Reviews

  • El hoyo [The Platform] (2019)

    El hoyo [The Platform] (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, September 2020) To its credit, it doesn’t take a long time for The Platform to hit us on the head with its blunt metaphor for capitalism. Our characters are stuck in a multi-storey prison, and once every day a platform slowly makes it way down the hundreds of cells to allow them to eat. But the sadistic part of it is that all the food is on the platform at once. No refills. You can’t hoard food, but there’s no way to stop people on the upper floor to eat all they want, leaving increasingly little food as the platform goes down, leaving those lower-floor prisoners to fend off for themselves. This is one of those movies where the metaphor takes over credibility—It’s impossible to treat this as something plausible, leaving only the parable. But this isn’t the problem that you may expect—for one thing, The Platform makes no attempt at softening the nightmarish nature of its story. Murder, cannibalism and meanness are essential graphic elements of the plot, and those with sensitive nature are almost assured to quit halfway through. But for those who stick around, the blunt-force symbolism will find a tight, mean Science Fiction fable à la Cube that keeps on exploring the implications and possibilities of its premise. Sociopolitical commentary is an essential part of the result, and it’s the kind of thing to make viewers think about the film long after they’ve seen it. It’s notable that the film, first shown at TIFF’s Midnight Madness and then bought for distribution by Netflix, has steadily grown in recognition through word-of-mouth, earning a wide audience during the great pandemic lockdown of 2020. It’s actually worth the hype: directed with sober realism by Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia, it benefits from strong acting performance by a surprisingly large cast (considering its premise) anchored by Iván Massagué and Zorion Eguileor. It also, surprisingly enough for me to say (because I’d rather have things spelled out and over-explained), benefits from an ending that cuts early, leaving just enough to the imagination. This being a metaphor, it would have been reduced and possibly nullified by any kind of explanation or definitive conclusion. (As a metaphor for current society, it also managed to imply that we can only make changes for the better without necessarily knowing for sure how they’re going to turn out—we can only hope that the children will be better off.) For a film that was nowhere near my radar until I saw it climb up the viewing charts of 2019 movies, I’m surprised, pleased and unsettled by The Platform: Despite the lack of plausibility, it’s a nice example of what’s possible even for low-budget films with an imaginative script and some pointed social commentary. That it happens to be on Netflix alongside the not-dissimilar Circle is just extra icing on the cake in the middle of the (streaming) platform.

  • The Money Pit (1986)

    The Money Pit (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2020) I remember seeing bits and pieces of The Money Pit as a kid, but seeing it now from beginning to end as a middle-aged man who has owned three houses and paid for two major renovation efforts is the kind of different perspective that I couldn’t have imagined back then. Very reminiscent of Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House, this is a comedy from Tom Hank’s younger, sillier period—Here he plays a young entertainment lawyer who must buy a house quickly to avoid homelessness and soon discovers that a slab-to-ceiling renovation is required. Beyond the wacky situations, funny dialogue and oversized characters, The Money Pit is comically distinctive in that it has many set-pieces of elaborate physical comedy as the house falls apart on its new owners, or the renovation crew comes knocking holes in the walls. Hanks is his usual comic 1980s self here, although Shelley Long gets more and more interesting as the film advances and has her become a foil for Hanks’ character’s increasingly maniacal portrayal. It’s quite a bit of fun, although my approval is somewhat tempered by having seen Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House not too long ago: The original film has a better portrayal of the universal process of buying and (re)building a house, far better dialogue and Cary Grant as a bonus. This one often skips over material that could have been interesting, stops caring about the money issue midway through, and goes too often for slapstick when it could have used a more dialogue-heavy approach. It’s still funny enough to warrant a look, although new homeowners may want to pay down a chunk of their line of credit before being retraumatized by the material here.

  • The Lord of the Rings (1978)

    The Lord of the Rings (1978)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, September 2020) Considering the epochal pop-culture thunderbolt that was Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy in 2001–2003, it’s inevitable that Ralph Bakshi’s prior take on the material would be relegated to the rank of a footnote. Not fair to the effort invested in the production, perhaps, but understandable. Nearly everyone watching the 1978 film after 2003 will be comparing it to Jackson’s trilogy, despite the fundamental differences in budgeting, special effects and creative intention between the two versions. This earlier version had to do what it could with a middle-range budget, nonexistent special effects and the limitation of working with one film rather than three—while a sequel was planned, the 1978 film’s modest success and bad relationship between Bakshi and other producers prevented Tolkien’s vision from being fully realized at that time. Bakshi also tried speeding up production by rotoscoping a lot of material, and while some of this can be justified as an artistic choice (giving an unsettling realistic appearance to the evil characters, specifically), the result feels like an awkward blend of hand-tinted villains and cartoonish heroes—perhaps impressive at the time, but outdated today. Story-wise, it almost goes without saying that the singular film is a speedrun of Tolkien’s story all the way to Helm’s Deep, skipping many details along the way. I didn’t get much enjoyment out of the result, but then again, I wasn’t really expecting to—Bakshi’s film was famous as a flawed adaptation even when I was a young SF&F fan in the 1990s, and the availability of a near-perfect take on the same material has now solidified its place as a curiosity.

  • The Anderson Tapes (1971)

    The Anderson Tapes (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) At its core, The Anderson Tapes can be summarized as a heist film—during the course of the story, an ex-con recruits a team to plan a large-scale robbery of an upper-class Manhattan apartment adjacent to Central Park. It takes us through the conception, the planning, the execution of the robbery, as well as its bloody aftermath. But as the computer-fond opening credits title font suggests, there’s a whole new wrapping around this noirish kind of plot: The presence of surveillance cameras, TV screens, computers and consumer electronics. Throughout the film (supported by beepeetee-doo computer noises), our protagonists are watched, recorded and itemized by various law enforcement and surveillance outfits. The Anderson Tapes’ big irony, of course, is that none of this surveillance actually works to prevent the robbery—each unit being concentrated on their own purposes, they completely miss the pieces being assembled in front of their eyes. Ultimately, it’s not surveillance that defeats the robbers but a ham radio and the power of concerted citizens half a world away. In the hand of directory Sidney Lumet, this proto-technothriller adapted from the Lawrence Sanders novel also offers plenty of touches that round out a suspense film: laughs, chills, thrills and action are dolled out in careful fashion, with surprisingly strong character work (including a very funny turn by veteran actress Judith Lowry) and a dependably likable turn by Sean Connery as the lead. The other big casting surprise here is a tall but very young-looking Christopher Walken in his first film role. What was a solid film upon release is now greatly enhanced for modern viewers by seeing then-primitive but scary technology being lavished with attention, and well-observed details to make it all credible. In that, The Anderson Tapes is clearly from the same director who later did Dog Day Afternoon and similarly raised a generic premise into something far more interesting.

  • The Big Picture (1989)

    The Big Picture (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) The premise of The Big Picture will be intensely familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a Hollywood satire: Smart Midwestern student filmmaker earns the attention of Hollywood producers, is gradually coopted by the studio system until he’s no longer himself, loses it all and fights to get to do it his way. That plot outline could be written on a napkin, but it’s not the point of the film. The point of it is the visual humour that writer-director Christopher Guest injects in his narrative, as our protagonist (a very likable Kevin Bacon) can’t help but supplement what’s happening to him with imagined spots heavily inspired by Hollywood classic movies. Tons of small visual jokes pepper the story, challenging viewers to pay attention. The cast can be surprising at times, especially when it comes to smaller roles: Teri Hatcher looks amazing as an opportunistic actress, John Cleese (sans moustache) plays an American bartender, Elliott Gould has a few moments as an imaginary prosecutor, Jennifer Jason Leigh is a wacky artistic type, Martin Short gets to play the stereotype of a talent agent, and Fran Drescher shows up as a trophy wife. Clearly produced as a satire of Hollywood for Hollywood people rather than the general public, The Big Picture is noteworthy in Guest’s filmography for not being a mockumentary, but rather a full narrative film, with plenty of imaginary asides. It’s quite a bit of fun, and probably ranks as one of those Hollywood satires that not enough people have seen. It’s well worth a look, and not solely as a filler for Guest completionists.

  • The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre aka Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995)

    The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre aka Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) Nearly every actor has a few regrets in the hungry days of their filmography, and some movies benefit from being those regrets—raising their profile far above what they would have been without those subsequently big-name actors. The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre had no less than two of them, enough so that it would, within two years, be re-edited, retitled and re-released as Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation to capitalize on the sudden stardom of Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger. Nothing but regional luck explains this dual pairing: The film was a low-production affair that scoured the Austin acting scene to find its actors, and both were newcomers looking for any kind of work. Zellweger does look cute in glasses as a young woman preyed upon by a family of killers on Texas backwoods roads. McConaughey plays against type as a younger member of that family that also includes include a deceptively normal-looking realtor as bait (the attractive Tonie Perensky). What could have been just a forgettable and generic plot soon turns bizarre (and worse) when the usual teenager-versus-hillbilly-psychos dynamic somehow comes to include links to a secret society (???) involved in the JFK assassination (!!!) as represented by a snappily dressed man in a limousine (?!!) who just drops by the house to have a look around (??!) Even the legacy of the Texas Chainsaw series (and I use the expression lightly, not being a fan of it) is severely undermined by Leatherface being an incredibly inept opponent reduced to being in drag and screaming helplessly. Thankfully, this family eats pizza rather than humans, but that’s just one more thing that comes to confound those expecting a continuation to the series. I, personally, don’t care about the Texas Chainsaw premise at all, so I’m enjoying a reaction to the film similar to that of Halloween III—the more they desecrate the series’ mythos, the more I’m enjoying the put-down. Still, subverting expectations isn’t a virtue by itself, and much of Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation is just tedious. Occasionally interesting for watching McConaughey and baby-faced Zellweger in such schlock, intermittently intriguing for undermining the entire series, but otherwise not really worth the effort.

  • Pete’s Dragon (1977)

    Pete’s Dragon (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Youtube Streaming, September 2020) Not every Disney film is created equal, and while I had decent-sized expectations for Pete’s Dragon, they were quickly punctured by the result. The story of a boy who befriends a sometimes-invisible dragon and tries to fit in a small New England coastal town, it’s not a film that has aged gracefully at all. The most visible aspect of its production date has to be the animation of Pete’s Dragon: while the live-action/animation integration must have been amazing at the time, it looks flat and, well, cartoonish to anyone after Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (which was admittedly inspired by this film.) But even excusing the charming rough-hewn animation doesn’t quite take care of the other disappointing aspects of the production, from a kind of comedy that’s not particularly interesting for the entire family, to musical numbers that struggle to produce even one memorable song out of the bunch. There are a few good moments here and then, but they’re nullified by the more embarrassing ones. (Never whitewash a lighthouse like those characters whitewash a lighthouse…) Watching this original Pete’s Dragon is a powerful argument that not all live-action remakes undertaken by The Mouse are bad—the 2016 remake of Pete’s Dragon is far superior to the original, and not merely in terms of effects. You can safely skip this one.

  • The Hard Way (1991)

    The Hard Way (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) Let’s face it: building a buddy cop movie around a hardened non-nonsense police officer and a frivolous Hollywood actor trying to gather inspiration is an evergreen premise. It’s good to bring in both the gritty policework and the innate humour of an outsider, along with a pinch of Hollywood satire. (It was such a solid premise, in fact, that it’s shared with that other 1991 movie, Into the Sun, about which the less said, the better.) Being able to claim John Badham as a director is a further coup, and having no less than James Woods as the hard-boiled cop and Michael J. Fox as the Hollywood celebrity is just icing on the cake. With Stephen Lang as the serial killer and Annabella Sciorra as the love interest (along with briefer roles for an ensemble as diverse as Delroy Lindo, Luis Guzmán, L. L. Cool J, Christina Ricci and Lewis Black), everything is there for a competent Hollywood film. The Hard Way more or less meets those expectations, with a few issues along the way. Woods and Fox play each other off quite well, even through the rote sequences of early distrust and gradual bonding. The film isn’t so successful as blending the menace of its villain (a bit overdone for a comedy) and feels creepy in its depiction of a cop regularly practising police brutality, but scores a few hits in describing how a Hollywood megastar can have a few problems “going undercover” when everyone knows their name. The metafictional material doesn’t stop there, what with specific problems when the investigation movies inside a movie theatre that happens to be playing the movie in which the actor stars, and a rather elegant envoi that blurs the lines between the film’s reality and the movie it inspired. Much of The Hard Way is rather predictable, but that’s not a bad thing considering the practised skill through which it’s executed. Less interesting are the three or four climaxes that cap the picture—two would have been enough, three is excessive and four gets ridiculous, even though the best and most interesting sequence is kept in reserve for the final climax. The Hard Way isn’t some kind of undiscovered gem or early 1990s classic, but it’s good enough and slick enough to please even despite its flaws.

  • Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)

    Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, September 2020) Ah, the 1970s New Hollywood! A time so predictable in its overdone nihilism that it couldn’t have even a simply buddy road movie without killing off one of its lead characters by the end! I’m not jesting: While most saner hands at another time in Hollywood’s history would have maintained Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’s lighthearted tone throughout, here is Michael Cimino doing his Cimino thing of ensuring that no one in the theatre is happy by the end of the film. Headlined by Clint Eastwood as a grizzled robber and Jeff Bridges as a happy-go-lucky drifter, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot starts out firmly in outlaw comedy, as Eastwood is disguised as a preacher and pursued by a gunman through field, after which he’s hit by Bridges’ car. Taking the younger man under his wing (and vice versa, up to a point), the veteran tells of a robbery haul still in the wild, hidden behind the blackboard of a one-classroom rural school. Pursued by two ex-members of Eastwood’s crew, they drive across a chunk of the American heartland to discover that the school is gone. Thinking of nothing better to do, they hatch another robbery, taking aim at the same place with the same tactics. For much of its duration, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot is a decently entertaining crime comedy, with antagonists not quite willing to pull the trigger on the protagonist and the protagonist working with the antagonists to reach their objectives. But this amiable façade comes crashing down at the very end, with characters meeting messy ends and one of them slumped over dead. How did we get there? The answer is “early 1970s,” obviously. While people always talk about Cimino’s second (The Deer Hunter) and third (Heaven’s Gate) films, this debut is worth noticing as well: Other than the downbeat ending, we can see Cimino taking utmost advantage of widescreen cinematography in his portrayal of the modern American west and the roads on which our characters travel from one part of the script to the other. Still, movies live or die on their endings, and the ending of Thunderbolt and Lightfoot seems unearned and unlikely to make anyone want to revisit the film as a romp.

  • Plymouth Adventure (1952)

    Plymouth Adventure (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) As a Canadian, there are a few pieces of American mythology that confound me, and the Mayflower is one of them. I know that Thanksgiving comes from its pilgrims, and so does part of the American overinflated sense of democracy. Never mind that it was a mere drop in the massive immigration waves that truly made America, that the American Revolution was far more crucial to its system of government or that Thanksgiving is a bit of a hollow celebration as we come to grips with colonization. But Plymouth Adventure goes all-in to mythologize the trip in celluloid form, featuring none other than Spencer Tracy as the captain of the ship ferrying the pilgrims to the new world. The journey is interminable for both the pilgrims and the audience, as the film overstuffs itself with an ensemble cast and several dramatic deviations from historical fact. There are romantic entanglements, deaths, storms and that stuff—with special effects so good at the time that they netted an Oscar. Dramatically, though, Plymouth Adventure is a bit of a bore. It’s so deeply convinced of the value of its story that it fails to make a case for its importance. The style of the film is typical of early 1950s bombast, although I fear what would have happened if they had made this film a few years later, just as 1950s films took on epic scope and length in order to outclass television. I don’t mean to imply that Plymouth Adventure is a bad movie—you can still watch it today and appreciate the result, as well as be thrilled at some of the storm sequences. But it’s self-satisfied in a way that limits its appeal to non-Americans—or even Americans who don’t buy into the white Pilgrim myth as the birth of the nation.

  • Viaggio in Italia [Journey to Italy] (1954)

    Viaggio in Italia [Journey to Italy] (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) I’m going to keep this short—writer-director Roberto Rossellini’s Journey to Italy is a good film, maybe even a great one, but not for me. Its depiction of a quarrelling couple well on its way to dissolution is depressing enough (although the film is working toward a better resolution), but the film’s loose, slow, episodic, almost improvisational quality isn’t the kind of thing I go out of my way to see. The black-and-white cinematography often stops the Italian scenery from being as impressive as it should be. I don’t quite dislike Journey to Italy—we get good performances out of Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders, the intrusion of the Vesuvius eruption into the narrative is clever, and there’s a travelogue-to-1950s-Naples quality here that’s interesting. But it’s not the kind of film I get enthusiastic about.

  • Cross of Iron (1977)

    Cross of Iron (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) Director Sam Peckinpah and war movies seem like an ideal match, and one of the surprises of his filmography is that there are so few of them in there. Maybe producers couldn’t trust him with the budget of a war movie; maybe he felt that there were only so many ways he could say he was anti-war. No matter the reason, at least we have Cross of Iron to fall back on—a gritty, non-sentimental, harsh and nihilistic view of WW2 as seen from the German officers fighting against the Soviets. (The question of their allegiance to Hitler is minimized—one character admits to hating Hitler, and the Nazi political officer is a reprehensible person even by the standards of the film.) The story is substantial, having to do with a glory-seeking officer facing off against a more pragmatic one, but the real worth of Cross of Iron is in the implacable battle sequences filled with explosions, death and futility. Peckinpah is in his element here, as he apparently revels in the senseless violence, the machismo of the soldiers, and the innate ugliness of it all. At least we get decent performances out of James Coburn, Maximilian Schell, James Mason and David Warner. Cross of Iron isn’t for everyone: even those viewers familiar with Peckinpah’s brand of violence may be put off by the unrelenting pace of this film and the way it sees no way out. But that does put Cross of Iron squarely in-line with the rest of the 1970s war films, digesting Vietnam through increasingly meaningless war films that were much closer to the war-is-hell end of the spectrum than war-is-an-adventure Hollywood movies of an earlier generation.

  • Victory aka Escape to Victory (1981)

    Victory aka Escape to Victory (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) No matter how you slice it, “Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, Max von Sydow and Pelé” is a really interesting cast for a WW2 movie. One of those fun war movies absolutely not adapted from real events, Victory posits an exhibition football match between Nazis and allied prisoners in Paris, who set in motion a complex escape plan. Sylvester Stallone stars as an American (captured while fighting with the Canadians) with plans to escape who’s recruited into the resistance for an even bigger escape plan. Cleverly playing both the underdog sports tropes and the war movie escapes one, Victory may not be believable or coherent, but at least it’s distinctive from most other WW2 films you’ve seen. John Huston directs with his usual late-career competence, and the production means are generally sufficient for the film’s scope. But here’s the thing: despite the high potential of the film, its built-in comfort zone, and good performances from Stallone, Caine, Sydow and Pelé, Victory all feels curiously… dull. The execution is fine, but there’s a spark missing: the suspense is slight, the episodes on the way to the ending feel perfunctory, and the entire thing can be almost immediately forgotten. Which is weird considering how unusual a blend of elements it is. Ah well—I suspect Victory is one of those films that begs to be rediscovered periodically: not quite as an enduring gem, but as a curio.

  • Frankenhooker (1990)

    Frankenhooker (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) This. This is what B-movies should be about: grotesque, raunchy, offensive, funny, audacious, goofy and not for everyone. Frankenhooker, as the title suggests, is a riff on Frankenstein (or maybe The Brain That Wouldn’t Die) as an amateur scientist goes the stitched body-parts route to revive his dead girlfriend. In the hands of writer-director Frank Henenlotter (famous for Basket Case), the result is a bizarre mixture of horror, comedy, nudity and dismembered body parts. It’s not made for mainstream audiences: Frankenhooker is deliberately aimed at the EC-comic sensibilities of horror fans who can take a gory joke and revel in the sickness of it. (By the time the protagonist’s “super-crack” makes prostitutes explode, well… even the bad special effects are part of the fun, as the actresses are switched with obvious mannequins that then explode.) While James Lorinz headlines the film as the nerdy scientist, I was more interested in seeing Heather Hunter in a small role. It’s all capped off by a dark ironic joke that claws back much of the film’s over-the-top misogyny. While I’m not sure that I would have been as charmed by Frankenhooker before becoming a jaded horror viewer, I found it all very funny—one of those wonderfully perverse, absolutely reprehensible films that are nonetheless about as far as it’s possible to go in that vein while remaining fun rather than gross. The 1980s were big on those films (there’s a heavy streak of Re-Animator energy here) and it’s a shame that we haven’t seen anything quite like this in the years since then. But, at least, we’ll always have Frankenhooker…

  • Woodstock (1970)

    Woodstock (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) In the Summer of 1969 historical face-off, I’m more of a moon landing guy than a Woodstock one, but even I’ll have to admit that the concert had better music. The massive documentary Woodstock is about as close as I’ll ever want to get to spending three days in a muddy field listening to music. At 185 minutes (or a massive 224 minutes for the director’s cut), it has a lot of material to present in between thirty musical acts, footage of the 400,000 people that were present for the event, and interviews with bemused locals talking about the hippie invasion of their quiet rural town. But anything that’s not the music is a distraction: the performance footage is the heart of the film. Woodstock was almost never made—according to legend, director Michael Wadleigh decided at the last minute to send a filming crew to upstate New York, and captured so much footage that it took months and a team of editors (including Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker) to wrestle it all into the final result—and that’s with the split-panel presentation to show as much footage as possible. It’s quite a movie, even if you have to set aside most of an evening to watch it all. For those who weren’t even alive in 1969, Woodstock is also a wonderful time capsule of an event unlikely to ever happen again.