Reviews

  • Les Pee-Wee 3D: L’hiver qui a changé ma vie [The Pee-Wee 3D: The Winter That Changed My Life] (2012)

    Les Pee-Wee 3D: L’hiver qui a changé ma vie [The Pee-Wee 3D: The Winter That Changed My Life] (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2020) Exactly no one was asking for a teen hockey film in three dimensions, but I suppose that the marketing coup in the small French-Canadian market was worth it – and let’s face it, audiences here lap up any kind of hockey film. Les Pee-Wee 3D: L’hiver qui a changé ma vie is familiar material – three young teenagers are brought together by hockey, learning life lessons along the way and competing in a major tournament as a test of their skills. Two boys and one girl share lead roles, and director Eric Tessier effectively moves the pieces of this small-scale sports film. The drama is shot cleanly, the hockey sequences are pretty good, and everything in between is unobtrusive. People who aren’t from Canada (and even more so French-Canada) can’t quite understand the enormous infrastructure that makes the country such an effective hockey-player factory, and it starts at the very junior level. If nothing else, Les Pee-Wee is a glimpse into that subculture, a pleasant-enough sports film for teenagers, and an easy crowd-pleaser. Surprisingly enough, the film got a sequel five years later, Junior Majeur, which followed the main characters into their early adult years, with far darker and more complicated subplots.

  • Ah-ga-ssi [The Handmaiden] (2016)

    Ah-ga-ssi [The Handmaiden] (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Kanopy Streaming, December 2020) Whenever there’s a new film by Chan-wook Park, the only good approach is to settle back in your seat and just accept what’s going to happen. You won’t be able to predict what happens. You won’t be prepared for the gorgeous set design. You won’t know on which tone the scenes are going to dance. You won’t know anything, so just enjoy. The Handmaiden is another illustration of this – a crime thriller that’s in part horrifying, suspenseful, erotic, angry, provocative, surprising, astonishing, awe-inspiring and darkly comic. It’s a blend of western inspiration and eastern execution (the premise is inspired by a novel from Welsh novelist Sarah Walters, but the setting and execution are thoroughly Korean) and it’s so thoroughly queer that it becomes inclusive. The Handmaiden isn’t for everyone, but it’s a wild ride for those who can brave its daredevil approach.

  • Parental Guidance (2012)

    Parental Guidance (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2020) While Billy Crystal isn’t listed as one of Parental Guidance’s screenwriters (although he is a producer), his brand of amiable old-school humour gets a pretty good fit in this story of generational clashes. The laughs begin when a couple has to go away for business and calls their parents to babysit the kids for a few days. Predictably, the old-school parenting represented by Crystal (and co-star Bette Midler) doesn’t quite fit the caricatural newageish instructions left by the parents… and things go on from there. It’s all meant to be sweet and easy to watch, which means that you will see every subplot coming from a mile away. As expected, Crystal plays into cranky baby-boomer stereotypes whose blunter methods of parenting can fill the gaps left by the too-permissive parents, and the ending sees personal growth for everyone involved. Unobtrusively directed by Andy Fickman (which apparently means letting Crystal do whatever he wants), the screenwriting tricks are obvious, the comedy is played broadly and the stereotypes take the place of characterization. And yet, it’s not unwatchable. Marisa Tomei is always a plus, and even the predictable sappiness works in wrapping up the film satisfyingly. Sure, Parental Guidance is Hollywood in autopilot mode, but when the formula works for most audiences, it works.

  • Rare Exports (2010)

    Rare Exports (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2020) The idea of a horror film in which Santa isn’t a kindly friend to all isn’t exactly original these days, but it’s given an energetic spin in Finnish writer-director Jalmari Helander’s Rare Exports. The Santa mythology is taken for a spin when a vast and ancient burial chamber is discovered inside one of Finland’s mountains – and a violent creature escapes. Santa is scary here, and his elves aren’t much better. Equal parts action, fantasy, horror and plain old holiday comedy, Rare Exports is a high-concept, low-brow mainstream crowd-pleaser… at least in concept. The material isn’t as much “psycho Santa with an axe” (as is often the case when horror meets Christmas) but “Krampus by another name.” Visually, it’s surprisingly slick: good special effects combined with Finnish shooting locations mean that we get a cold wintry atmosphere made for chills, and some very sharp cinematography. Narratively, the film struggles a bit more: The script doesn’t get to the meat of its premise for a long time, and there’s a sense that the film has more ideas than the means required to execute them. The ending doesn’t quite tie things up enough (the final joke is based on a previous short film by the writer-director, which doesn’t necessarily fit with the rest) and the pacing of the entire film is inconsistent. Nonetheless, there’s some interesting material here, and given Rare Exports’ lack of holiday cheer it can play pretty well at any time other than the weeks leading up to December 25.

  • 1917 (2019)

    1917 (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) World War I has long been neglected by Hollywood – WW2 gets all of the attention, and the technical improvements in digital cinema weren’t necessarily used to update the portrait of the Great War as much as they’ve been used to rethink other conflicts. But that’s all over with the arrival of 1917, which not only serves a big wide-scope view of the war that encompasses its multiple facets, but does it with an insane gamble: following two messengers through a pair of very, very, very long continuous shots giving viewers the immediacy of them being involved in the conflict without cuts away from the action. It’s a bravura performance from writer-director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins, and it works surprisingly well, what with the digital wizardry blending everything together as time passes unnaturally fast and yet we find our characters going from one episodic adventure to the other. The feeling left by this sweeping view of a large-scale conflict is gripping, and yet very personal for our two viewpoint characters. There’s something fascinating in seeing how modern filmmaking technology can enhance the immersive experience even further, and thanks to everyone involved in 1917, World War I has never felt so real, immediate and relevant.

  • Trolls World Tour (2020)

    Trolls World Tour (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) The cinematic Trolls universe gets a massive upgrade in Trolls World Tour as the storytelling becomes more self-assured and the universe is expanded so that the “Pop Trolls” of the first film are joined by five other tribes of musically-oriented creatures. Pushing the pacing to ludicrous levels and going for a jukebox musical rhythm that thinks that twenty seconds of each song is too long, this sequel is almost relentlessly colourful. The result is bright, fun, slightly overbearing, and yet very cheerful – exactly what’s needed in this glum 2020. The animation is superb, and the visual style of the film extends to accommodate six very different aesthetics as we discover one troll tribe after another. As if that wasn’t enough, the film even serves an inclusivity 201 seminar to the kids by slapping down its heroine as she talks about trolls “being all the same” to prefer a celebration of what each race of trolls brings to the diverse whole. Whew. While I wasn’t overly positive about the first instalment of the series, I’m considerably happier with Trolls World Tour: It’s bigger, better, more ambitious and doesn’t feature the ugly antagonists of the first film nearly as much. I may even be curious to see where else a third film may want to go.

  • Once Upon a Time at Christmas (2017)

    Once Upon a Time at Christmas (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2020) Look, I get it – by mid-December, anyone driven insane by syrupy Christmas store music, inane Christmas movies, the pressure to buy and consume, or the non-negotiable requirements of Christmas family traditions can sour on the holidays. And the impulse to transgress whatever is wholesome in the world is equally strong among horror filmmakers. In that light, Once Upon a Time at Christmas feels like an inevitable production: Down-tempo Christmas tunes provide the soundtrack to serial killers (a psychopathic army veteran and a strip-mall Harley Quinn) rampaging through a small town to the cue of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” –a connection that takes forever for the local police to make. The film seems curiously enamoured of its murderous pair as they pile up the bodies by the dozens and seem unstoppable even in taking on the FBI. This killer-worship goes on right up to the very forgiving conclusion, and as someone who doesn’t react well to stories in which the serial killers are unstoppable or (ick) presented as folk heroes – a curiously unpopular opinion in today’s horror fandom – I was just about ready to fire Once Upon a Time at Christmas into the sun at the fifteen-minute mark. What kept my finger off the launch button was a certain occasional grace in execution – director Paul Tanter may not be working with the best screenplay nor the highest budget, but he occasionally nails a scene, doesn’t let the limits of his production show too much, and does justice to the material when the third quarter of the script gets slightly more interesting. Alas, this comes crashing down once again toward the end as the shortcomings of the screenplay become increasingly vexing, and the conclusion can’t deliver what’s needed for the film to escape its nature as a cheap schlocky disappointment. Once Upon a Time at Christmas is not funny, it’s not scary, and it’s not worth the trouble. I’m ready to go back to the big-city-girl-goes-back-to-her-hometown Christmas rom-coms now. Gladly.

  • Silent Night (2012)

    Silent Night (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2020) Whether Silent Night is a remake, reboot or legacy sequel of the “classic” slasher film Silent Night, Deadly Night is immaterial – it’s still a Christmas-themed slasher, and you know what that means: paper-thin writing, excessive gore, nihilistic humour and straightforward filmmaking. This film doesn’t break the rules, as a psychotic Santa goes around murdering those on his naughty list. Silent Night is really for the hardcore horror fans more than general audiences: it delivers what’s expected in that subgenre, and doesn’t even pretend to be anything more. I suppose that its best audiences are mid-December gorehounds tired of relentless holiday cheer.

  • Susan Slept Here (1954)

    Susan Slept Here (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) On paper, Susan Slept Here sound revolting. After all, the story has a 35-year-old screenwriter fostering, then immediately marrying a 17-year-old-runaway. It gets even woooorse when you realize that star Dick Powell was 50 and Debbie Reynolds was 22 the year the film was released. Even calibrating by 1950s standards, this is far beyond the frontiers of creepy. But everything is in the execution, and excuses can be found in details. For one thing, the film is built to be a comedy examining the age difference between the leads and often acknowledges the repellence of the situation. What’s more, the younger woman is clearly the dominant partner in Susan Slept Here – her desires are what drives the film, and her street-smart personality clearly outshines that of the older, somewhat boring man. This is even reinforced in a dream sequence ballet in which she sees her crush being seduced by a four-armed spider woman and chokes someone to gain the key to her freedom from a cage. If that’s not weird enough, consider that the film is narrated by an Academy Award statuette. Oh, yes, there’s a lot going on here – pretty good dialogue, Powell turning in a swan song of sorts (it was his final film appearance) and Reynolds being very good in a tricky role. The predictable ending will still make everyone uncomfortable, except that “uncomfortable” is still a great deal better than “aghast,” which may have been a possibility had lesser talents had handled Susan Slept Here’s built-in creepiness.

  • Le père Noël est une ordure [Santa Claus Is a Stinker] (1982)

    Le père Noël est une ordure [Santa Claus Is a Stinker] (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2020) Christmas Eve is an ideal time to revisit French classic comedy Le père Noël est une ordure. After all, the last few weeks have been a relentless assault of holiday cheer, humanist values, peace on Earth and goodwill among all humans – it’s time for something different. The very least you can say about this film is that it’s at the opposite end of the Christmas spirit. Taking place at a suicide hotline on Christmas Eve, it features exceptionally misanthropic characters behaving extremely badly, and this until the very end of the film. It’s probably more offensive and funnier today than it’s ever been, because part of the film’s joy is how bluntly it revels in its hatred for humanity. The humour isn’t sophisticated, but most of it is nasty enough to make even jaded viewers aghast – pure shock comedy. Unlike its markedly inferior American remake Mixed Nuts, it doesn’t even try to blunt the nastiest edges of the narrative. This was my first viewing in decades, but certainly not my first viewing: Le père Noël est une ordure was, somehow, a fixture of French-Canadian television holiday schedules in the mid-to-late 1980s, and seems to still be running strong even today. It’s not going to be for everyone, but it’s refreshingly going for broke in the ways it tries to make viewers laugh, and damn those who may be offended.

  • It Happened on Fifth Avenue (1947)

    It Happened on Fifth Avenue (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) Generally speaking, the best Christmas movies are both about the typical values of Christmas (family, generosity, kindness) while having other things on the go than simply waiting for December 25. Such is the case with It Happened on Fifth Avenue, a film that doesn’t necessarily revel in the pageantry of the season, but does its best to showcase Christmas values. The story has, over the years, acquired a patina of period-specific characteristics, as veterans returned from WW2 can’t find places to stay due to a housing crisis, and see themselves left on the margins of society even as able-bodied, skilled people. A solution offers itself to the protagonist of our story, as he’s told about a rich man’s mansion left unoccupied while the owner winters over in another state. Two homeless men living in luxury seems like an ideal arrangement until the daughter of the owner shows up and passes herself off as another vagabond. Then the father comes back and also pretends to be a homeless person in his own house… Pretty soon, the film is awash in romance, hidden identities, crucial choices, a makeshift micro-society in an opulent house, and Holiday cheer as Christmas draws closer and closer. Director Roy Del Ruth does a good job keeping everything humming along, which is supported by Don DeFore as the protagonist, and the very cute Gale Storm as the disguised owner’s daughter. While It Happened on Fifth Avenue is not specifically geared toward being an outright comedy and thus suffers from a few lulls, the entire film is quite charming and Christmas-adjacent enough to be worth a look even if you’re burnt out by Christmas Eve. It’s a crowd-pleaser in the most classic sense, and hits its marks no matter when you see it during the year.

  • Spotlight on Christmas aka Starring Christmas (2020)

    Spotlight on Christmas aka Starring Christmas (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2020) By now, the formulaic nature of Christmas romantic comedies made in the Hallmark/Lifetime tradition is so well-defined that even my local middlebrow radio station had a segment about it. (There was a local connection — my hometown of Ottawa is a major player in the Christmas movie production market considering that there’s usually more snow here than in any other filmmaking centre.) Take an urban career professional, send her back to her hometown in time for Christmas, have her meet a single hunk (bonus points if they were high school sweethearts), have them spend some time together with our urban professional bringing some of her professionalism for a local cause and the rest of the film writes itself. The amazing thing is that even by 2020, the formula is still followed precisely: Spotlight on Christmas distinguishes itself from the pack by making the heroine a famous Hollywood actress, but otherwise sticks to the formula as if it was deathly afraid of any deviation. Given my interest in all things Hollywood (even funhouse distortion of it) and the current December Christmas spirit, I thought I’d give it a chance and see if I had any fun watching it. It must have been the magic of the holidays, because I did – although I have to admit that I left the film playing while doing something else: This is not meant to be dense filmmaking, and the nature of the formula means that you can take five-minute breaks and still follow what was happening perfectly well. Still, the failure mode of Christmas romantic movies is nowhere near that of other genres: They’re upbeat, charming, not meant to be taken seriously and innocuous, even at their worst. The barrier for success is low and the crews working on those films are practised enough that it’s hard to mess up the recipe. Complaining that Spotlight on Christmas is strikingly unrealistic in its portrayal of an actress’ life is completely missing the point, as is any comment saying that their relationship won’t make it past Easter. It’s meant to be a comforting blanket with as few real-life reminders as possible and by that metric, Spotlight on Christmas is neither better nor worse than other movies made in that genre. It’ll rerun for years and be forgotten within days, that second characteristic feeding into the first one. It is exactly what it is.

  • Hip Hop Holiday (2019)

    Hip Hop Holiday (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2020) One of BET television’s 2019 Christmastime offerings is Hip Hop Holiday, a romantic comedy set during the holidays within the world of Hip-Hop showbiz. Trina Braxton stars as an initially unbearable diva who gets a gradual personality change thanks to the reappearance of an old flame. As is often the case with those bad-girls-redeemed-by-good-men tales (or the gender-flipped reverse), there’s a feeling that everything that made the character interesting is gradually stripped away by the ongoing romance, until, at the end, we’re left with a near-lobotomized version of the person we started with. That’s not being against personality growth in movie narratives – it’s wishing that something more interesting would replace the abrasive hellion that we start with. The same goes for the film in general: while the world of Hip-Hop makes for a decent backdrop to the action, this too gradually disappears throughout the film to focus almost exclusively on the mini-universe of the romantic couple. This doesn’t help Hip Hop Holiday overcome the usual problems with Christmas romances – the foreordained conclusion, slap-dash dialogue, lower production budget and heavy reliance on audience goodwill. Hip Hop Holiday is certainly acceptable (especially as background noise), but there’s nothing here to warrant sustained attention.

  • USS Christmas (2020)

    USS Christmas (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2020) The Hallmark Christmas movie behemoth leers toward the American military-entertainment complex in USS Christmas, a transposition of the brand’s usual serving of holiday romance to a military setting. The plot has to do with a journalist taking a tiger cruise, encountering a mysteriously seductive Grinch (it’s his call name) and digging into a romantic mystery in the ship’s archives. While the aircraft carrier makes for a more intriguing than usual backdrop to the romance, the film pretty much plays to expectations. If you’ve seen a Hallmark Christmas romance movie, you‘ll be right at ease here – the intent is comfort, not surprise or shock. Alas, this also means that the film gets away with the usual problems of the brand: cute-but-not-sexy leads, mismatched chemistry, outrageous plot holes and, specific to USS Christmas, a very long list of inaccuracies from mismatch between stock footage and shooting location to being fuzzy about service distinction, to the characters simply not acting like officers would. (Thanks to a very well-informed American audience, there are long and hilariously detailed lists of the film’s mistakes.) Whether USS Christmas works will depend on your expectations. Just want something to throw on the TV while wrapping gifts? That’ll do. Expecting anything more? Skip to the next film, any next film.

  • To All a Goodnight (1980)

    To All a Goodnight (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2020) As a representative example of the golden age of slashers and an explanation as to why the subgenre crashed and burnt two years later, To All a Goodnight makes for an eloquent demonstration. Classic to the point of feeling like a grotesque carnival of clichés, it sees a group of girls isolated in a boarding school during the Christmas Break, having sex with their sneaky boyfriends and being brutally murdered (along with said boyfriends) by someone in a Santa suit. If you’re looking for the most average slasher, it’s hard to do better: the film is cleanly structured as a slasher with regularly scheduled kills no matter if they make sense or not; a whodunit that’s not really surprising (although there’s an additional fillip that presages many such twists in future films); and matter-of-fact direction by David Hess. Everything that one can hate about slashers, from rampant misogyny to cheap narrative to terrible dialogue to excessive levels of violence, can be found here – conversely, fans of the form may find just enough here to make them happy for an evening. To All a Goodnight (good title, though!) is not the best, not the worst, but as a mediocre example of 1980s slashers, it’s exactly what it tries to be.