fiennes, and it’s actually quite tasteful in its specific way. It does feel like an inheritor to the doomed-romance British tradition of films like Brief Encounter, and there’s never any doubt that it’s not going to end well. (Especially when the film begins with “This is a diary of hate” from someone who’s not an emo teenager.)  One of the reasons why I’m happier seeing the film now rather than in 1999 is that I’ve grown more sympathetic to the result: it may not be my cup of (intensely simmering) tea, but I can appreciate the maturity of the results, many of the good lines, quite a bit of the restraint in which it’s executed and the overall atmosphere of doomed lovers. The End of the Affair is a very specific kind of film, but it’s not badly executed as those go.

  • The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

    The Lair of the White Worm (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2021) I clearly wasn’t prepared for the sheer wondrous weirdness of The Lair of the White Worm and seeing Hugh Grant’s in the credits actually misled me further. This is not your Hugh Grant movie of later years: in the hands of legendary director Ken Russell, this is a crazy horror/comedy that goes all-out on grossness, gore, fetichism, and folk horror. Peter Capaldi (!) joins Grant in adding further casting interest to the result, which is really not the film you’d expect. While not a marquee name these days, Amanda Donohoe is probably the film’s highlight as the sultry evil Lady Sylvia. This is the kind of off-kilter work where a dream sequence featuring the film’s two female leads fighting aboard an airplane is the kind of thing that you take in stride. (Plus vampire teeth that look as if they’d lacerate anyone’s mouth in moments.)  It features quite a bit more kink, phallic symbols and nudity than you’d expect from a film of its time and place. The visuals are more daring as well, and the result has this crazy mixture of horror and comedy that works surprisingly well (because it usually doesn’t). You can see why The Lair of the White Worm has earned a bit of a cult following over the decades — I’m probably going to want to watch it again in a year or two just to make sure that what I remember from the film is indeed what happened.

  • Les demoiselles ont eu 25 ans [The Young Girls Turn 25] (1993)

    Les demoiselles ont eu 25 ans [The Young Girls Turn 25] (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) While other people praise Les parapluies de Cherbourg, my favourite Jacques Demy musical is, without a doubt, Les demoiselles de Rochefort, one of the rare pastiches of American musicals that actually work as a great movie on its own. I’m far from being the only one to think highly of the film, as Les demoiselles ont eu 25 ans goes back to Rochefort in order to celebrate the film’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Amazingly enough, this documentary was directed by none other than French cinema legend Agnès Varda, Demy’s widow who was present during the celebrations to receive the homages in lieu of her husband (who died in 1990). While short at 63 minutes, the film blends footage of the original film and the celebrations with interviews from various players in the film, including Catherine Deneuve. We also get a look, through archival footage and recollections, at the making of the film. It’s clear from the footage that by 1993, Rochefort had immensely benefited from the film’s enduring reputation — various local officials speak fondly of the impact the film had on tourism. While the result is more utilitarian than inspiring, it’s not a bad way to revisit the impact of Les demoiselles de Rochefort and to refresh your brain with the terrific earworm of its best-known song. Clearly made for fans of the film, it delivers everything we can ask of a twenty-fifth anniversary celebration.

  • I Am Patrick Swayze (2019)

    I Am Patrick Swayze (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) It’s interesting to see how Patrick Swayze has maintained his good reputation despite his death in 2009. His peak movies between 1987’s Dirty Dancing and 1991s Point Break are a legendary streak (yes, especially Road House) and cynics will say that it helped him to peak well before his death — by the time he passed away, he had managed to escape Hollywood and see his legacy solidify. Still, he did die before his time at 54, and in keeping with Network Entertainment’s “I Am” series of documentary biographies, the film is a paean to him by friends and family. Plenty of family footage appears over interviews about him, archival footage and excerpts from his films. The portrait we get is one of a supremely gifted dancer who turned his attention to Hollywood and got what he wanted out of his superstar years — namely, the opportunity to buy a ranch and have a life away from the spotlight. It would have been interesting to delve a bit deeper into why he has such a spotty filmography after becoming a box-office superstar — even in the 1990s, there could be years between his roles and I’m not sure the film clearly explains why. Still, the result is emotional enough: Swayze, as portrayed here, is the epitome of a good soul: kind, humble, and graceful, with a variety of interests and skills. Jennifer Gray’s description of what it was to work with such a generous actor is moving, and so is the work ethic that led him to work on his last TV series through chemotherapy. Perhaps a bit more sentimental than other films in the “I Am” series, I Am Patrick Swayze reflects its subject by taking a more emotional and gentle approach. It’s a really good reminder of why Swayze became so famous despite a relatively small number of career-defining features — you could see the man shine through the roles, and that was more than good enough to charm everyone.

  • The Long, Hot Summer (1958)

    The Long, Hot Summer (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) Long before becoming a respected Hollywood icon and salad dressing tycoon, Paul Newman was the designated bad boy of the late-1950s-early-1960s and The Long, Hot Summer clearly takes advantage of that persona. A rural melodrama featuring a drifter (Newman), a rural patriarch (Orson Welles!) and his daughter (Joanne Woodward, soon-to-be Newman’s wife), it breaks no new grounds in narrative matters. We can guess how these things go, but the film’s biggest asset is its sense of rural atmosphere, and actors such as Welles and Newman playing off each other. There are links here with Tennessee Williams plays (especially if you follow Newman’s filmography at the time), with later films such as Hud and with a certain kind of rural southern-USA drama that would periodically pop up in Hollywood history later on. For twenty-first century viewers, Welles is a bit in a weird transitional persona here — overweight and no longer young but not yet bearded nor all that old. The melding of three Faulkner stories into one film actually works well into getting to a coherent whole with plenty of interesting side-details. While The Long, Hot Summer does not amount to an essential film (well, except for those Newman and Welles fans), you can see the way it worked back then, and an archetypical kind of southern rural drama.

  • I Am Burt Reynolds (2020)

    I Am Burt Reynolds (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) In keeping with Network Entertainment’s “I Am” series of documentary biopics, I Am Burt Reynolds ends up selecting a highly charismatic celebrity, although Burt Reynolds is slightly unusual in how he lived a full life and didn’t die prematurely, as most of the series’ subjects have. Still, the attraction here is Reynolds himself. A promising football player as a young man, he redirected his life to acting after a bad injury in the late 1950s and gradually became a superstar by the mid-1970s. This film doesn’t spend a lot of time on Reynold’s lengthy apprenticeship — it almost skips directly from post-college acting to 1972’s Deliverance, underplaying his fairly lengthy phase as a journeyman actor and occasional stuntman. But one thing that the film does capture in spades in Reynold’s extraordinary charisma, especially in talk-show appearances when he could be self-deprecating with the assurance of being an extraordinarily good-looking man. I am Burt Reynolds does feature dozens of snippets of Reynolds talking about himself, and nearly every single one of those is a funny one-liner. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Reynolds went directly from talk shows to stardom — his breakout role in Deliverance came on the heels of a casting based on his talk-show appearances, and so did his then-striking nude photoshoot for Cosmo magazine. The next ten years saw Reynolds at his best and biggest, culminating in the first two Smokey and the Bandits films. If the documentary serves one purpose, it’s to make contemporary audiences understand why Reynolds became such a sex symbol at that time—while contemporary standards have evolved and Reynolds may belong to a somewhat 1970s view of masculinity, you can understand through his appearances and footage why Reynolds was a hit—confident, funny, tough and clever at once. In keeping with other films in the series, this is a fundamentally sympathetic look at the character — his struggles with painkillers, money management and divorce are not underplayed, but there’s also far less darkness to Reynolds (who died at the ripe old age of 82) than with other subjects of the series. The glimpses at his life at the ranch reinforce that this is a documentary made by family and friends, as does the rather large place left for director Adam Rifkin to talk about Reynolds as the star of The Last Movie Star, which consciously aligned its character with the actor. The resulting documentary is a very decent homage to an often-underestimated actor and a grander-than-life personality. The lack of objectivity of the documentary is still in-keeping with the I am series, but there simply isn’t as much here to criticize in Reynolds himself.

  • Evil Laugh (1986)

    Evil Laugh (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2021) My loathing for slasher films of the 1980s is never as high as when it degenerates into nihilistic splatter. Evil Laugh is just one single step above that — it’s not intensely detestable as much as completely forgettable. The plot, and stop me if you’ve heard that before, is about a group of young people being killed one by one while they are stuck in a remote location. Yes, it’s about as interesting as that sounds — the only halfway noteworthy element of the film is that it was produced in 1986, years after the peak of the slasher craze. You’d expect such a late entry to be somewhat more interesting or distinctive, but writer-director-producer Dominick Brascia plays like it was still 1981 and audiences could just watch this stuff indiscriminately. Of course, it’s now 2021 and there’s really nothing to see here — there’s some irony in having no nudity in a film starring Ashlyn Gere. The film shows some rudimentary self-awareness in referencing other slashers, but there’s nothing really noteworthy here… and then it gets into dumb sequences such as the microwave murder that just shows the contempt the filmmakers have for their audiences. No, there’s nothing worth laughing about in Evil Laugh, and even less worth seeing.

  • Black Bear (2020)

    Black Bear (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) There are two very intentionally different films in Black Bear (or maybe even three) — a first half that’s a comedy playing as a drama, and a second half that’s a drama playing as comedy. Or maybe the reverse. The point being: don’t expect a tidy result, especially when the framing device is a screenwriter looking pensively at a blank page. The first story is about a writer-director going at a remote bed-and-breakfast retreat in order to gather inspiration for her next film, not knowing that she’s landing right in the middle of a warring couple that’s having trouble reconciling the woman’s pregnancy with their moving out of New York City to the backwoods and the effect that a young and attractive newcomer has on their couple dynamics. (It’s blindingly obvious from their first moments that these two shouldn’t be married.) It’s an excruciatingly awkward situation that plays off in constant arguments, marital sniping, unfolding adultery and an almost-inevitable downbeat ending, at which point we reset with the same actors in the same setting, playing a very different story — the shooting of a low-budget film in that remote cabin, with an entire crew dealing with the elaborate head-games of a director trying to coax a performance out of his capricious leading actress/wife. While Black Bear’s first half does have its occasionally amusing dialogues, the second half is more obviously humorous, what with coffee-spilling slapstick and the smouldering tension of a crew trying to wrap up a shoot. Despite the plot and character realignment, it plays along familiar themes of creative process labour, warring couples and a final conflagration. The result is certainly… odd. It zig-zags between comedy and tragedy and plays metatextual tricks between its two halves. I didn’t spend much time thinking about how all the parts related to each other: In my disappointingly simple head-canon, the film is about the screenwriter staring into space and digesting her ideas into two different possibilities before staring to write. The result isn’t meant to be tidy or satisfying. Still, there are a few things to like in the corners of the film. Audrey Plaza gets a very solid role here playing two or three different people and hitting many different emotional high notes along the way, from her usually detached awkward dialogue to some very high-pitched dramatic moments toward the end. There are hints of Bergman here in futzing with the filmmaking process and identity — writer-director Lawrence Michael Levine is not going for simple entertainment here, but it’s not clear how successful he is at what he’s trying to do, so scattered is the result. Black Bear is one of those films that works better in writing its review (with some reflection on the result, after some reading regarding the film’s production and intentions) rather than in the moment where we’re never too sure if the next scene will be a joke of full-scale slaughter of the entire cast. It certainly hit my fondness for movies about the moviemaking process, and I think I may enjoy seeing it again sometime.