Reviews

  • The Big Parade (1925)

    The Big Parade (1925)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2019) The history of anti-war movies is longer than is often acknowledged, and we can point to films such as 1925’s The Big Parade as an influential statement that would inspire many. Coming from the horrors of WW1, it takes the decision to depict war honestly, paving the way for more forceful statements such as All Quiet on the Western Front. It does have the drawbacks of many silent movies: At 151 minutes, even a skilled director such as King Vidor takes forever to make his points and advance the action. More than half the film happens before the soldiers even see combat, and those pre-combat scenes during which they romance a French farm girl are easily the most forgettable of the film. Still, The Big Parade doesn’t hold back its punches in its last hour, with a harrowing forest march in which rows of soldiers are picked off by hidden snipers, and then on to the more familiar scenes of trench warfare. None of the soldiers make it whole through the film. While the film is far too long and repetitive for modern audiences, it’s still a powerful statement, and an effective recreation of war sequences, barely seven years after the end of WW1. You can compare and contrast with other WW1 movies completed before WW2, including comedies such as Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms and Keaton’s Doughboys.

  • La nuit américaine [Day for Night] (1973)

    La nuit américaine [Day for Night] (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2019) I am a very indulgent viewer for movies that talk about movies, so it was almost inevitable that I’d have a soft spot for La nuit américaine, a rather fun film describing the filming of a French melodrama. It does feature clever meta-textual stuff that will make more sense the more you know about movies. It’s written and directed by François Truffaut, who also turns in a suitably sympathetic performance as the in-movie writer-director. The usual happens—production problems, neurotic actors, cast/crew hanky-panky, and serious accidents (of them, fatal, happens offscreen and is played for mostly laughs as if the actor had disappeared abruptly from La nuit américaine itself). It’s also a look at early-1970s studio-based filmmaking, with Truffaut explicitly closing on a mournful note that movies should not go to the street and entirely abandon their own specialized filmmaking environment. Compared to other French New Wave movie, it’s surprisingly funny—although, by 1973, you can make an argument that the New Wave was becoming undistinguishable from the rest of the filmmaking ocean. It’s generally about the relationship that the cast and crew have with making movies—as one character says, “I’d leave a man for a movie, but I’d never leave a movie for a man”—no wonder Hollywood loved this film and gave it an Academy Award. (An interesting bit of trivia is that it was nominated for Oscars two years in a row: first winning the foreign film award for 1973, then nominated for three more Academy Awards for its 1974 American run.)  La nuit américaine may or may not have aged not-so-well—I suspect that while it remains charming and fun today, it’s not quite a fresh or new or revelatory as it must have seemed to an audience decades before lengthy making-of movies (sometimes more interesting than the movies they depict) became such a staple of DVDs and online promotional material.

  • Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)

    Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2019) Considering that the 1942 Doolittle raid over Tokyo was itself mostly a propaganda operation, it does make sense that it would lead to a 1944 propaganda movie about it in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Spencer Tracy is the biggest name in the movie as Doolittle making a few speeches (usually telling his crew that it’s OK if they quit and, in an interesting scene, that they should if they’ll think of themselves as murderers to civilians working in military factories), but much of the film is focused on a small bomber crew as they undergo training, deployment, action and egress to safety. Despite the obvious propagandist value of the film, Dalton Trumbo’s script is a well-constructed journey with likable characters as they go from home to danger and back. It also soft-pedals demonization of the enemy, portraying it as a justifiable response to past slights rather than killing for killing’s sake. (That’s not quite the historical record, but compare that attitude with other 1940s war movies that delight in mass murder and you’ll see the difference.)  As a result, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo has aged better than many films of the era—it’s surprisingly entertaining even today, and some great Oscar-winning special effects do help it stay even more impressive with time.

  • Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars (2017)

    Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, June 2019) Don’t feel bad if you’re just learning that there’s a fifth Starship Troopers film called Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars—most people don’t even know that there was a second one, or that the second and third ones were low-budget live-action efforts before the fourth and fifth became photorealistic computer-animated movies. With such a messy pedigree, it’s kind of a surprise to find out that this fifth film brings back four of the characters and two of the actors (or at least their voices) from the first film, not to mention the same screenwriter. As a result, Traitor of Mars is an interesting follow-up—very much a follow-up to the fourth film in tone and execution, with links going back to the Verhoeven film through its satire of a militaristic society (“Would you like to know more?”) but also to the Heinlein novel in its uncompromising depiction of armoured-suit combat against the arachnid enemy. Much of the film is incredibly dumb, but at least it’s consistently dumb with the rest of the series so far—we’re not really supposed to believe in hordes of alien spiders taking over planets, or that military infantry would be the best solution to that problem, or people being so stupid as to blindly follow a military dictatorship. But those are the assumptions of the series, and Traitor of Mars does make the most out of them. Playing with science-fiction devices such as terraforming towers, this is a film solely dedicated to its action sequences, and accessorily to some kind of mandarins-eating-each-other political subplots making life more difficult for our fighting heroes. It’s actually fun to see all four lead characters of the first film back for more (even Dina Meyer voicing Dizzy Flores!) and the tone, despite the focus on action, is very similar to the original. What’s new since the fourth instalment, of course, if the photorealistic CGI—Traitor of Mars is similar to such efforts as Starship Troopers: Invasion, Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV and Resident Evil: Vendetta, all aiming to deliver as convincing a movie as it’s possible to do inside a computer. It falls short in presenting humans, but often succeeds in shots that don’t show human flesh—making it a perfect choice for exo-armour combat. I’m not going to argue that Traitor of Mars is any good a movie—it could go much farther in both the satire and the action, and at significantly less than 90 minutes it’s not trying to be anything much more than another instalment for the fans. Still, it’s not bad and can even present a few good sequences five movies (or three, depending on how you feel about movies 2 and 3) into the series.

  • The Sandlot (1993)

    The Sandlot (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, June 2019) There are no perfect movies, but there can be archetypical movies—films so accurate in their intentions and execution that it’s hard to imagine them being any better than they are. After a belated first viewing, that’s how I feel about The Sandlot: If you were to make a movie about boomers reflecting on the early 1960s through a narrated coming-of-age comedy about baseball, you would probably end up remaking The Sandlot. The story isn’t that complicated, featuring an unathletic kid trying to make friends in his new neighbourhood and discovering a group of boys playing baseball in a nearby abandoned field, with a dangerous dog on the other side of the fence. It certainly helps that the film, at times, echoes other similar movies such as Stand by Me, A Christmas Carol and Field of Dreams: there’s a universality to its execution that finds an echo across a wide audience, focusing on the low stakes so important to early teenagers, and occasionally slipping into fantastical imagination as an impressionistic device. It works even for people with no particular interest in baseball. There are a handful of striking scenes (some of them still influential, as the trailer for Stranger Things season 3 shows), a feel-good ending, some clever character work and a nostalgic atmosphere that comes close to cloying without quite being stuck in it. After a bland beginning, I progressively got into it and was won over by the end. The Sandlot does exactly what it wants, and it does it as well as anyone could have done.

  • Eight Men Out (1988)

    Eight Men Out (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2019) I’m not much of a baseball person, but even I found myself gradually interested in Eight Men Out’s depiction of the World Series-fixing scandal of 1919—a sordid little footnote in American sports history during which gamblers managed to convince a few White Sox players to deliberately lose games and be compensated by a share of the profits. Perhaps the most interesting thing in writer-director John Sayles’ film is the way even a fixing operation is fraught with complexity: It’s not enough to even convince the players (in this case, helped along by the baseball team owner’s legendary cheapness)—you have to prevent leaks, ensure that they’re paid, and fight against every player’s instinct to win. A bunch of name actors (including John Cusack, David Strathairn, Charlie Sheen and others) help keep Eight Men Out interesting even despite the absence of a satisfying climax: the film mirrors the regrettable real events that led to the lifelong expulsion of eight players from the baseball league—including Shoeless Joe Jackson—, the team owners asserting their control over players (a decades-old theme) and national disillusionment about the purity of baseball. Despite the usual warnings against learning history from Hollywood movies, Eight Men Out is a fascinating illustration of incidents that many would rather not acknowledge … making it even more important a subject.

  • Silver Bullet (1985)

    Silver Bullet (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2019) I’ve been rediscovering a few surprisingly good Stephen King movie adaptations lately, but Silver Bullet won’t be one of them. At best, it’s a middle-of-the-road adaptation, compensating for a familiar premise with a few quirky details, occasional good moments and a fun performance by a crowd-favourite actor. Another take on the well-worn werewolf mythos, Silver Bullet tells us about a pair of teenagers and their quirky uncle taking on a deadly threat stalking their small town. As the bodies pile up, we’re quite obviously stuck in a 1980s horror film aimed at teenagers—the blood flows, the scares can be silly, and the overall atmosphere is more comforting than any kind of horrifying. Werewolf or not, the structure of the film—with its escalating death count and final confrontation—won’t surprise anyone who’s seen any other horror movie before. Still, a few things do save Silver Bullet from all-out mediocrity. The somewhat sympathetic portrait of a teenage protagonist in a wheelchair (played by Corey Haim) may have been intended as exploitative but ends up interesting in its own way. Having Gary Busey step in as an eccentric, alcoholic uncle isn’t played for laughs as much as you’d think (even the film acknowledge that the guy has issues) but remains distinctive due to Busey himself. Finally, there is some good directing here and there, whether it’s a foggy sequence, or the clever revelation of the human identity of the werewolf—although it’s unclear whether these touches come from credited director Dan Attias or the film’s first director Don Coscarelli. In other words, expect a standard werewolf movie and you just might be mildly satisfied.

  • I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)

    I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2019) As much as I like using movies to point out the similarities between past decade and modern times, there are times when films will remind you that the past was something else entirely. It’s bad enough that I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang highlights that there was such a thing as chain gangs, or “a group of prisoners chained together to perform menial or physically challenging work as a form of punishment” as Wikipedia bloodlessly puts it. The barbaric reality on the ground was far more horrific, and this 1930s prison melodrama clearly has a provocative intention in highlighting the inhumanity of southern state’s legal systems: as with many other 1930s prison movies, this one carries the spirit of reform. The plotting is an upsetting blend of prison escape thriller and uplifting by-the-bootstrap melodrama, as our likable protagonist (another great Paul Muni performance) ends up in a chain gang, escapes, is tricked back into another one and escapes again, forever condemned to live in the underworld. Director Mervyn Leroy has a sure hand on his material, making interesting choices on how to portray elapsed time for a multi-decade story, taking us through WW1 and Depression-era America with its day labourers and relaxed moral code. The Pre-Code nature of the film feels vigorous here, being far more suggestive than later movies (what is she doing in his room … oh) and character behaviour (such as spouses cheating on each other) that would be nearly eliminated from moviemaking a few years later. Chain gangs aren’t the least of the film’s dated nature—hearing a female character bluntly state “I’m free, white and 21” had me spending a significant amount of time going down a rabbit hole of 1930s slang that really hasn’t aged well at all. Perhaps the biggest shock of the film comes at the very end, which comes abruptly and refuses us any comfort after the triumphant escape that precedes it—you can see here a very early glimmer of the moral fatalism that would later come to dominate American film noir and unsettle audiences. Despite a few misfires (such as uninteresting female characters), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang easily fulfills the expectations set by its exploitative title, and has us carefully measuring the distance between ourselves and bad ideas of the past.

  • The Sugarland Express (1974)

    The Sugarland Express (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2019) There were many “criminal lovers on the run” movies in the early days of the New Hollywood, so it’s not exactly surprising to realize that The Sugarland Express, Steven Spielberg’s first theatrical film, was in that vein. Already at this early stage of his career, you can recognize several of his characteristic touches as a director: The great camera moves, the touches of humour, and how the film comes alive during its chase sequences. While the conclusion of the film isn’t all laughs, The Sugarland Express is markedly more optimistic than (say) Bonnie and Clyde or Badlands—the very premise of having a couple on the run is made almost comical by this being a slow-speed chase that even recreational vehicles can join as part of a long caravan. Despite the steadily darkening tone, the film is easily at its best during the absurdly slow pursuit in the film’s first two acts. The premise is sustained throughout the film, although there is a near-fatal lull in the middle as the action stops for the night. It’s not particularly easy to emphasize with the dumb thick-headed protagonist, but the dynamic between him, his wife (Goldie Hawn in a somewhat early role) and the policeman they kidnap and hold hostage throughout the rest of the ordeal. Still, especially for Spielberg fans, the quality of the images and the direction remains one of the best reasons to watch The Sugarland Express.

  • The New Karate Kid (1994)

    The New Karate Kid (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2019) Four movies into the franchise, it’s normal that The New Karate Kid looks as if it’s in desperate need of inspiration. Dispensing with the hero of the first three films to take on a new female protagonist didn’t exactly inspire confidence in the material, and the film seems intent on proving all skeptics right. At least Pat Morita is back as Mr. Miyagi, although by this time in the series he had become a caricature of his former self. The plot gets going as Miyagi travels east and encounters a young struggling orphan. If you’ve kept up with the series so far, this fourth entry will not hold any surprise, so closely does it stick close to the martial-arts-as-a-pathway-to-personal-growth template. The gender of the protagonist doesn’t change much. The New Karate Kid is not that good, but Morita carries the movie and Hilary Swank makes it just a bit less painful—her performance is distinctive enough even in a dull movie. Swank fans, you know who you are. You’ll be joined by Karate Kid completists.

  • Nowhere to Run (1993)

    Nowhere to Run (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2019) As dull and featureless as most Jean-Claude Van Damme movies of the early-1990s, Nowhere to Run doesn’t have much to offer to those who aren’t already fans of the actor. Here we have van Damme as an escaped ex-convict (but not the bad kind of ex-convict, obviously) taking up the protection of a widow and her two children against unscrupulous real-estate developers in a rural setting. To be fair, Robert Harmon’s direction does have a few moments, especially in the action sequences. Still, that’s not much—There’s more fun in chuckling at Belgian van Damme pretending to be from Québec, or seeing an unusually cute Rosanna Arquette go through the motions of a rote role. There really isn’t much to gnaw on in the movie, even for action-movie fans—it’s fairly dull stuff, with few surprises in execution. Van Damme was averaging nearly a movie and a half per year in the early 1990s (not an easy feat considering the rigours of an action role), and Nowhere to Run has the bad luck of being sandwiched between the far-better Universal Soldier and Hard Target. In other words, don’t worry too much if you forgot about it—you’re liable to forget about it moments after watching it again.

  • The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)

    The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2019) Knowing that The Serpent and the Rainbow is a horror movie taking place in midt-1980s Haiti, I was expecting the worst—and for the most part I got what I was expecting: the portrayal of a nation torn between petty dictatorship (The Duvalier regime fled the country midway through the shoot, prompting a move to nearly Dominican Republic) and old-school pre-Romero voodoo zombies. In the middle of it comes a white scientist (Bill Pullman, mildly likable) investigating the voodoo drug that turns people into zombies—for pharmaceutical science! What he encounters in Haiti is a nightmare gallery of characters either in service of a terror-based regime complete with genital torture, or all-knowing in the ways of voodoo. What may have been plausibly deniable as drug-fuelled realism turns ambiguously supernatural in time for the ending, with a villain defeated by lost souls freed from their restraints and a hero whose mind can now do telekinesis. No, The Serpent and the Rainbow (very loosely adapted from a true story) does not deal in subtleties. That’s too bad—As a French-Canadian, I have a real affection for Haiti, and I wish the country was portrayed in a somewhat more credible fashion once in a while. On the other hand, and I’m not that happy about it: now that the film is thirty years old, there is some value in it having captured the terror of the Tontons Macoutes and the Duvalier family of despots. The Serpent and the Rainbow is on somewhat firmer ground when dealing straight-up scares: Director Wes Craven knows what he’s doing, and while the hallucination shtick gets obvious early on, he still gets to build a few intriguing images and suspense sequences along the way. The film does also benefit from solid work from Zakes Mokae as a villain, Brent Jennings as a morally chaotic contact, and the very cute Cathy Tyson in the thankless role of the doctor/damsel-in-distress. As distasteful as the stereotypical portrait of Haiti can be, it does add quite a bit of atmosphere to The Serpent and the Rainbow and helps it stand out from blander horror movies of the time.

  • The Grinch (2018)

    The Grinch (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2019) When it comes to Christmas movies, I’ve grown accustomed to as much repetition as Christmas songs—replay them, remake them—I must have seen five different version of A Christmas Carol during December 2018 alone. So, I’m not overly bothered by seeing a third version of The Grinch—I (surprisingly!) didn’t care all that much about the 1968 Boris Karloff one, and was only cautiously positive about the 2000 Jim Carrey one. The reason why this version of The Grinch isn’t as useless as most remakes is that Dr. Seuss’s colourful imagination is far better suited to computer animation than live-action (as shown by at least two other CGI-Seuss features), and so there’s a lot of material for the 2018 version to explore. The result is surprisingly … pleasant. The characters aren’t as grotesque as the live-action version, and directors Scott Mosier and Yarrow Cheney clearly have a lot of fun finding madcap details to stuff in the thin original story. Benedict Cumberbatch’s performance as the Grinch is fine, but it’s a more daring choice to use Pharrell Williams as the narrator. The musical cues are also interesting, going for a slightly newer sampling (“Christmas in Hollis,” Brian Setzer Orchestra’s “Jingle Bells,” Pentatonix, etc.) than the classics. Some of the slapstick gags are genuinely amusing, and the film does manage to shift the Grinch’s opinion of Christmas in a not-too-sappy way (although the ending does drag on a bit). I suspect that seeing the film in June, away from the glut of Xmas madness, may have helped more than hindered. It’s always risky to predict what Christmas film will endure or not, but there’s a good chance that The Grinch will get a lot of play over the next few years. Considering how enjoyable the film is, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

  • The Good Son (1991)

    The Good Son (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, June 2019) There are a few plot devices that irritate me no end, and the bad seed trope is certainly one of them. You know the one because it’s so familiar: the evil amoral sociopathic child, able to pretend that s/he’s the sweetest while killing pets, going after siblings (usually successfully, at least at first) and making our young hero look like the culpable one. You have certainly seen something like this before. Well, The Good Son has it all, albeit with the added wrinkle that the bad seed is McCauley Culkin, taking his Home Alone character and pushing it comfortably into the realm of premeditated murder. Against him is a very young Elijah Wood, trying (unsuccessfully) to convince adults around him that his cousin is irremediably bad and that he’s coming after them next. The ending is elegant in its own fashion (although abrupt), but much of the film is spent in hackneyed thriller territory, with musical stings telling us exactly how to feel about what we’re seeing, and all subtlety being extinguished. The young psychopathic antagonist is maximally detestable, and The Good Son hammers on that theme for roughly an hour out of its total slim running time. Repetitive and irritating—now there’s a recipe for unpleasant watching.

  • The Weight of Water (2000)

    The Weight of Water (2000)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, June 2019) I came to The Weight of Water with expectations that were far too high. As one of the few movies I still hadn’t seen from director Kathryn Bigelow, I was really looking forward to it. Bigelow has a long track record of entertaining movies, but The Weight of Water is something else. Despite a murder mystery and a cast headlined by Sean Penn and Elizabeth Hurley, it turns out to be a disappointing bore. The premise has to do with a modern photographer investigating a centuries-old murder mystery, with the movie flashing back to the earlier era to show us what happened. Or may have happened, or what they wished had happened—it’s that kind of film where the first act goes so deep into fantasy that anything may happen and it would be infuriating if we hadn’t stopped caring well before that point. The narration across two centuries doesn’t really bring anything together, the drama seems to repeat itself endlessly even in a relatively short picture and the film is far duller than the director’s reputation may suggest. The irritating overblow cinematography does nothing to make the film any less lifeless or uninteresting. Yes, I dozed off at some point and didn’t feel I had missed anything—I certainly did not feel as if I had to rewind and re-watch. I’m glad I’m a bit more of a Bigelow completist now, but not that happy about The Weight of Water itself.