Reviews

  • A Girl in Every Port (1952)

    A Girl in Every Port (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) My answer to “Which Marx Brother do you find the funniest?” is immediate, constant and definitive: Groucho, always Groucho. His typical verbal wit is my kind of humour, and he was, to me, always the highlight of any of the Brothers’ movies. A Girl in Every Port is something slightly different, as we have Groucho without his brothers playing a sailor who gets embroiled in racehorse schemes while his ship is stationed in town. At no less than sixty-two at the film of the film’s release, Groucho is easily a few decades older than his character, but those (along with the painted-on moustache) are the conventions we have to play with if the film is to make any sense. The script is willing to complicate and overcomplicate its own fraudulent schemes until even the characters comment on easier ways of doing things. (But the gag of a horse being helped on a warship is worth it.) The result isn’t all that funny, but it’s amusing enough, and a welcome opportunity to have Groucho go for one of his last starring movie roles. Groucho himself may not hit any peaks of verbal humour, but he breaks the fourth wall quite a bit, and he gets his laughs. Don DeFore anchors the film as the henpecked victim of the scams, while Marie Wilson provides the romantic interest. Notably an early Irwin Allen production, A Girl in Every Port is probably best suited for Groucho fans and those who have the patience for an average comedy. But it’s fun all right, and who can resist Groucho commenting to the audience on the unlikeliness of his own movie’s plot?

  • Take Her, She’s Mine (1963)

    Take Her, She’s Mine (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) By the early 1960s, James Stewart was long past his young premier roles of the 1930s, his everyday men of the 1940s or his attempt to redefine himself in a darker, more rugged persona in the 1950s—he was now fit to portray a stereotypically likable dad dealing with sending his daughter to college. Adapted from a Broadway comedy that was, amazingly enough, based on the experiences of eventually famous writer-director Norah Ephron as a younger girl, Take Her, She’s Mine has Stewart as the kind of dad that everyone would like to have—bumbling and overprotective, but also intensely likable and able to support his daughter (played by iconic teenybopper Sandra Dee) whenever she needs help. The framing device has Stewart’s character explaining an increasingly ludicrous series of embarrassing newspaper articles before we go back in time and see how each one of them came to be. It all plays against a California-based couple sending their daughter to an east-coast college where she is swept up in the burgeoning social protest movements. As a look in the turmoil that was developing within 1960s America, Take Her, She’s Mine is a fun romp—at least in its first two thirds, because the film loses quite a bit of comic steam in the later third as the action moves to Paris and stops being as relatable. Still, Stewart can’t be topped as the well-intentioned, stammering dad who ends up participating in a sit-in against obscenity laws on behalf of his daughter, or tries to muddle through a deficient knowledge of French while tracking down his daughter in quasi-bohemian Paris. (Some of the French is quite good, some of it almost unintelligible.) It’s all good fun, and even the exhausted third act (reportedly a product of studio interference) can’t quite erase the superb period piece humour of the rest of the film as handled by director Henry Koster. Then, of course, you’ve got Stewart in a minor but highly enjoyable role—and sometimes, that’s really all you need.

  • Written on the Wind (1956)

    Written on the Wind (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) I have, in past reviews, used “melodrama” as a bit of an epithet, complaining about overwrought drama as if it was a bad thing by definition. But Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind has shown me the error of my ways, as its overblown, overwrought, overdriven plotting is a spectacular demonstration of the joys of melodrama when it simply stops caring about being plausible. From the first few minutes (even discounting the very dramatic framing device that gets us to murder in less than sixty seconds), it’s obvious that this isn’t a script that plays in subtleties, as characters get married on a whim and are soon enjoying line-by-line verbal jousting. Robert Stack and Lauren Bacall play bickering couples like few others, and both amazingly tear into their dialogue without cracking up at the absurdity of it all. Things get much better (or worse) once a scheming sister (Dorothy Malone, shattering her mousy persona with a brassy blonde hairdo) and a longtime friend (Rock Hudson, in a straight—ahem: sedate—performance that became rich in subtext when his homosexuality was revealed decades later) enter the picture and also start making trouble. The love square is inherently unstable, and it becomes even wilder once infertility, money, alcoholism, lust and plain old death enter the picture. The fifth character here is heard rather than seen—the orchestral score is exceptionally aggressive here, not underscoring the action as much as overscoring it—there’s a scene with a boy riding a mechanical horse outside a restaurant that has to be heard to be believed. It’s all very broad and outrageously in-your-face, so much so that the film flips into satirical territory by pure brute force. The kicker is that there really isn’t much of a difference between Written on the Wind and later soap operas, even glorified ones such as Dallas and Dynasty—Sirk was clearly ahead of his time here, or simply repurposing pulp fiction to the big screen with a ferociousness that would set a precedent. No matter why or how, Written on the Wind remains a striking movie today, going for madcap blatant melodrama and leaving a much stronger impression than many so-called serious dramas of the time.

  • Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969)

    Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) I don’t, as a rule, like westerns very much—the combination of overly familiar elements with an overall might-makes-right attitude has never sat very well with me, and you can make a fair argument that much of it boils down to basic differences between Americans and Canadians. It takes a lot to get me sympathetic to a Western, but Support Your Local Sheriff! manage to do so through a mildly comic treatment of the good old stranger-comes-to-town idea. Here, we have James Garner playing a confident gunsmith who takes up the sheriff’s job in a gold-rush town while he’s on his way to Australia—taming a rowdy town with little support from the town’s leaders. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Support Your Local Sheriff! is how it manages to be amusing without going to comedic extremes—this is tame material compared to Blazing Saddles, for instance, but the payoff is the ability to make compelling comic characters without turning them into absurdist caricatures. The film succeeds quickly at making us care for the characters, and once you have that, you can keep the same gently comic tone going until the end, as the film doesn’t necessarily rely on gags to keep going. Garner cuts quite a figure as the hero in a role tailored for him (he produced the film) — most modern comedies would have been tempted to make him incompetent, but here the laughs are better in following how he outsmarts the town. Meanwhile, Joan Hackett makes for a lovely romantic foil, with director Burt Kennedy being able to create a convincing small-town western atmosphere out of a meagre budget. I quite liked the result—it treats western with a lack of irreverence but not quite contempt, and it leaves viewers with smiles on their faces.

  • La residencia [The House that Screamed] (1969)

    La residencia [The House that Screamed] (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2020) It does happen that films that could have been considered mildly innovative for their time end up completely left behind by later variations on the same theme. Which is the sad case with La residencia, a film that could have been distinctive in 1969, but now feels overfamiliar—or perhaps it’s just me and the many boarding school horror movies I’ve seen over the past few months. Suffice to say that La residencia is, at first glance, a very familiar film—one about students in an all-girl school where creepy and terrifying things are afoot, where there’s rampant abuse and mysteriously disappearing students. Fortunately, the ending goes beyond that, into a semi-inverted Psycho scenario that puts a horror stamp on the result. It’s somewhat surprising for a 1969 film—and the treatment decidedly owes more to the slow-burn aesthetics of The Haunting rather than the wilder giallo movies of the following decade—but we have seen other movies do much more with the same premise, and unfortunately, this does reflect on La residencia despite its overall success.

  • The Way I See It (2020)

    The Way I See It (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) Peter de Souza spent years of his life being as inconspicuous as possible—as an official photographer for the White House during the Reagan administration, then the Obama one, his job depended on capturing key moments of the presidency without being noticed, without people even realizing that he was in the room. As such, it gave him a unique look at the way a president behaves in all spheres of his life—personal and political. He probably could have lived the rest of his life in relative obscurity, but as The Way I See It explains, this unique knowledge of presidential behaviour also led him to pass judgment on Obama’s successor, especially as the excesses of the administration trampled upon the exemplary behaviour that de Souza witnessed. Using Instagram and his formidable archives, de Souza became a leading mocker of the commander-in-chief, pointing out the contrasts between the president he shadowed for eight years and his less-than-admirable successor. The Way I See It would not have existed without this controversy—much of the film is framed by a presentation in which de Souza acknowledges these unprecedented times and the unusually combative position in which he placed himself. But this, as he points out, is not a partisan thing—having served both Democratic and Republican administrations, he poses the difference in terms of decency—Reagan and Obama were decent people (a thesis abundantly illustrated with dozens of intimate anecdotes), whereas the current president is not. Much of The Way I See It illustrates its point by speedrunning through much of the Obama administration, pointing out a consistency of behaviour at odds with his successor, and reminding us of what a truly presidential response can be—the Sandy Hooks segment is particularly powerful, showing a president capable of authentic compassion and empathy. The documentary doesn’t need to compare it with the behaviour of Obama’s successor—we all know he’s incapable of such things. If I do have one issue about The Way I See It, it’s that Peter de Souza’s job is fascinating enough that it didn’t need the constant reminders about the current administration: it will date the film faster than it should, although I hope that we’ll soon be able to look upon this documentary as a distasteful reminder of a particularly dark period in American politics.

  • Batman vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2019)

    Batman vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2020) It’s tempting to say something about the unlikeliness of the crossover in Batman vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but as the film’s ending credits make clear, there are already dozens of comic books dealing with that exact same premise, or variations thereof. And as it turns out, there’s a peanut-butter-and-jam quality to the stoicism of the caped crusader and the irreverent teenage humour of the four reptiles. The plot itself is fairly obvious, but the character interactions can be a lot of fun, perhaps most notably with Robin finding some kinship with characters that are his own age. As usual, the rich cast of characters of the Batman-verse provides much entertainment. Visually, the film does find an acceptable middle ground between the aesthetics of both series. What doesn’t work so well is the sometimes-excessive amount of violence (I guess I’m just still used to PG-13 Batman), especially how it clashes with the more lighthearted tone of the rest of the film. Still, Batman vs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is watchable enough, and an unlikely success considering its two inspirations.

  • Siempre, Luis (2020)

    Siempre, Luis (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) With the massive success of the Broadway musical Hamilton, it’s inevitable that it would lead to a number of movies, books and other works that may not necessarily be derivative, but would not exist without Hamilton’s popularity and fan base. So it is that the documentary Siempre, Luis is both about the efforts to bring Hamilton to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, but also the life of Luis Miranda, the father of Hamilton’s creator Lin-Manuel Miranda. It’s a compelling story, as we follow the ever-active Luis making his way to New York City, where he studies and gets involved in the political process as an activist and then an organizer. Woven throughout the documentary is a strong appreciation for Puerto Rico, along with a gentle push for statehood by summarizing the territory’s unusual situation. (The film’s politics are not subtle.) Luis is a strong character, although putting him next to the incredibly charismatic Lin-Manuel is one of those situations where the documentarian can’t really win. The other issue is that while the film uses the Hamilton musical’s tortuous road to Puerto Rico as a framing device, the show’s ultimate performance is often given short thrift. Still, it’s interesting enough, and the glimpses at Lin-Manuel’s origins make for compelling viewing for fans of his musicals. (“In the Heights” is given a few minutes to properly contextualize the breakthrough that it was.) The way Miranda-père helped Miranda-fils in his early days is certainly not to be discounted.

  • 1776 (1972)

    1776 (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) As a buff of both American politics and movie musicals, it was inevitable that I’d eventually make my way to 1776. I only realized a few minutes in the film the clear link between 2010s′ Hamilton and this 1970s′ 1776: Both, after all, adopt the musical as a way to talk about the founding days of the United States in decidedly unheroic fashion, with personal interests overriding national concerns, and the messiness of the process that led to documents and ideas that people now perceive as set in stone. This version of history focuses on the backroom machinations in Philadelphia as the founding fathers hashed out the details of their new country in a series of trades and compromises. The focus here is on John Adams, as a self-deprecating protagonist around which the conversations take place. It’s all wonderfully personal, quirky and unheroic, although Howard Da Silva deservedly gets the lion’s share of bon mots as Benjamin Franklin. It’s a musical comedy, but the songs are not particularly impressive—but that’s fine, given that the dialogue in between the songs is by far the most interesting part of the film. Wikipedia notes that the film is substantially accurate all the way to some of the most striking lines of dialogue—often taken from contemporary correspondence or later recollections from the people involved. The overall film is not perfect, but it’s surprisingly good: Even at more than two hours and a half, 1776 zips by and makes for great listening. It makes for a splendid double bill (as the first feature) to Hamilton, taking you (to borrow a phrase) in the room where it happened.

  • Astronaut (2019)

    Astronaut (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) Sometimes, a film stares you in the face long enough in the TV listing that it wears you down. So it is with Astronaut, a film whose title always seemed a bit too grandiose compared to its very down-to-earth story of an older man (freshly placed in a retirement home) aiming to win a contest to go to space. Featuring Richard Dreyfuss and acknowledging his age, Astronaut turns out to be a drama with an eventual underpinning of a techno-thriller, as our soil expert comes to suspect a flaw in the runway essential to a space launch. Still, Astronaut fits within the recent trend of retirement-age hero films, as an entire crop of 1980s actors ages into senior roles. There’s a bit of wish fulfillment to it (“Old people can be useful too!”), but also a decent drama considering how the story expands to touch upon the characters involved in it—you wouldn’t necessarily expect the PR person for the space company to become a two-dimensional character, but she does. It ends on a suitably sweet note, everyone getting what they want but not necessarily in the way that they want. As for the reasons why Astronaut shows up so often on a specific Canadian Cable TV channel? It’s a Canadian production, partially financed by the channel itself.

  • Random Acts of Violence (2019)

    Random Acts of Violence (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) I was really curious to see what Jay Baruchel had in mind as a writer-director for Random Acts of Violence. Alas, that turns out to be a slasher horror movie that gets bogged down into a muddled hypocritical critique of horror as incitement to real-life murders. To be fair, there are quite a few nice things here—The stylistic outlandishness of the result is noticeable (even the credit sequence seems to be from Gaspard Noé’s playbook) and the film does a lot with a rather small budget. Jordana Brewster brings a lot to every movie she’s in, and Baruchel himself has a supporting role. Alas, I don’t have as many nice things to say about the thematic underpinning of the premise, as a creator of horror-themed comic book (making the serial killer a hero, sigh) goes on a road trip to refuel his inspiration, and then ends up inspiring a real-life psycho to murder as many times as the red syrup budget will stand it. Cloaking itself in pseudo-profound artistic pretensions, Random Acts of Violence does remain the kind of horror film that prides itself on the goriness of its kills, which disqualifies it from any serious attempt at critiquing the genre—not that it particularly cares to, as it seems nihilistically indifferent to the very issues it raises. There may be a mouthpiece character arguing for the victim’s perspective, but the film itself is fairly clear about what it wants to do all the way to the final stab. There isn’t much comedy to either soften the blow or actually make itself subversive, leading to many missed opportunities. And that extends to much of the film itself—Random Acts of Violence does seem dimly aware of what it could be talking about, but takes the easy way out by featuring murders rather than what it could be saying about the murders. I see more horror movies in an average year than the average person will see in a lifetime, but I’m halfway to thinking that there may be a corrosive effect to making a horror movie if you get seduced by the easy allure of catering to the horror fans.

  • Captain Horatio Hornblower R. N. (1951)

    Captain Horatio Hornblower R. N. (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) It doesn’t necessarily fit to call Captain Horatio Hornblower a swashbuckler—while there are plenty of wonderful nautical adventures here, it’s a fairly rare example of a captain in the employ of the crown, battling pirates, Spaniards and the accursed French along the way. (It’s the “Royal Navy” in the title.) But despite the official sanctions, expect plenty of ship battles shot in great Technicolor. Gregory Peck makes for a compelling Hornblower, and the addition of Virginia Mayo as a romantic interest only adds to the interest of the casting. The minutia of life on the sea is not described too badly, whereas the complex political machinations of the Napoleonic wars are explained in easily understandable dialogue. (Particularly amusing is the moment where Hornblower is told that the Spaniards are now allied with the English, so it’s a good thing that they never had to fight one of those massive Spanish ships. Cue the “well, actually…”) Peck and the battle footage are, in themselves, worth the viewing—but the amount of adventure and rollicking drama of the film are enough to keep anyone invested in the result.

  • Rabid (2019)

    Rabid (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) If anyone’s going to remake 1970s Cronenberg, I’m glad it’s the Soska Sisters. Returning to the icky kind of horror à la American Mary, the Soskas cleverly expand upon Cronenberg’s original Rabid with far better technical assets at their disposal (the makeup effects to depict the result of a motorcycle accident are… terrifying) and also a bit more realism in their presentation. Matters of transhumanism (and the vocabulary of a public health crisis that rings disturbingly eerie in pandemic-dominated 2020) make this feel like a 2010s film rather than a 1970s remake. Not everything is perfect, though: the film is definitely too long (I accidentally started watching it twenty minutes into the film, and when I went back to see what I had missed, I didn’t feel as if I had missed anything), and the balance between the personal story of the protagonist and the wider outbreak of “rabies” feels disconnected to the point of being useless. I’m also not crazy about transhumanism being held up (here and in other places) as the new boogeyman of medical horror—but that’s just me. Still, this new version of Rabid does a few things better than the original. The ending is better than the original; the heroine is far better developed; the story has been justifiably transplanted to the United States, with a few potshots at the state of their health care system. The Soskas wisely keep the full craziness of the film for the final sequence (it does get wilder than expectations), and it’s good to see them back in the full-bore horror mode after a few underwhelming action movies. Still, I think they could do better—perhaps not in execution as much as in premise: competently reheating a low-budget 1977 feature does have its merits, but isn’t it time to see them do more original material?

  • A Private War (2018)

    A Private War (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need war correspondents. In the meantime… we do—they’re the ones to go toward danger and tell us what’s really happening. A Private War does tell us quite a bit about the profession in portraying the life and death of Marie Colvin, a veteran foreign correspondent who found herself in many of the world’s hottest spots between 2001 and 2012. Rosamund Pike turns in an impressive performance as Colvin, frizzy hair, low voice and eyepatch adding much to a complex character study. The private war of the title refers to Colvin’s own struggles with what she was experiencing—trying to self-medicate through alcohol, eventually spending some time institutionalized in an attempt to overcome PTSD. And yet always returning to the hot spots despite the losses along the way. The film clearly frames itself as an elegy, and it does build to a seemingly inevitable death while covering the Syrian civil war. As an exploration of the work of a war correspondent, it’s gripping—thanks to good special effects, the film can afford to have numerous scenes taking us through unimaginable death and destruction. Still, much of the film revolves back around Pike’s performance: she’s utterly unrecognizable from many of her softer, gentler performances here and I suspect that the film will live on as one of her finest. It’s an impressive tribute to an impressive journalist, and it’s a shame that A Private War didn’t find a commercial audience upon initial release.

  • Hell, or Tidewater (2020)

    Hell, or Tidewater (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2020) There’s a blend of terrible and wonderful in Hell, or Tidewater that makes me want to tell anyone to watch the film even though it’s almost unwatchable. Produced with a high-school play production values yet tackling a heady blend of geopolitical intrigue and Canadian issues such as pipelines, Arctic Circle exploitation, gigantic submarines and First Nations rights, it’s certainly a film that aims for much more than it can deliver. I cannot adequately describe the amateurishness of the production: It’s a repulsive blend of bargain-basement CGI, threadbare sets, terrible actors, incompetent direction, amazingly unconvincing staging and awful dialogue. This is a film where the footage shows a small river and has characters tell us about the amazing underground submarine base underneath. It’s a film with cute but terrible actresses, with dialogue that spells out acronyms (and there are many acronyms), with set decoration that have no relationship with anything we can imagine as appropriate for the script. The shots don’t match; the submarine CGI is worse than most kids’ shows—I could go on, but you get the point: you have probably never seen a film as terribly made as this one. Even the premise of using submarines to transport energy is so dumb that it defies explanation. And I’m barely scratching at the insanity of the other building blocks of the plot. And yet, and yet… I found myself occasionally charmed by the film’s intentions and its willingness to include techno-thriller action along big social issues. It clearly wears its First Nations sensibilities on its sleeves, and it goes for broke in attempting a story that would be far better served by a novel than a movie made on anything less than a hundred-million-dollar budget. It’s so fiercely Canadian that it openly frowns at Americans and has us winning one over grotesquely caricatural Russians. I strongly suspect that my begrudging but real affection for the result does owe something to a bad habit of mine: the tendency to listen to movies while I’m doing something else (usually, ahem, writing movie reviews) rather than focus intently on the screen. I strongly suspect that I would have tapped out had I been stuck doing nothing but watching the screen. Listening to the film, however, takes most of the film’s heave-inducing visuals out of the equation, leaving only the premise, plot, dialogue, technical details and flat line reading as the irritants. I don’t necessarily recommend this way of digesting a film to anyone else (it takes practice to listen to a movie and know when to look up at the screen), but in rare cases it may actually improve the experience. Still, I don’t want to beat up on an ambitious Canadian production too much—it bothers me quite a bit that I cannot find any single other review of Hell, or Tidewater on the web at this moment, and so this one may pop up as any kind of defining assessment.