Reviews

  • Fubar II (2010)

    Fubar II (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) From 2003 to 2013, the Canadian Dream was quite specifically located in Fort MacMurray, Alberta. That’s where the oil patch boom led to the creation of tens of thousands of well-paid jobs with few educational requirements. People moved across the country to sign up for oil crews, and quickly made more money than they knew what to do with (well, except to buy a big pickup truck). The bust followed the boom, but it’s amusing to see Fubar II make good of the craziness that was going on at the time. As we rejoin our likable metalhead loser protagonists from the first Fubar, it’s clear that they could use a bit of money. So, when a friend talks to them about the Eldorado up north, they pick up everything (which isn’t much) and leave, quickly finding good jobs. But they’re clearly not as good as the jobs, and before long one of them is actively looking at workers’ compensation through self-injury while the other hooks up with a woman who has apparently slept with half of the cast. No, the Fubar protagonists aren’t going to cover themselves in glory in this new adventure, and that’s more or less the point of it. Fortunately, even the handheld camera work puts us in Fort MacMurray during the big boom, and if you like the characters, then you’ll enjoy the slightly bigger budget and slightly stronger plot that goes along with this new instalment.

  • Into the Sun (1991)

    Into the Sun (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2020) I don’t specifically have anything against movies that twist genres midway through—done properly à la From Dusk Till Dawn, it can be a memorable experience in itself. Done badly, or without conviction, it ends up being like Into the Sun, a too-low-budget comedy that plays with the idea of a professional fighter pilot being tasked with showing his job to a Hollywood actor looking for inspiration for his new role. So far so good: it gets a few laughs. The first half-hour of the film feels midway between Top Gun and Hot Shots!, which is a very strange tone to take, both too serious and not serious enough. Things take a bad turn when our protagonists are shot down over enemy territory (in a rather unconvincing sequence), leading to a prolonged ground sequence that’s far from being as amusing as the beginning of the film. There aren’t many casual laughs to be found in the heroes being captured and tortures, and it doesn’t help that Hot Shots Part Deux would cover much of the same ground far more successfully a few years later. Into the Sun disintegrates during that last half, unable to make the most effective use of its actor turned soldier (See: Tropic Thunder) or its soldier swayed by the actor. Good idea, disappointing execution: a film’s premise going unfulfilled.

  • Alien Nation (1988)

    Alien Nation (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2020) The Science Fiction genre has a long history (especially in print) of using murder mystery narratives in order to illustrate a future society: it’s a great way to examine what makes a society tick, allow the detectives to meet various people and show a science-fictional device as a wrinkle in the investigation or the crime. Conversely, Hollywood has an equally long history of using science-fictional environment as mere backdrop for a thoroughly ordinary plot that could have worked just as well in contemporary settings. The difference between the two is subtle but significant: in one case, the plot enhances the genre, while in the other the plot is irrelevant to the genre. Seasoned SF fans clearly prefer the first—there’s even a dismissive expression from the Turkey City Lexicon, “Abbess phone home” to call Science Fiction that could have been anything else. Alien Nation straddles the line between the two in such a way that can often look like one or the other. One way of looking at it is that Alien Nation takes us in a decently imagined “near future” of 1988, in which a ship of aliens has landed on Earth and been assimilated in American society. They have their own language, biology and physical capabilities, and much of the film’s first half-hour is spent illustrating those changes through the early stages of a murder investigation, complicated by the pairing of the first alien policeman with an investigator (James Caan) resentful since aliens killed his partner. The metaphor for immigrant integration really isn’t subtle here, from the title onward. Still, that first half-hour is probably the most interesting thing about Alien Nation, as the aliens have their own alphabet and language, live in ghettos (with their own strip clubs), and love drinking sour milk recreationally. But then the film loses interest in taking refuge in “ordinary story labelled SF” territory: The mismatched-cop duo clearly cribs from racial integration films, and as the story advances, we’re left with a cops-against-a-monster conclusion that strips away nearly anything that had been interesting about earlier worldbuilding. (Not to mention basic questions: why would an alien species so vulnerable to saltwater choose to stay in a coastal town?) At least Caan has a decent role as the human cop, while Mandy Patinkin is unrecognizable as his alien partner. You can gauge the interest of Alien Nation’s premise and underlying concept in the long list of TV movies and novels that were produced as spinoff—the idea was so good that it couldn’t be left alone. But the film itself merely achieves a middle-of-the-road cop drama and nothing more. That’s not too bad, but it could have been better.

  • Sweet Charity (1969)

    Sweet Charity (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) I hope no one ever asks me to write a book about Hollywood musicals, because one of the middle chapters will be called, “How Bob Fosse destroyed the musical and yes, it’s all his fault.” I exaggerate slightly for comic effect, but not by much: Fosse was the leading director of musicals during the 1970s’s New Hollywood (probably the worst decade for musicals) and nearly everything I’ve seen from him I have disliked. [September 2020: I take that back! Lenny and Star 80 are decent, while All that Jazz is a really good musical.] His approach made musicals grow up, but in retrospect that was a terrible idea. Sweet Charity is a case in point, bringing together many things that I dislike. Fosse adapted his own Broadway show based on Nights of Cabiria (a film I dislike) having cast Shirley Maclaine (an actress I dislike) and wallowing in a dark cabaret style (an approach I dislike) to end with a bittersweet ending (another choice I dislike, so we’re not doing well here). I’ll grant that Maclaine is a lookalike for Giulietta Masina (further dislike), but otherwise, eh, why even bother. While the film manages a few comic moments and hums the familiar tune of “Hey, Big Spender,” it’s remarkably unfunny as a comedy, tinged with freeze-frame melancholy as it follows a girl with few stable prospects in a big city designed to eat such people alive. (One welcome exception: the wonderfully weird and high-energy number featuring Sammy Davis Jr.) Even the ending, which initially seems destined for a bright and colourful happy finale, ends up pulling the rug under the protagonist’s feet. (I can’t help thinking that for classical musical fans, this is a cruel case of “this is why you can’t have nice things” and no, I don’t care if it follows the original stage musical.) The dark and moody cinematography of the film is very New Hollywood, a now-dated style which isn’t a good match for the exuberant joie de vivre of the classic (and timeless) Hollywood musical. I don’t exactly dislike the film (especially on a curve, as there are Fosse movies that I actually hate, starting with Cabaret) but in many ways Sweet Charity is just close enough to the glory days of the Hollywood musical (I mean—it was released the same year as the far more enjoyable Hello, Dolly!) to feel like a grotesque perversion of the form. It flopped in 1969, and I don’t think it’s any more likable today.

  • The Opposite Sex (1956)

    The Opposite Sex (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) Knowing that The Opposite Sex is adapted from the same novel that led to 1939’s classic The Women, and having a look at its great cast, and watching its roaringly cynical start in which a woman speaks tartly about other women, you could be forgiven for having high expectations for it. Alas, the reality is a bit more pedestrian: The script settles into a lower-pitch struggle between women arguing about men. It’s certainly watchable, but there are many missed opportunities to do better. Bizarrely enough, I’m against the decision to include male characters in the film—The Women showed how to do it well, and they don’t add much to the arguments between the female protagonists. The musical comedy nature of the film is hard to grasp, considering that seasoned signer Dolores Grey barely sings, and noted triple-threat Ann Miller doesn’t dance nor sing. While the bon mots can be biting here and there, the script settles into a routine pace as the film advances: the women complain about men to other women, then complain about other women to yet other women. At least there’s more to see than to hear—I watched The Opposite Sex because of Ann Miller and was slightly disappointed in this regard, but that disappointment was more than nullified by seeing a lot of a young and radiant Joan Collins. Many other second-string notables populate the cast, from June Allyson, Joan Blondell, Ann Sheridan and Leslie Nielsen in a very serious role. Also worth noting is the garishly oversaturated Technicolor, which for some reason doesn’t really feature a lot of greens but does push the MGM Technicolor style about as far as it could go. Somehow less modern than the 1939 version, this mid-1950s romantic drama isn’t that bad by itself, but there are a lot of questionable choices made here knowing what else could have been done with this material and these performers.

  • $ aka Dollars (1971)

    $ aka Dollars (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) More promising than successful, Dollars is certainly watchable, but there’s a sense that a few tweaks would have helped it tremendously. It does have the tremendous advantage of starring a young Warren Beatty (charming) and Goldie Hawn (also charming), so there’s clearly a high floor to how bad this can be. Plus, it features a complex heist narrative where an intricate crime leads to a just-as-intricate game of crosses and double-crosses, as the previous owners of the money they’ve stolen chase them to get it back. It all takes place in rarely-seen picturesque Hamburg, further adding to the unusual appeal of the film. With all of those ingredients, it’s hard to imagine where Dollars goes wrong, but it does. For a lighthearted caper comedy, it clearly overdoes the very, very, very long chase sequence that forms most of the film’s second half—taking out half of it would have improved the rest, already overlong at 120 minutes. It’s also, less clearly identifiably, a film that doesn’t have the added spark that such films require: it’s not light on its feet, it’s not particularly romantic, it’s not sustainably clever (even if the heist itself is ingenious). You can argue that its story choices (notably in a second half that separates the protagonist and turns into repetitive wintertime chases) are not conducive to the kind of expected patter and romantic tension and that’s fair—but Dollars is still the kind of thing you watch and wonder why it’s not better given all of the elements at its disposal.

  • Shlock (1973)

    Shlock (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2020) Serendipity can be a cool thing, and so it is that Cable TV scheduling happenstance led to me seeing the first of John Landis’ films (Shlock) less than a week after seeing his last (Burke & Hare). While Landis’ career never really recovered from the on-set deaths during the making of The Twilight Zone: The Movie, the first ten years of his career were a cascade of highly imaginative comedies, with ultra-low-budget Shlock to set the tone. A parody of 1950s monster movies that almost retroactively serves as a lampoon of terrible 1970s creature features and 1980s slashers, Shlock is about a prehistoric creature (Landis in an ape suit) terrorizing a small Southern California town, alternately harming or helping characters. It’s meant to be parodic, so there are plenty of references to 2001: A Space Odyssey, cheap banana jokes and satire of 1970s TV reporting. It would be an exaggeration to call the result any good, but there are a few laughs here and there, and anyone can recognize Landis’ comic invention, so closely would the tone be replicated in later, bigger-budget movies. It’s definitely a curio, but not a bad one for Landis fans.

  • Kansas City Confidential (1952)

    Kansas City Confidential (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, August 2020) Considering how often film noir and heist movies have been remade, remixed and ripped off, it’s a weird feeling to find a classic Hollywood crime film that almost feels original. I settled down to watch Kansas City Confidential convinced that I was in for another 1950s noir heist film, but it turns out that the film is far more concerned with the tortured aftermath of its opening robbery than the crime itself. Better yet—this is almost a film in which the criminals must chase down the police to solve the crime. The mastermind’s brilliant idea to hire criminals for his crimes and frame an average man for it spectacularly backfires when said everyman becomes obsessed with uncovering the real culprits. Crisply shot and featuring actors with the tough faces and rough voices required for the material, Kansas City Confidential is a well directed by Phil Karlson. It plays with notions of injustice and hope even as its less-than-honourable characters jockey for a pile of cash. Lee van Cleef is notable in a small role, but the best performance here goes to John Payne as an ex-con trying to bring justice. The production values aren’t all that high, but as far as film noirs go, Kansas City Confidential is fun to watch and, surprisingly, still a bit original seven decades later.

  • Night Train to Terror (1985)

    Night Train to Terror (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2020) There are two ways to talk about Night Train to Terror—the first being a surface viewing of the film, the second informed by the making of the movie. The first is almost purely experiential, as you come away from the film with an amazed sense of disbelief at what you’ve just seen. It takes only a few moments (as what’s supposed to be a horror film segues into a cheap pop-music video and then a chat between God and Lucifer) to realize that something is horribly wrong with this film, and the rest does not disappoint. Incoherent editing propels us further and faster in a story that seems to be missing any kind of connective material, rushing to gratuitous nudity and extreme gore while leaving basic narrative behind. Twenty minutes later, we go back to the pop-music band, and then God and the Devil as they start introducing another story with the same rapid-fire incoherent approach to grand-guignol material. And then on to a third story. While Night Train to Terror is obviously an anthology story, it’s still markedly less controlled than most similar films. Despite the rushed nature of the storytelling, the budget shown on-screen (as we have far many more setting changes and narrative progression) seems disconnected from the low-budget production values. The choppy editing doesn’t help in maintaining continuity, but the schlocky nature of the gore and nudity tries its best to distract us from a storytelling void. (It doesn’t succeed.) The film ends shortly afterward with a desperately unconvincing train derailment, leaving us amazed (but not in a good way) at what we’ve just seen. The nature of the film becomes a bit clearer once we read about its production history, as Night Train to Terror is really a re-edited stitching of three unreleased full-length horror films with an added framing device. Suddenly, it becomes clearer why the budget seems inconsistent with the visuals: it’s three films’ worth of material badly boiled down into one, with crucial narrative material left out in favour of gore effects and nudity scenes. (And if that’s amazing, wait until you follow the link to take a look at disgraced screenwriter Philip Yordan’s career.) Still, no number of explanations will do justice to the sheer experience of seeing the film and going “wow” at the amazing incompetence on display. Night Train to Terror is far best experienced as a group, as everyone will already be there for the therapy session afterward.

  • A King in New York (1957)

    A King in New York (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) Film historians widely recognize A King of New York for being Charlie Chaplin’s response to being exiled from the United States at the height of McCarthyism—a way for him to talk about his exile while flipping the situation over, by playing a European king exiled to New York. As such, there’s a poignancy to the comedy here—wrestling with fame, isolation, money problems and a good old identity crisis. As our protagonist comes home, his money is absconded, leading him to increasingly uncomfortable dealings with New York City society and, in particular, the demands of the advertising industry. Along the way, this becomes an occasion for Chaplin to lampoon the trends of the age—rock and roll, widescreen movies, and once again the encroaching influence of TV and advertisements. In doing so, however, we sense Chaplin as an aging outsider railing against what he may not understand and certainly does not enjoy—Modern Times made mundane. There are very useful comparison to be made with the satire of the contemporary comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and the cynicism of A Face in the Crowd, both of which were released the same year as A King in New York. It does, in doing so, become an essential part of Chaplin’s filmography, especially in illustrating his later-career trajectory. It’s funny, but there’s a poignancy underneath the surface that’s hard to ignore if you know the slightest bit about Chaplin’s life in the 1950s. It’s worth noting that the film didn’t play in the US until 1972…

  • An American Pickle (2020)

    An American Pickle (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) I defy anyone to be able to tell where the next twenty minutes of An American Pickle are going to go at any given time, so quickly does this comedy go from one comic riff to another. The overall structure of the film is solid enough (Revived after a hundred years, a Jewish-American immigrant from Eastern Europe must learn to live with his great-grandson) and so is the central conflict, but then the film hops from one episode to another in ten-minute segments, touching up fish-out-of-water tropes, Brooklyn hipsterism, immigrant narratives, outrage culture, some political satire and then on to a less funny, more heartfelt but not undeserved ending. Seth Rogen plays the two principal roles, a conceit that works generally well. The jokes are amusing enough, and much of the humour is a blend between absurdist ideas clashing with the intrusion of reality when it makes the most comic sense. Director Brandon Trost keeps things hopping at a pace that keeps up with the episodes. While An American Pickle was released direct-to-TV in North America, it was meant as a theatrical feature and clearly feels as such. It’s not a bad milestone in Rogen’s career—double starring in a comedy that manages a good transition from laughter to sentiment. (There’s even a welcome absence of weed jokes here.) It’s not the first such film he’s headed, but it does help evolve his screen persona into something that can sustain him well beyond his initial slacker persona.

  • Run This Town (2019)

    Run This Town (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) The strange fever dream of Rob Ford’s tenure as Toronto’s mayor was bound to make the leap to the movies at one point or another, and if Run this Town is the first, it’s probably not going to be the last nor the best. Set in a particularly depressing version of our reality where journalism is fighting for survival through top-ten lists, the film tells us how a plucky young journalist ends up uncovering proof of Ford’s drug abuse while mayor—alongside worse improprieties such as being drunk and abusive toward his staff. It’s a nice underdog story… except that even cursory observers of the Ford story know that’s not how it happened, and how the real story was certainly not quite as clear-cut and easily translatable to a three-act screenplay format. Run this Town does have its moments—The actions and ideals of the journalists are opposed to the spinning tricks of the mayor’s equally young staff, and how they manage to keep Ford’s issues out of the news through cheap appeals to populism. The cynical take on modern journalism is enough to make anyone despair for the future of the country, and writer-director Ricky Tollman’s approach to the material, often using split screen, does have a modern, quasi-anarchistic approach. The film wears a dispiriting colour palette like an attitude, and its cynicism can be overbearing at times, especially when the film goes on an extended rant boldly taking on the kind of anti-Millennial prejudice that only idiots really believe. But the worst sin here is blatantly inventing a character rather than being able to tell us the real story with the real people involved—including, problematically enough, replacing a female journalist with a male intern. It’s highly possible that we’re still not distant enough from the story to be able to tell it properly—Ford may be dead (explaining why he’s the only named real character here, played with caricatural villainy by Damian Lewis) but many of the other people involved aren’t, and the rights to journalist Robyn Doolittle’s book have been sold for a competing project. Ultimately, it’s also true that the real story of Rob Ford may be unstoryable—involving too many people with a small part of the story, and not featuring any movie-worthy dramatic moments. Run this Town can be interesting in dramatizing the real events, but it’s also annoying in that it takes far too many liberties along the way.

  • The Festival (2018)

    The Festival (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) Movies can be about vicarious living, and I’ve known for a while that while I may enjoy music played at festivals, I would hate the experience of the festivals themselves. (By now, I’m also decades too old for sleeping in tents, getting drunk and traipsing in mud all day long.) As evidence that I should leave music festivals to those who will enjoy them, I offer raunchy comedy The Festival. Our story begins with a new college graduate being dumped right before the graduation ceremony… but still heading over to a Leeds-like music festival even knowing that his ex-girlfriend is going to be there. Much mayhem ensues from that point on, with weird people, drunken stupors, stripteases and car sex being almost-mandatory checkpoints along the way. It’s raunchy, foul-mouthed and wince-inducing (mild physical mutilation is included) and still funny enough to be a good-enough time. Much of it depends on the actors—Joe Thomas takes centre stage as the nebbish protagonist (he gets better), with Hammed Animashaun and Claudia O’Doherty in supporting roles. The Leeds music festival itself provides the amazing sight of fields full of tents and debauchery. The comedic arc is intensely predictable, but that’s part of the point: People buy tickets to The Festival knowing what they will hear and how they’re going to feel, with a bit of adventure along the way. I could have skipped some of the film’s less wholesome moments, but it’s not a bad time. Furthermore, The Festival has further reinforced my conviction to avoid music festivals, so that’s an extra.

  • The Long Dumb Road (2018)

    The Long Dumb Road (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) Jason Mantzoukas has been a comedy MVP for a few years now, always brightening and spicing movies even in small roles. Now here’s The Long Dumb Road to give him a leading role. As befit Mantzoukas’ screen persona, it’s a bigger-than-life role as an explosive, impulsive live-in-the-moment drifter who ends up changing the course of a young earnest sheltered young man on his way to his first year of college in Los Angeles. The Long Dumb Road, as it becomes apparent early on, is the kind of comedy film where the characters get in deeper and deeper trouble until they learn a valuable life lesson along the way. But the point here isn’t the greater story as much as the comic sketches encountered along the way, with character actors playing the obstacles in the leads’ way. There isn’t anything startlingly new here, nor is it all that hilarious—but, of course, that will depend on your tolerance for humiliation comedy. Still, The Long Dumb Road is a short, effective comedy even if the ending doesn’t quite bring everything together.

  • The Rookie (1990)

    The Rookie (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2020) In retrospect, The Rookie feels stuck between the rogue-cops-thrillers of the 1980s and the overblown action movies of the 1990s. Clint Eastwood directs and stars as a veteran cop alongside a younger Charlie Sheen as his new partner investigating car thefts. While their characters are supposed to be different, there isn’t a lot separating Eastwood’s interpretation of his character here from Dirty Harry Callahan. But the buddy-cop conventions of the 1980s are complemented by a handful of spectacular stunt sequences that herald the arrival of another kind of cop movie. The car-carrier flip-over that punctuates the end of the first act could be seen as a precursor to the similar Bad Boys II sequences, while the airplane crash and explosions seem taken from the Die Hard series. The result may be an interesting mess, but it’s a mess nonetheless, and aspects of the whole have not aged well at all. The psychopathic behaviour of the so-called heroes is troubling enough (especially given that it is rewarded), and then there is the incomprehensible ethnic miscasting: Raul Julia is fantastic no matter the role, but he’s a bit difficult to accept as a German crime lord. On a similar note, Sônia Braga makes for a captivating villain, but she doesn’t quite click in an action context. (She’s also given, in an obvious ploy for controversy, a scene in which her character rapes Clint Eastwood’s character.) More interesting than your usual 1980s buddy-cop movie but still nowhere near a good movie, The Rookie is justifiably known for being a curio in Eastwood’s directorial filmography: A semi-crazy action cop movie with roughly twice as many stunt set-pieces as the rest of his movies combined.