Reviews

  • Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

    Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, August 2020) Considering how Little Shop of Horrors is a dark musical comedy featuring quite a bit of affection for a human-eating plant called Audrey, there are many, many ways the film could have gone wrong. Its first achievement is that it didn’t – the second is how good it ends up being. Deftly directed by Frank Oz, the film can at least depend on good performers – some veterans, some lesser-known, but all able to bring their best to their characters. This starts with Rick Moranis as the Nebbish at put-upon Seymour, continues with Ellen Greene’s squeaky-voiced performance as the adorable love interest, goes to a bad-boy supporting role for dark-haired 50s style Steve Martin, and finally to near-cameos by Bill Murray, John Candy and James Belushi. Then add in the bouncy do-wop musical numbers, the sweet romance, the crazy comedy of Martin’s subplot, the constant interruptions by the bloodthirsty talking plant and it all combines for a film that’s ridiculously hard to resist, even knowing it features a human-killing plant. The ending finds a way to culminate the craziness while still delivering a satisfying ending, but it was a close thing: Little Shop of Horror is famous for scrapping a very expensive large-scale original ending (following the off-Broadway play) in which Audrey kills the protagonists and goes on to conquer the world. It’s entertaining in a you-lost-the-game bad-ending kind of way, but it’s not the one most appropriate to the film, and hurrah to whatever studio interference that led to a revised climax. Get the physical version of the film that has both, and you’ll decide by yourself.

  • Bombshell (2019)

    Bombshell (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) It only took two years (and I’m not sure we can imply causation), but the first major #MeToo movie has arrived and by its nature it’s problematic. By “major,” I obviously mean “big budget, big stars, big topic” – in this case, Bombshell is about no less than sexism and sexual harassment within Fox News, as played by Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie, John Lithgow and Kate McKinnon among others. Written by Charles Randolph and directed by Jay Roach, the film takes on the style of a dark, fast-paced comedy very much like their previous The Big Short, albeit less successful: there’s a hard limit to how much comedy you can wring out of volatile issues like sexual harassment. What’s more, anything about Fox News in today’s hyper-charged political temperature is going to get it wrong, either by being timid about it or feeling overblown. Bombshell, at a surface level, works rather well: the technical execution is more than adequate, the pacing is steady, the superficial look at how Fox News sells its brand of noxious fearmongering through blandly attractive blonde white women is on-target, and one can’t say enough good things about the central Theron-Kidman-Robbie trio. Hilariously enough for a film about packaging politics through near-identical broadcast blondes, Bombshell won an Academy Award for Makeup and Hairstyling. The film doesn’t go soft on the repulsive Roger Ailes and his actions, and at first seems to be aligning itself with the blowing winds of #MeToo retribution. Start digging just a bit deeper into the film, however, and things get murkier, confusing and irreconcilable. It’s hard to avoid thinking that, for all of their proven skills in making The Big Short so great, the Randolph/Roach duo may not be ideally suited to helm a film about women’s issues: Assuming (as one should) parity in filmmaking skills available to Hollywood producers, a female-driven creative team would have benefited from better optics, and delivered a more authentic result. (I’m not that certain that it would have been different or better, but I do believe in “what looks good” and male creative heads on a women’s issue film is not something that looks good – and retribution for #MeToo should at least begin with giving voices. We’ll talk again in a decade or so about the creative equality of cross-gender takes once we’re closer to true equality.) There are some fine arguments to be made as well about how Bombshell doesn’t quite go to the bottom of the issue of what Fox News sells – fear through sex appeal, through female newscasters who are harmed by the falsehoods they’re selling. But perhaps most vexingly ironic of all is the growing realization that, of all the news networks where this is taking place, Fox was first forced to confront and pay for its structural sexism. You can read op-eds and hot takes and blog posts and academic commentary on Bombshell all day long and end up even more mixed on the film than you could have thought possible. So, can Bombshell be both a fun watch and a film without a strong point to make? Maybe. For once, I won’t even try to wrap it all up with a definite conclusion.

  • The Egg and I (1947)

    The Egg and I (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) The dream of moving from the city to the bucolic countryside “to raise chicken or something” has long been a horrifying illusion, and there are decades of Hollywood movies to make the point. One of the funniest remains The Egg and I, featuring Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert as two city mice grappling with the not-so-much-fun reality of becoming chicken-and-egg farmers on a dilapidated property. It is, from a certain perspective, a horror movie – the newlywed bride (Colbert) barely has a say as she’s whisked off to rural depths, forced to slave away to support her husband’s crazy scheme, rebuffed in her basic desires and suffers the further indignity of thinking that her husband is being seduced by a local poultry queen. But it’s also very, very funny (plus, she gets what she wants in the end) – Colbert’s near-hysterical reactions are the perfect complement to MacMurray’s infuriatingly goofy charm and the film is further bolstered by strong performances from Marjorie Main and Percy Kilbride as “Ma and Pa Kettle” (a spinoff series would lead to nine more films for their characters). The episodic comedy-of-error can be repetitive at times (and there’s definitely a limit to the amount of humour you can wring out of poor Colbert being ignored and humiliated) but The Egg and I eventually succeeds by going back to the basics. After all, it is a “city mouse gets humbled by the country” kind of thing – the dated humour may be more visible now, but the underpinning of the subgenre always leads to an improvement by the end.

  • The Howling (1981)

    The Howling (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Youtube Streaming, August 2020) There is a lot of interesting stuff in werewolf dark comedy horror film The Howling – but I’m not too sure it all adds up to a better-than-interesting movie. There is a lot to like, for instance, in the blend of influences that end up in the script as a TV reporter, traumatized by an experience with a serial killer, is sent to a rehabilitation “colony” where she encounters werewolves. It’s not your average plot premise, and the blend of TV journalism with somewhat dubious new age therapy both feels very specific to the early 1980s and still provocative today. Add to that a typically clever directing job by Joe Dante, working from a script rewrite by John Sayles to add dark humour to the proceedings, and The Howling is a lot more than your average horror film. Then, perhaps most of all, there are the practical special effects all culminating into a lengthy werewolf transformation scene that’s both impressive (for its time) and a bit of a showing-off. The opening sequence is gripping, the closing scene is a nice attempt at collapsing the masquerade, and in-between we’ve got unpredictable moments all over the place. All of this should make The Howling much better than it is – but in the end it still feels like a disappointment. Much of this has to do with a scattershot approach that’s not as disciplined as it should be. The links between the serial killer that dominates the film’s first few minutes and the werewolf film that it becomes are preposterous. The pacing of the film is all over the place, and arguably shoots itself in the foot by having a mid-film transformation sequence far more impressive than the climax. Dramatic tension varies widely with great moments stranded in the middle of long stretches of nothing. While The Howling has a frank post-New Hollywood approach to the links between werewolves and animalistic erotic desire, it ultimately doesn’t do much with that (compare/contrast with The Hunger if you will). The actors do well without doing exceptionally well (maybe they were cowed by the special effects) and the direction is flashy without being sustained. In other words, The Howling does not amount to more than the sum of its parts, and, in fact, suffers when some parts subtract from the total. I still think it’s worth a look for fans of 1980s horror as one of the most daring takes on familiar material, but it doesn’t wrap it all up satisfyingly.

  • Premier juillet, le film [Moving] (2004)

    Premier juillet, le film [Moving] (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) It’s good, from time to time, to take a step away from your own culture and realize how some accepted aspects of it are, in fact, completely insane when seen from farther away. Such as the moving frenzy that culminates around July 1st in Québec – for historical reasons, the traditional end date for Québec rents is July 1st, meaning that roughly 150,000 people will move on that day. As a Franco-Ontarian suburban home owner, I was never directly involved in the madness (which mostly afflicts Québec-based urban renters) until fairly late in life when –despite my best efforts! — I ended up moving twice in Québec in mid-to-late June, with the July 1st deadline looming large in both cases. In any case, I’m glad that there’s at least one movie to take this bit of Québec culture and memorialize it, even if the result doesn’t quite make the most of the opportunities at its disposal. An ensemble comedy, Premier juillet follows a chain of three moving groups on July 1st – a young couple moving into an apartment vacated by a small family that’s moving from Montréal to a small village house where the son is moving away to Montréal to be with his sister, who has just been evicted by a landlord fed up with her behaviour and non-payment. It’s not an overly comic comedy, if you’ll pardon the expression: it ends well for everyone, but there are sombre moments and less-than-admirable characters along the way. The interlinked nature of the three specific stories sometimes takes away as much as it gives, in that I didn’t quite get a sense of climax to the stories, nor a really representative depiction of the moving madness of July 1st. Oh, some bits and pieces are likable and universal enough – the time-lapses of rooms being emptied or decorated hit hard for some reason. The very cute Sabine Karsenti plays perhaps the most level-headed character in the film, as she and her boyfriend start navigating the difficult give-and-take of living together. Featuring some Montréal-based actors who feel familiar but not overexposed, director Philippe Gagnon’s first full-length feature is watchable enough… but somehow not quite up to the comic mayhem that it could have been.

  • High Pressure (1932)

    High Pressure (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) It’s amusing that the two kinds of roles in which William Powell did best were either amateur sleuths or fast-talking hucksters. High Pressure is one of the best of the second type: Powell plays a loquacious promoter who has specialized in giving legitimacy to high-risk investment schemes, not quite resorting to fraud but not quite doing things the most orthodox way. (Or what we’d call today a serial start-up entrepreneur.) The latest venture is about synthetic rubber and it seems to work well until the protagonist meets the “inventor” of the product and concludes that he’s made a terrible mistake in trusting a crackpot. But plotting his overseas exit isn’t so simple when romance with his long-suffering girlfriend is involved. High Pressure isn’t that good, but it does sport rather wonderful art deco sets, a very charismatic Powell spitting one convincing pitch after another, and moves forward rather amusingly thanks to director Mervyn LeRoy. The satirical look at the exaggerations required for success in business remains evergreen. (Why bother having a hiring process for a president when you can just hire someone who looks the part?) Since the same theatrical play was adapted four years later as Hot Money, it’s easy to see both films and appreciate just how much Powell brings to the result. Powell fans will love High Pressure, and those who don’t know Powell just may become fans.

    (Second viewing, On Cable TV, February 2022)  William Powell is usually a delight to watch, but his early-1930s films have him going back and forth between the kind of villains he played in the 1920s, and the suave urban charmer he would go on to play for the rest of his career.  In High Pressure, we get him as a borderline cad – a fast-talking hype man for speculative business ventures, this close to a huckster without quite losing our sympathy along the way.  Much of the story has him trying to drum up interest for a synthetic rubber business venture, while navigating the rocky straits of his romantic relationship and learning more about the genius inventor who came up with the product he’s trying to sell.  The business satire is obviously coming from the depths of The Great Depression, but could play just as well with twenty-first century crypto-nonsense.  There’s at least one big laugh in the last third as our protagonist can prove beyond any doubt the false credentials of the inventor.  Otherwise, this is a rather amiable and typically zippy (72 minutes!) early-1930s film – already self-assured in its use of fast-paced dialogue and generous in allowing Powell to take centre-stage.  There’s much better out there, but any Powell fan should have a look at High Pressure.

  • Night on Earth (1991)

    Night on Earth (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) I can’t say that I’ve been able to make myself like Jim Jarmusch’s work, but at least I’ve warmed up enough to not dread his name every time he ends up on my must-see lists. Night on Earth is, as usual for Jarmusch, an interesting concept that offers something new, but doesn’t always work in its execution. The high concept is this: five vignettes about taxi drivers and their passengers, more or less happening at the same time, but in five different cities during one single night. The span of the cities (Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki) is different enough to offer different sights, but also different moods from comedy to tragedy. Is Night on Earth interesting? Sure. Does it have a good cast? Of course, in-between Winona Ryder, Gena Rowlands, Giancarlo Esposito, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Rosie Perez and Roberto Benigni. Is it well directed? Yes, although it doesn’t have any particularly energetic style. But is it any good? Well, that depends – Jarmusch fans don’t need to be told what to think of it, but for everyone else it will depend on how you react to the individual vignettes. Benigni is, of course, a specific taste, and the Helsinki sequence feels like a downer every time it pops up. The Los Angeles and New York segments will feel most familiar, although the Paris one does work quite well. In the end, as with most of Jarmusch’s films, the only way to find out how you’ll feel about his movies is to watch them – at least Night on Earth is distinct enough to be picked from any lineup.

  • The Kennel Murder Case (1933)

    The Kennel Murder Case (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) Come for William Powell as a sleuth; stay for a locked-room mystery so convoluted that it becomes a performance piece in The Kennel Murder Case. This was the fourth time Powell played then-popular literary detective Philo Vance (in the fifth film adaptation of the character). The actor, of course, was suited to portraying an upper-class gentleman investigator, but Vance isn’t quite the same as his later Nick Charles interpretation: Vance is single, serious and not quite as much of an alcoholic. Still, Powell’s charm and unflappability serve him well even when the script can’t quite serve up the quips. It helps that then-journeyman director Michael Curtiz does well in giving energy to the talky thriller through stylish decisions. The 1930s were a strong decade for murder mysteries, and The Kennel Murder Case does rather well in its elevated company: it’s intricate, presented smoothly (especially for a film of the early sound era) and engrossing – and doesn’t last more than 73 minutes! Narratively, it’s not quite perfect: Powell without a sparring partner feels like a missed opportunity, and the very last bit of the ending is slightly disappointing after the high-flying summation of all evidence. But generations of moviegoers have demonstrated an unquenchable thirst for good murder mysteries, and The Kennel Murder Case will satisfy even today.

  • Dark Victory (1939)

    Dark Victory (1939)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) The difference between drama and melodrama is often whether it works or not, and Dark Victory does play with highly combustible material, as it focuses on a hedonistic socialite who discovers she has roughly a year left to live. Trying to rearrange her affairs in order to exit with dignity, she discovers love, respect and acceptance. This could have gone wrong in a dozen embarrassing ways, but the big surprise here is how well it manipulates audiences and carries them willingly to a weeper of a conclusion. Dark Victory ranks high on the list of Bette Davis’s performances, and it’s not hard to see why: a lesser actress could have made the material ridiculous, but here she carries the entire film on her shoulders. It’s not just an acting performance: Davis also (says the film’s production history) pushed hard for such a tearjerker to be made in the studio system, believing that she could do justice to the material. Indeed she could, although later generations of viewers could also spot Humphrey Bogart (as a likable stable master, no less) and Ronald Reagan in small roles. Director Edmund Goulding gives Davis all the freedom she needs to nail the character, and the result speaks for itself. Yes, Dark Victory is manipulating your emotions and yes, you’ll see it coming, but it’s not melodrama if it works – it’s crowd-pleasing art.

  • La casa del fin de los tiempos [The House at the End of Time] (2013)

    La casa del fin de los tiempos [The House at the End of Time] (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2020) Slickly made, ingeniously (if messily) plotted, a bit silly with its fantastic devices, but still interesting enough by itself, The House at the End of Time is also a rare bit of Venezuelan cinema to have broken through to the North American market. Writer-director-producer Alejandro Hidalgo gradually puts together the piece of his narrative as he brings an older woman back to an isolated house, the scene of terrifying crimes thirty years earlier. Wrongfully accused of the murders, she vows to piece together the mystery of who killed her children and husband. The action kicks in high gear once the element of time travel is introduced into the story (it’s not a spoiler if it’s in the title!), but be careful: This is fantastic time travel, not science-fictional. There is no machine, no justification, no mechanism (the film’s exposition contains the word “randomly,” if that helps) – there’s only a thread of dramatic (or horrific) progression. More rationalist viewers will be put off by the messiness of the result, but in terms of creepy-house atmosphere and ingenious application of SF tropes to low-key horror stories, well, The House at the End of Time does much better. It’s not exactly great, but it’s a pleasant-enough surprise to warrant a bit of attention, and let’s face it: it’s not as if we’ve got a glut of Venezuelan horror films, right?

  • He Who Gets Slapped (1924)

    He Who Gets Slapped (1924)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) Tragedy and melodrama aren’t always that far apart, and He Who Gets Slapped’s biggest strength may be how it transforms ludicrous material into something of a psychological study in self-loathing and tragic repentance. The setup is so over-the-top as to become ridiculous, as our protagonist gets destroyed professionally, romantically and personally in one single slap – but reappears as a tragic clown years later in a performance where he recreates that single humiliating moment. The rest? Well, it involves a lion, another woman promised to the same rival, more slapping, and wholesale deaths by the time the curtains fall. And yet, and yet — Lon Chaney is very good in the leading role, bringing quite a bit of subtlety to a silent performance. Norma Shearer gets a pre-sound showcase role here. Finally, writer-director Victor Seastrom (adapting a Russian play) orchestrates something that transcends melodramatic material to become something far more interesting. Far-fetched and yet somehow universal, He Who Gets Slapped ranks among the finest of silent drama: not necessarily accessible to neophytes, but a powerful statement about the early days of cinema if you’re patient and willing to invest some work in watching the film.

  • I Love You Again (1940)

    I Love You Again (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) You can’t really go wrong with the William Powell / Myrna Loy duo in romantic comedies, and their ninth outing I Love You Again is a good example of that: the premise is ridiculous but the zest with which both Powell and Loy dive into the material is what elevates it to another level. Taking the good old amnesia trope out for a spin, the film begins when a straight-laced model citizen (Powell) suffers a head blow and discovers that he has reverted to a state prior to another blow to the head, ten years earlier when he was a conman. Finding himself in a position to use his good community standing, he launches a few schemes… but also discovers that his fuddy-duddy personality was so dull that his wife (Loy) is planning to divorce him. Deftly navigating between romance, scheming, comedy, preposterous bits of plotting and quite a bit of crackling dialogue, I Love You Again first works as a script, and then becomes even better in the hands of Powell and Loy, both of whom are able to get back into Thin Man-esque repartee without the accumulated weight of the series’ later instalments. While Powell gets the biggest roles in terms of comic shenanigans, Loy’s dialogue is funnier and better delivered. On the other hand, Powell in a boy-scout monitor’s uniform is one for the clip book. Funny, witty and rather cute too, I Love You Again is a demonstration of pure star power: director W.S. Van Dyke lets Powell and Loy do what they’re best at, and doesn’t interrupt of call attention to himself.

  • The Trip to Spain (2017)

    The Trip to Spain (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) If you’ve seen The Trip or The Trip to Italy, you know what to expect from The Trip to Spain… mostly. Clearly, it’s still about Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan, playing fictionalized versions of themselves, travelling, eating, impersonating and bickering throughout a few days of Spanish tourism. It’s exactly what they did in the previous two instalments, and it’s about as good and amusing as it was – provided that you have a tolerance for the same. The formula survives another bout pretty well: the scenery is usually magnificent, the food looks great, Coogan and Brydon each go over-the-top with funny impersonations, and the film’s dips into drama once again take the form of the two middle-aged men working out their insecurities and small-scale personal crises. The most distinctive element for the film involves a running theme about Don Quixote and Pancho Villa, leading to an ending that struck me as overdramatic. [November 2024: …and isn’t really followed up in the fourth-and-final instalment The Trip to Greece.] Still, The Trip to Spain is rather good fun in a comfortable way: If you like the shtick, take a look, and if you don’t, then don’t.

  • Les Boys IV (2005)

    Les Boys IV (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, August 2020) Considering how closely the Les Boys series aligned itself with a certain stereotypical depiction of French-Canadian males, it was almost inevitable that sooner or later, it would pick up that other big French-Canadian tradition: the fishing trip up north. After the usual 45-minute throat clearing so characteristic to the ensemble nature of the film series, this fourth instalment finally picks up its own identity when it becomes clear to the coach that his dysfunctional team needs a deep-woods retreat to patch itself. Most of the film’s middle section fuels its comedy by taking up the clichés of an expedition gone wrong, fit to the ongoing characters. It’s watchable without being particularly better than expected. Directed by George Mihalka rather than Louis Saïa (who helmed the first three films), this one has occasional moments of more intense cinematography, and some not-so-subtle touches (such as the camera lingering on hockey tape as the team psychologically gets back together). Most of the cast is back, although Patrick Huard’s character is hilariously depicted as being bandaged up and so unable to speak. The soundtrack is far less remarkable without Éric Lapointe’s involvement, and the episodic nature of the characters gets more and more obvious – the series would become a five-season TV show two years later. Still, as a wrap-up to the mainline series, it’s not too bad, and it certainly cannot be blamed for delivering exactly what fans were expecting.

  • The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

    The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) A few people claim that the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre had some respectability. Despite its grand-guignolesque violence, their argument goes, it had stripped-down naturalistic cinematography that did much, in the early 1970s, to take the horror genre forward and (also) into slashers. Well, that original respectability certainly isn’t carried over to its sequel, which was made on the other side of the slasher craze it helped create and as a result goes nuts on ludicrous gore while leaving any attempt at realism well behind. What was halfway believable in the prequel is now completely crazy in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, taking advantage of heightened audience expectations and pumped-up gore effects. What saves the film (and earns begrudging respect from this slasher-hater critic) is director Tobe Hooper’s willingness to indulge into satire of the slasher genre itself. What is over the top is deliberately over-the-top, highlighted in so many ways that the film almost thinks of itself as a comedy. It doesn’t exactly endear me to the result, but it does raise The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 above the copycat nature of many of its mid-1980s slasher equivalents.