Reviews

  • The Honeymoon Machine (1961)

    The Honeymoon Machine (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) We don’t naturally associate Steve MacQueen with comedy, but The Honeymoon Machine does offer him a good showcase for his persona in a more lighthearted context. Here, he plays a hustler-type US Navy sailor who sees an opportunity when his ship, equipped with a super-powerful computer, docks at a fantasy version of Venice complete with a casino and a luxurious hotel suite. Dragging fellow crewmembers into his burgeoning scheme, he rents the suite, gets the cooperation of the computer expert, brings in the necessary equipment to communicate with the ship and finds a way to crack the probabilities of roulette. Things get funnier and more complicated when the admiral’s daughter stumbles into the suite, when the computer operator’s old flame resurfaces, when the admiral launches an investigation into unauthorized ship-to-shore communications and when even the Russians grow concerned about what’s happening with the Americans. Before long, The Honeymoon Machine (adapted from a Broadway play) has several spinning plates all crashing into each other in comic complications. MacQueen is his usual cool and likable self, except playing for farce this time around and being good at it—even if he reportedly walked out on the film’s sneak preview. Meanwhile, Paula Prentiss looks gorgeous in her character’s thick-rimmed glasses, even with the film making a few jokes about it. The Honeymoon Machine is not a good movie, but it’s a fun one—it’s very much in-line with a stage-bound farcical tradition and is well worth rediscovering from Hollywood’s archives. Plus, there’s a MacQueen in a rare comedy role, which isn’t the least of the film’s charms.

  • Maria Chapdelaine (1934)

    Maria Chapdelaine (1934)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2020) The 1934 version of Maria Chapdelaine opens on the worse possible note. The story of Maria Chapdelaine is a French-Canadian classic for a few reasons, but keep in mind a few things: The original novel on which the film was based was written by a French immigrant, describing a rural Québec largely for European audiences. (In a twist of fate, he died before the novel became a runaway success.) This 1934 film was made by French filmmakers who came to Québec to shoot the film. (There was no significant French-Canadian film industry before the 1950s and even that is stretching the truth quite a bit.) The film was also made for French-European audiences, something that its opening scrawls underline heavily: first, it feels compelled to point out that despite the film’s rural setting, Québec also had bustling cities; second, it felt compelled to point out that the filmmakers toned down the “rough” Québec accent for intelligibility. With an incredibly patronizing opening text like that, anyone would be justified in expecting a condescending grab bag of cultural appropriation and dismissiveness. Fortunately, the film does much better once it gets going. It clearly relishes the colourful French-Canadian patois, with dialogue clearly showcasing rural expressions without repetition. The non-Québecois mid-Atlantic accent actually works in the film’s favour, clearly letting the words speak for themselves rather than the inflection—after a while, you simply stop noticing it. The film works even better visually: a lot of work was invested in capturing images of rural Québec at a time where very few filmmakers did, and the result is an amazing document of 1930s Québec looking like the 1910s. There’s a lot of enthusiasm and not as much condescension in how rural Québec is presented: the soundtrack of the film is crammed with traditional French-Canadian songs, images of farms and logging camps, and delightful turns of phrase that are impossible to translate in any other language (or any other French dialect). From mild loathing, I actually grew to like the result quite a bit, and see it as a very worthy precursor to Québec’s own film industry. Keep in mind that this Maris Chapdelaine was made before Québec’s secular Révolution tranquille and that it predates the turbulent history of Québec’s separatist movement, lending it a different quality than later versions meant to promote Québec’s rural roots. Also keep in mind that Maria Chapdelaine has been shot four times: this 1930s French version, a 1950s French version, a (rather good) 1983 version made in Québec and, as I write these lines, is slated to be Québec’s next homegrown blockbuster. The universal nature of the story (which features three suitors to a beautiful young woman, each of them representing a facet of the French-Canadian experience) and terroir appeal make it a natural for generational reinterpretation. I frankly think that we all lucked out with the 1930s version: opening scrawl aside, it’s about as good an adaptation that could be made at the time.

  • Murder by Decree (1979)

    Murder by Decree (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) The idea of pairing Sherlock Holmes against Jack the Ripper has a long history—it’s a natural matchup from a chronological perspective, and an irresistible one from a dramatic viewpoint. Murder by Decree is far from being the first work of fiction to explore the pairing (even in limiting ourselves to movies, A Study in Terror did it a decade earlier), but you don’t have to be the first to be influential—It was decently successful at the box office and so I wonder how many of the later works of fiction combining the two have been influenced by this one. The plot is very much focused on the royal conspiracy angle, almost de rigueur as a way to make the stakes as high as they could possibly go in London. Depending on how you feel about whether Jack the Ripper story should adhere to the historical record, this will either be interesting or far-fetched. Still, the point of Murder by Decree isn’t as much the story as the concept, plus the rather engrossing atmosphere. Fully playing with the idea of 1800s London being a fog-shrouded city and spending a good chunk of money on period detail, director Bob Clark makes Murder by Decree notable for its iconography. There’s also a nice amount of acting talent involved: Christopher Plummer and none other than James Mason (who looks much older but sounds the same) star as, respectively, Holmes and Watson, with Donald Sutherland and Genevieve Bujold in supporting roles. It all wraps up in a package slightly too long (especially in the ending stretch, drunk on its own conspiracy fantasies) but remains enjoyable despite the gory subject matter.

  • This Woman Is Dangerous (1952)

    This Woman Is Dangerous (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) I don’t particularly like Joan Crawford-the-person, but as an actress she could have her moments in even the most average films, and it’s a quirk of characterization that makes her the star of This Woman is Dangerous. Trying out permutations on a familiar theme of a gangster eyeing a mundane life, the script makes showcases a woman as the head of a crime gang, and Crawford tears into the role with relish, living up to the title of the film before settling down with a tale of progressive blindness and falling in love with her surgeon. The complications come up when her ex-lover comes back to get her, although the interest of the film diminishes the closer it gets back to a standard crime thriller. By far the best part of the film is the opening, during which Crawford barks orders to her gang and proves that she is not to be trifled with. Her character softens and becomes less interesting as it goes by, although as a quasi-noir crime film, This Woman is Dangerous does have basic watchability.

  • Rich Kids (1979)

    Rich Kids (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) I wasn’t looking forward to watching Rich Kids—tales of divorce as seen from the eyes of children (well, young teenagers) are almost too sad to contemplate, and I wasn’t sure I was up for it. But the film turns out to be easier to take than I expected—funnier, more optimistic, not quite as centred on the kid characters (although it’s a gradual process) and somewhat wittier than the usual drama on the topic. While the “rich kids” of the title are played by debut actors Trini Alvarado (who went on to have a significant career) and one-time actor Jeremy Levy, the parents of the female lead are played with Kathryn Walker and John Lithgow. The territory here is familiar from many other films—rich intellectual New Yorkers splitting up and kids making sense of it. But compared to the dreariness of (say) The Squid and the Whale, Rich Kids is far more entertaining to watch: The kids are admittedly written as precocious sages (as per the “here’s how your parents are going to announce their divorce to you… pick a restaurant you don’t like” scene), but their wisdom continually decreases throughout the film until the parents race to their rescue later on. Plenty of amusing secondary subplots and details enliven things, especially when it comes to how the parents are facing their divorce—the film opens with an elaborate charade by the protagonist’s father that doesn’t even fool the intended audience, and eventually paints a nightmarish portrait of another man in the throes of a stereotypical midlife crisis. It all amounts to a moderately good comic drama that exceeds expectations: much easier to watch than I expected, and not without its share of darker comedy.

  • Family Plot (1976)

    Family Plot (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Considering a career that spanned slightly more than half a century, there are some really weird things in Alfred Hitchcock’s filmography that are seldom mentioned in the same breath as his acknowledged classics. I have a really soft spot for his 1941 screwball comedy of remarriage Mr. & Mrs. Smith, but his final feature film Family Plot is no less quirky. A comedy thriller pitting two teams of criminals against each other thanks to clashing schemes, it almost works as an apology for the unbearable bleakness of his previous film Frenzy. I’m not suggesting that Family Plot is a barrel of laughs: it’s often surprisingly long, hits a few very dramatic notes late in the third act, and often seems confused about where it’s going. But its dark sense of humour seems far more befitting of earlier Hitchcock films à la The Trouble with Harry, and feels like a minor but ironic coda to a storied career. The comic caper may feel loose at first, but it does tighten up quite a bit toward the end, and the ending is a release of tension as effective as many of his previous films. The 1970s period detail adds an interesting patina to the film, and the result is an entertaining but definitely second-tier Hitchcock film.

  • I Kill Giants (2017)

    I Kill Giants (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2020) I am getting tired of the “imaginative protagonist escapes to imagined worlds because of a psychological trauma” trope, and this one is played to full effect in I Kill Giants. Our heroine is an eccentric, smart, lonely teenager who is having trouble coping with the terminal illness of her mother—in the absence of a father, the older sister is the one trying to keep the four siblings together, and she’s not able to do a good job of it. As a result, our protagonist escapes in fantasies in which she defends her small coastal town against giants come to destroy everything… among many other quirks of imagination that do absolutely nothing to endear her to her high-school classmates. The film plays a bit on the ambiguity between her fantasies and reality, so you can probably read the film both ways if you’re so inclined—but I think (counter-intuitively enough for me, given how prompt I am to reject any purely realistic interpretations) that the film is better if it’s entirely taking place in her mind. I Kill Giants does rest quite a bit on the lead performance of Madison Wolfe in the main role, with some assistance from Imogen Poots and Zoe Saldana in sympathetic adult role (with a small cameo from Jennifer Ehle). Special effects are used copiously to portray the protagonist’s inner mind. Part of my lack of enthusiasm for the result also comes from a too-close proximity with the very similar A Monster Calls—which at least lays its terminal illness cards on the table from the get-go, rather than treat it as some kind of mind-shaking plot twist. I still did not dislike the result, but that’s not quite the same thing as being ready to recommend it. I suppose that it will appeal to people looking for those kinds of liminal stories between reality and fantasy, with a strong melodramatic conclusion.

  • Alex & Emma (2003)

    Alex & Emma (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2020) I am an incredibly forgiving audience for movies discussing the craft of fiction writing, and it boggles my mind that Alex & Emma slipped under my radar for a good… ugh… seventeen years. At least it does offer a way to go back in time and see decent performances from the younger Kate Hudson and Luke Wilson. He is a writer with a severe writer’s block and gambling problem; she is a stenotypist hired to make him write a complete novel in thirty days. If he doesn’t write, he doesn’t get paid and he doesn’t pay back his gambling debt and he probably dies at some point. The stakes are thus established, and so is the basic ludicrousness of the premise: I know a lot of writers, and even those rare ones who use Dictaphones and voice recognition would rather stop writing (and maybe even die) than trust someone else to deliver a finished manuscript. Still, let’s give that one a bit of disbelief: There’s nothing less interesting than a writer typing away (or, most often, staring blankly into space as they plot and plan and try to find the right words), so having a writing partner is essential to having a movie… and a romantic plot. For he is writing a romance, and soon the parallels between their situation and the story being recreated on-screen predictably emerge. She pokes and prods and questions his choices; he changes his mind and so do the imaginary excerpts of the story—Since they play their avatars, Hudson ends up playing three or four different roles as he keeps changing the identity of her character. It’s an amiable, highly dramatized look at the life of novel writers: director Rob Reiner keeps things light and amusing until a predictably dramatic third act, and the film is easy enough to watch, with a few chuckles along the way. It’s not demanding watching, and that often doesn’t quite play smoothly enough: it’s not clear if he’s a talented writer, and it’s not clear if what he’s writing is meant to be serious or a simple potboiler. (It’s probably genre fiction, but that leads to further questions about his career that the film does a bad job explaining: it would make far better sense if he had half a dozen novels already published rather than just one.) Comparisons with Paris When It Sizzles are not at all complimentary—but then again, Hudson and Wilson are not Holden and Hepburn. Still, I liked Alex & Emma almost as much as I expected to: it’s a bit of fluff, but a bit of fluff in a domain that I like hearing about.

  • Getting to Know You (2020)

    Getting to Know You (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) There is filmmaking life in Ontario outside Toronto, and after seeing Sudbury become a minor film shooting metropolis in the field of Canadian Science Fiction, here we have Sault Ste. Marie acting as backdrop to intimate romantic comedy Getting to Know You. It starts in a quasi-theatrical fashion, as two travellers meet in an almost-empty hotel. He’s a prodigal son coming back to town for a high-school reunion, hoping to declare his long-lasting love for his hometown sweetheart; she’s a London-based photographer coming back to clean up her estranged dead brother’s house. After a first act almost entirely set in a hotel, the film opens up, and so do the characters: his plans to romance his sweetheart hilariously derail, she’s asked to play his wife and complications simply pile up the longer the two protagonists stay in a small town where everybody knows each other. It’s not headed toward an easy ending: Getting to Know You plays things on a low, almost melancholic key. There are quite a few moments of genuine comedy along the way, but the end of the film is more contemplative than triumphant, which is disappointing but not inappropriate. Natasha Little and Rupert Penry-Jones headline the film, which means that they are on-screen for nearly all of it. Writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin doesn’t too badly—although the impression left by the first act of the film is a bit misleading and disjoints the film’s spatial unity (at least the story ends when they leave town). Still, it’s an amiable-enough film, significantly more interesting than the Hallmark romantic movies often shot elsewhere in non-Toronto Ontario.

  • Dark Waters (2019)

    Dark Waters (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Much in the same vein as the Oscar-winning Spotlight (which shares headliner Mark Ruffalo as he settles comfortably in older, heavier, gruffer, more cerebral roles), Dark Waters takes on a big target and humanizes the fight against it. This time, the story begins once a farmer brings evidence of severe animal poisoning to a lawyer used to argue on behalf of Dupont. But, intrigued by the story, he starts poking and prodding at the evidence, eventually unearthing, after a decade of work, an incredible corporate coverup of toxic material dumping. It’s easy to think of similar films (Erin Brockovich also comes to mind), but that doesn’t make them any less relevant every time: we need to vulgarize those stories to give an example of what can happen when the system works. It may work slowly and grind those involved in it (Dark Waters is merciless in describing the toll that such a vast undertaking can take—Anne Hathaway’s character seems included solely to work that angle), but it can work and effect change. The problem is keeping a light on it. Dark Waters, as befit its title, is not a light and colourful film: shot in muted, cold cinematography, it looks serious and important even before any dialogue is said. But it’s successful at summarizing a complex matter of biochemistry and law in a way that doesn’t insult viewers—it makes the complicated accessible, even if we often feel the invisible strings of dramatization work their magic. Ruffalo (who also co-produced the film) makes for a likable low-key protagonist, with some assistance from noted co-activist Tim Robbins (who gets a fine speech that may reconcile a few viewers with the necessary role of lawyers), Bill Pullman, Victor Garber and Bill Camp as the very down-to-earth farmer who initiated it all. I wasn’t expecting to like Dark Waters so much, but found myself steadily engrossed in it. It does have the heft of an important film, but it doesn’t lose track of its requirement to keep audiences interested.

  • I Am Greta (2020)

    I Am Greta (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Perhaps the most amazing thing about sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg’s rise to prominence as an outspoken environmentalist hasn’t been as much her full-throated interventions in the popular discourse, but seeing her opponents make fools of themselves by attacking her. With feature-length documentary I Am Greta, we get to spend a bit of time with her and her parents at the peak (so far) or her popularity, travelling from student protests in Oslo to New York City in a sailboat before addressing the United Nations. She gets ample time to address the camera in less structured settings, and we get to see some of the work that goes on in between those speeches. (Including, amusingly enough, her parents trying to hold her back a bit to make sure that she’s eaten enough and takes care of herself.) Even for casual followers of Thunberg, I Am Greta doesn’t break new ground or hold any striking revelations—she is her public persona, and the film is clearly not going to be anything less than fully sympathetic to her. Still, while I suspect that we are far from having heard the last from her, it’s a document of a particularly charged era in her life. Time will confirm how right she was and how misguided her opponents will continue to be.

  • Hullabaloo (1940)

    Hullabaloo (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) I’ll admit it: I got suckered into watching Hullabaloo through a deceptive logline. It turns out that while “A radio star creates a national panic when he announces a Martian invasion” is part of the film’s plot, it’s nowhere near all of it. The film was also billed as a drama (probably thinking about the obvious inspiration of Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds broadcast), whereas it’s much closer to a musical comedy than anything else. Much of the show actually revolves around an eccentric radio personality (played with appropriate panache by Frank Morgan) desperately trying to stay relevant in a changing marketplace. He’s skilled at celebrity impressions (which are really the real people, dubbed over his voice), leading to an alien-invasion broadcast that’s a bit too successful for his own good—but there’s another half of the film to go at that point. The focus then shifts to his daughters from three different marriages, and we understand that he’s looking out for three alimony payments as his motivation… and that drives the rest of the film. It all ends suitably well, especially when his older daughter’s new beau takes up some of the most level-headed decisions. As usual, the fun of films like Hullabaloo is more in the historical details, small jokes and bit performances—I was really happy to see one of my favourite bit players for the era, Virginia O’Brien, have two small numbers singing her usual deadpan version of songs that had just been sung seriously by conventional performers. While I was deceived by Hullabaloo’s TV Guide description, I’m really happy with what I ended up watching in the end.

  • Jing Cheng 81 hao 2 [The House that Never Dies II] (2017)

    Jing Cheng 81 hao 2 [The House that Never Dies II] (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Sometimes, even a hackneyed story can be interesting when it’s executed differently, and that’s how Chinese film The House that Never Dies II can feel intriguing even as it crawls through the usual haunted house horror clichés. By its quality of being set in Beijing and playing with tropes from a Chinese perspective, it distinguishes itself from many other haunted house movies from the Hollywood factory. Still, this distinction merely raises the film to a watchable quality—and much of the interest revolves around individual scenes rather than the overall result: Far too long, even at scarcely more than 90 minutes, The House that Never Dies II loses itself by over-explaining historical information that should have been dealt with in the first film, and doesn’t manage to make much use out of the dual-timeline structure. It does better in terms of individual horror set-pieces, even if those are also somewhat similar to the American horror corpus. Still, it’s an interesting look at how other cultures can adapt (and, in many cases, imitate) classic Hollywood tropes.

  • Give a Girl a Break (1953)

    Give a Girl a Break (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) There were a lot of Broadway musicals in the 1950s, and Give a Girl a Break was certainly one of them. It’s neither better nor worse than the norm—simply very much a typical musical of its period, with decent songs, fine dancing, a buoyant atmosphere and a perfunctory romance to anchor everything. As far as star power, you have Debbie Reynolds playing one of the three hopefuls competing for a top spot on an upcoming Broadway show after the lead actress walks out. She is being championed by a show gofer played by none other than Bob Fosse, but there are two other actresses and two other champions to contend with, and much of Give a Girl a Break consists in dancing and singing while they’re waiting for the final decision of which one of the three actresses will be picked for the role. Much of the film’s first half is formulaic, playing off Broadway backstage musical tropes without too much originality. Only “Nothing is impossible” breaks up the monotony a little bit. Things get more stylized and more interesting in the second half, the standout sequence being a balloon dance played backward. It’s a bit of a commentary on the film that the “contest” between the three would-be stars is a bit of a dud: the resolution is messy and everyone gets something nice for their trouble. But this isn’t about a character winning over the others: it’s about song and dance and the classic warm fuzzy feeling of a Broadway musical where nothing too serious is likely to happen. I happen to like the foundational elements of Broadway musicals and so quite liked Give a Girl a Break despite not finding all that much distinctive about the film.

  • Lady Be Good (1941)

    Lady Be Good (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Mashing together the comedy of remarriage with the Broadway retrospective, Lady Be Good may feel familiar, but it does have its share of good moments. From the framing device (as a woman recounts events to the divorce judge) on to Eleanor Powell’s anthology-worthy final dance number (as spectacular to film as it was to see, as shown in That’s Entertainment III), it’s a typical musical of the period, blending gentle romance with musical numbers often blatantly presented as part of a show. While Powell is billed as the lead, her presence here is closer to a supporting role, as much of the screentime goes to a couple of writers/composers with a complicated relationship, slipping in and out of marriage with an ease only seen in show business movies. Still, don’t feel too bad for Powell, as her two numbers are by far the standout of Lady Be Good: In the first, she tap-dances alongside a trained dog taking part in the routine—by the time it ends with the dog jumping on her and them falling onto a bed giggling, we feel much of the same exhilaration at the success of the routine. Her other big number goes to the tune of “Fascinating Rhythm,” and first includes tap-dancing alongside a deep succession of pianos, followed by a more freewheeling number that ends with her being flipped over head over heels eight times before making as many spins on herself and her grinning at the camera—it’s absolutely flawless. Other good numbers include a great dance routine by the Berry Brothers, and a cute short deadpan number from Virginia O’Brien taking on “Your Words and My Music” as only she could. (MGM was still figuring out what to do with her in 1940-41—her best numbers would come later.) The story itself is fine, the leads (Robert Young and Ann Sothern) are adequate despite being blander than they should, and Red Skelton pops up in a supporting role. There’s also a cute montage in which the song climbs the charts and spins off many versions, giving us a glimpse into the nature of pop music at the beginning of the 1940s.