Reviews

  • Pocketful of Miracles (1961)

    Pocketful of Miracles (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) I’ll go easy on remakes if the director of the original is the one remaking it, and here we have Pocketful of Miracles, Frank Capra’s remake of his own 1933 romantic comedy Lady for a Day. The story of a mob boss transforming a street vendor into a society madam for the purpose of impressing her marrying daughter remains the same, but some aspects of the film have been upgraded – the colour cinematography is easier to take in for modern audiences, and the camera has a greater degree of freedom here than in the early 1930s. The acting talent here is also quite a bit better: It’s hard to argue against Bette Davis as the Pollyannaed street vendor, and the cast (which also had Glenn Ford and then-girlfriend Hope Lange) includes an early appearance by Peter Falk and a screen debut for Ann-Margret as the vendor’s daughter. Still, it’s not hard to prefer the original version: Capra’s early enthusiasm is not reflected in the more workmanlike execution of the remake (which would end up being his last film) and the story, even as a conscious 1930s period piece, seems to fit more closely in Depression-era America than the early-1960s. This remake is also far too long for its own good at a staggering 137 minutes. Still, if that’s going to be Capra’s swan song, then it’s not a bad one: Pocketful of Miracles still manages to exhibit the writer-director’s faith in the ordinary Americans and his compassionate touch.

  • Capharnaüm (2018)

    Capharnaüm (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, December 2020) If you’re wondering what’s the barest minimum “recommended” review I can give, I suppose it would look a lot like this take on Capharnaüm – a strong film that I did not enjoy watching and have no intention to ever watch again. Taking up deep into the misery of children surviving at the bottom of the slums of Beirut, it follows the hardscrabble life of a hardened 12-year-old living on the streets and trying to take care of even younger children. There is a cinematic plot of sorts, having to do with the young man wanting to sue his parents for neglect, but the heart of the film is in the near-documentary footage shot in abominably poor conditions, describing the daily reality of a nightmarish existence. Writer-director Nadine Labaki doesn’t quite control the high-level construction of her film, but certainly lets the images speak for themselves in creating an atmosphere and establishing character. But Capharnaüm is absolutely not entertaining to watch – more like a harrowing two-hour documentary than a piece of narrative fiction. I can certainly understand why it got the acclaim it received (all the way to an Oscar nomination) but I had a hard time making it to the end, and can go live a happier life now that I don’t have to do so again.

  • Dumbo (2019)

    Dumbo (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Disney+ Streaming, December 2020) Et tu, Burton? What dubious privilege it is to see the brightest minds of our generation enslaved in service of The Mouse’s insatiable pursuit of profit, pilfering its back catalogue for inspiration as if originality was blasphemous. The latest victim is Tim Burton, whose “imagination” (as falsely claimed in the trailer) is servile to the recreation of Dumbo’s familiar story. To be fair, it’s easy to understand what could attract him to such a project: the thought of recreating a 1920s circus in big-budget glory must have been irresistible, and playing into such a classic sandbox must have had its appeal. Part of Dumbo does work: the visual polish of the production is lovely, and there’s some occasional cuteness to the CGI Dumbo. The actors also do decent work (Michael Keaton and Danny Devito, in particular), but the heart of the film is missing – an overstuffed script takes away from the linear simplicity of what could have been, and it takes forever for the film to get somewhere interesting. I suppose there’s something meta-ironic (or something) in having the film explicitly talk about the commodification of wonder in search of ever-greater profit. Not that it worked – like many of the latest Disney live-action adaptations, Dumbo barely made any money considering the magnitude of the investment. Not that we’re any closer to an end to them – the end game is probably to offer a live-action equivalent to the entire animated catalogue on Disney+. It will keep going as long as Disney exists as a for-profit entity.

  • A Christmas Carol (1984)

    A Christmas Carol (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) Surprisingly, some of the best depictions of Scrooge and the classic Dickens story A Christmas Carol have come by way of television movies – the 1999 Patrick Stewart one, for instance, or even this 1984 George C. Scott version. While visible shot on a smaller budget and with a simpler visual style, this version succeeds based on performances (Scott being a leading one), atmosphere and a certain straightforwardness at only 100 minutes running time. Quite faithful to the original, its deviations are few and acceptable – it sticks to the smallest amount of fantasy possible to tell the story, and director Clive Donner finds a balance between establishing atmosphere and being efficient about the narrative. If you’re in the mood for an efficient, old-school presentation of a classic, this version of A Christmas Carol is it – it still feels modern enough to be easily watchable (something that’s not always true of the black-and-white versions, alas) while sticking close enough to the foundation to avoid the distinctiveness of other versions.

  • La morte viene dallo spazio [The Day the Sky Exploded] (1958)

    La morte viene dallo spazio [The Day the Sky Exploded] (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2020) In my travels as an apprentice Science Fiction film historian, there are wonders that cannot be enjoyed. Such is the case with The Day the Sky Exploded, which has the dual distinction of being the first Italian Science Fiction film, and the first film directed by later legend of Italian cinema Mario Bava. I did like the techno-thrillerish premise of targeting asteroids heading for Earth, but the execution here is bargain-basement clearance value – ramshackle sets, unconvincing actors, plenty of stock footage and an atrocious script, even in translation. So let’s file The Day the Sky Exploded under “historically important, otherwise unbearable” and move on.

  • Remember the Night (1940)

    Remember the Night (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) It’s hard to go wrong with Preston Sturges, Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, even if Remember the Night is a portent of better things to come for all of them. An incredible contrivance is at the heart of the story – a District Attorney taking an accused shoplifter with him on a long car trip to spend Christmas with his parents. It’s a splendid excuse for a romantic comedy, though – with Stanwyck as the corrupt temptress and MacMurray as the letter-perfect officer of the law, working at tempering their differences and gradually falling in love along the way. (Their climactic kiss takes place in front of Niagara Falls, on the Canadian side.) This was the last film exclusively penned by Sturges before he took up directing (Mitchell Leisen directed this one), and it’s filled with great moments, good dialogue, clever plotting and well-sketched characters. Remember the Night manages the impressive trick of being both archetypical enough to summarize quickly, and has a stuffed plot to make the moment-to-moment watching of the film engaging enough. It’s both a Christmas film and something that can be watched any other month of the year: when it’s funny, it’s very funny, and when it’s romantic, it’s very romantic. And yet, all three major players here would go on to bigger and better successes, sometimes even with each other – Stanwyck and Sturges in The Lady Eve, Stanwyck and MacMurray in Double Indemnity, and, of course, Sturges by himself with an extraordinary series of films over the following few years.

  • Los amantes pasajeros [I’m So Excited!] (2013)

    Los amantes pasajeros [I’m So Excited!] (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, December 2020) No one writes and directs films like Pedro Almodovar, and certainly no one can write an airplane thriller comedy like him. Largely taking place aboard a flight from Madrid to Mexico City that develops technical problems that may lead to a crash, I’m So Excited! takes a campy, comic, and very queer approach to its material, with lusty gay flight attendants trading barbs, sharing sexual exploit stories and drugging passengers to keep them quiet. The contrivances and complications inevitably reach Almodovarian proportions, enough to remind us that nothing here is meant to be serious or credible. While colourful and comic, I’m So Excited! is also overly broad and lightweight – and perhaps a bit dull when compared to its own best moments. The paradoxical result is that while bits and pieces of the film are great good fun, there’s too much of the not-so-much-fun material to keep a consistent tone. Another thing that really does not help is a female-on-male rape that’s played for laugh and singlehandedly slaps down the film’s good-natured charm by a full star or more. The last act also loses steam at a crucial moment where it should get crazier, and it doesn’t leave the film in the best shape in viewers’ minds as they take it all in. There’s clearly some potential here in having Almodovar go big, broad and colourful – but there are too many false notes (some of them honkers) in here to be completely acceptable.

  • Charlie’s Angels (2019)

    Charlie’s Angels (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, December 2020) No. Just no. I’ve had it with misandry promoted as female empowerment. True equality is not a film in which all men are portrayed as evil, duplicitous or incompetent. This Charlie’s Angels’ self-satisfied assertion that this is, like, the first time anyone has even thought about having female action heroes is immensely grating, and the script goes out of its way to be actively unpleasant in matters of male-bashing. The thing is, I don’t actually hate the entire thing: Despite some fun-killing wrong notes, writer-director-star-producer Elizabeth Banks (who deservedly earns every good and bad comment about the film) can direct a few good sequences even if her writing is repetitive and bland. Ella Balinska is a joy to watch, and Kristen Stewart is surprisingly compelling here. With a few tweaks to tone down the stridently misandrist tone (and a few more viewings of McG’s previous Charlie’s Angels films to understand why they were actually fun), this could have been much better. And if all of this makes me a reactionary… so be it. But I have a feeling that this is going to age badly enough that everyone, male or female or other, is going to see this Charlie’s Angels in twenty years and roll their eyes. That is, if anyone remembers it.

  • Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019)

    Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Disney+ Streaming, December 2020) If you’ll allow me to be cranky for just a moment, let me rant for a hundred words on how I dislike the current trend of not allowing villain to remain villains. You don’t need to remind me that there aren’t that many self-acknowledged villains in real life – everyone has their reasons, and all can rationalize them. But in fiction? Let me have some evil people running amok, making life difficult for the heroes. Don’t go digging into their backstories, making them misunderstood sad sacks, or rewriting their heinous acts as good-faith errors. Alas, that’s the entire point of Maleficent and its sequel Mistress of Evil: shift perspective to the antagonist and show that, aw, she’s really a good girl after all. Or at least not as bad as the other girls. Whatever. But (twist!), this excessive humanization of the antagonist isn’t the worst aspect of the film – that would be the overstuffed yet unsatisfying story, which muddles its own morals and crams so much material in what should be a simpler (and shorter!) film that it loses its interest at every new complication. The weak script is partially offset by strong performances (none as impressive as Angelina Jolie’s return in the title role) and phenomenal special effects, but not enough to bring the film to an acceptable level. Disney’s live-action looting of its library doesn’t necessarily get better when it starts spinning off “original sequels” to the riffs – it just underscores how desperate the Mouse can be for sure hits. And no, I don’t want to humanize The Mouse’s actions at this point.

  • Croisières sidérales [Sideral Cruises] (1942)

    Croisières sidérales [Sideral Cruises] (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) Oh! Oh! As a budding Science Fiction historian, I always get a thrill whenever I discover a forgotten piece of SF history. Croisières sidérales certainly qualifies as such, considering that it’s probably the first film to tackle general relativity… and it comes from nowhere else but Vichy France. The technicalities of the film are ludicrous, as a hot-air balloon takes its passengers to Venus (!) and then back to Earth (!!) except that for them the past 15 days have been equivalent to 25 years on Earth (!!!), which makes for significant changes as they return to see their loved ones. That’s right – a full half-century before Interstellar, there’s some time dilatation used for dramatic effect. If the hot-air balloon thing hasn’t aged well, the film’s last section, in which our astronauts must compose with suddenly grown-up children and aged relatives, is quite nice in its own way. Now, I wouldn’t want the film’s cutting-edge ideas to overshadow its far more disappointing execution: the film’s production values are not good, it badly blends disparate tones from poetic realism to musical comedy, and the pacing is often very, very slow. But that’s the price to pay to discover a film that is almost entirely absent from the histories of Science Fiction film. To think it was made when Nazis controlled the French film industry is even more amazing. It’s frankly not worth a watch if you’re just a casual SF fan, but it’s essential for those who are serious about studying the field. After all, Science Fiction was nearly absent from Hollywood during the entire 1940s – this makes Croisières sidérales, almost by default, one of the best SF films of the decade.

  • For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism (2009)

    For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) Of course, you would find a review of For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism on a site dedicated to film reviewing and criticism. Critics talking about criticism is catnip to critics, and writer-director Gerald Peary clearly knows this: his film is pretty much all about the basics of American Film Criticism over the past hundred years, featuring archival footage, talking-head interviews and a bit of narration from Patricia Clarkson. All the major pre-2010 critics are featured here, whether it’s Ebert, Kael (in archival footage), Scott, Mitchell, Maltin, Maslin, Reed and Siskel. Amazingly enough in a passing-the-torch kind of manner, it also features Harry Knowles at the height of his popularity (now thankfully over, but I remember those times), and Karina Longworth long before she became the podcaster of the essential You Must Remember This. The production values of this documentary are on the lower end, but the content is great. Crucially, the film was shot over eight years, through the growing obsolescence of print film criticism – while this dates the film in significant ways, it also preserves this facet of American film history when it was relatively fresh. Surprisingly enough, there weren’t (aren’t?) many or any formal histories of film criticism at the time of For the Love of Movies’ release – this is both original and important as a first-draft history and as a celebration of the meaning of criticism. Far from taking cheap shots at something that nearly everyone thinks they can do (I cough-cough guiltily), this is a documentary that insists on establishing how movies would be poorer without critical commentary.

  • Johnny Dangerously (1984)

    Johnny Dangerously (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2020) I’m not going to pretend that Johnny Dangerously is a great comedy. But I will say that it seems to have been unfairly forgotten over the decades. There are reasons for this, of course: This is Michael Keaton playing a mobster during his silliest era, and his run of 1980s comedies doesn’t get enough appreciation. Then this is a 1930s gangster film parody, and most people don’t remember those as clearly as they did even in the 1980s. (Although you could almost see Johnny Dangerously as a predictive parody of 1991’s Billy Bathgate.) It’s also quite uneven in matters of jokes – some witty bits are juxtaposed with broad dumb stuff, and the effect isn’t as much a film going for all kinds and levels of humour (something I usually respect and encourage) but a film that can’t quite find its own specific comic sensibility. This being said, there is some really funny stuff here, and some of the players (notably Peter Boyle, Joe Piscopo, Griffin Dunne and a younger Danny DeVito) carry their part really well. Keaton himself is charm and hilarity, while director Amy Heckerling can deliver a joke but often has trouble keeping some tonal unity over the entire thing. Johnny Dangerously may aspire to high-pace spoof comedy, but doesn’t quite stick the landing. Now, the best thing I could do to you would be to lower your expectations so that by the time you finally see the film, you would think that it’s better than you thought it would be. So here goes: Uneven but sporadically funny, Johnny Dangerously will do if you think you’ve seen the big comedies of the 1980s and are now making your way through the rest. It has a few funny surprises for you.

  • Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983)

    Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) Don’t go around thinking that Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is some kind of holiday movie, because it’s really weirder than that. It’s actually a Japanese-made WW2 drama starring David Bowie as an interpreter in a Prisoner of War camp where the strict commander of the camp develops a homoerotic fascination for him. Nothing less. Matters of honour and sacrifice weigh heavily in the dramatic arc of the film until the somewhat bittersweet conclusion. Writer-director Nagisa Ōshima credibly portrays the atmosphere of a WW2 POW camp, but the film’s subtle and meandering tone eventually takes its toll. In the end, I found Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence more intriguing as a concept than interesting to watch. At least it’s not another Hallmark Christmas special…

  • Every Girl Should Be Married (1948)

    Every Girl Should Be Married (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) With a title like Every Girl Should Be Married, it’s fair to say that the film won’t ever win any progressive awards. If you happen to watch the now-hilarious trailer, your expectations may run even lower. But the movie itself is a bit more mixed – starting with the heroine’s deeply held belief that women should be free to make the first move (hurrah) but continuing with the same heroine going for some good old-fashioned stalking instead (boo). Of course, the target of her affection is played by Cary Grant, who effortlessly deflects all of her attempts until it’s time for him to yield and for the film to end. Let’s admit right away that Every Girl Should Be Married is a middle-tier Grant film, perhaps even a lower-tier one. Grant is charming enough to make it worthwhile, but there’s a limit to how much he can elevate the material. Playing opposite him is Besty Drake, who would become Grant’s third wife not even a year after the release of the film. (Not that it will make you feel better, but they started dating before the shoot.) It’s certainly not unwatchable – you can make an argument that the female protagonist has a lot more agency than most of the female romantic comedy protagonists of the time. But Grant has made enough good-to-great romantic comedies that even an intermittently interesting one can feel like a step backward.

  • Cold Pursuit (2019)

    Cold Pursuit (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, December 2020) Producers apparently aren’t done with Liamsploitation film, apparently, and neither am I: if you want to cast sixty-something Liam Neeson as a plow truck driver going on a rampage of revenge against the local mob for killing his son, then be my guest. But Cold Pursuit does have a slightly different flavour from other Liamsploitation films. The setting, high up in the snowy mountains, is distinctive enough. But it’s the tone of the film, adapted from Norwegian action film Kraftidioten, that makes it as distinctive as The Grey was. Here, we get a revenge story served as a very dark comedy, from distinctive angles chosen by director Hans Petter Moland (who also directed the original) to visually scratching out the names of the (many) deceased as they are taken out of the story. It’s a bit of flourish over what could have been a very familiar story of grieving dads, mob war, escalating revenge and baroque death scenes. It’s certainly watchable, and perhaps (due to its off-beat tone) slightly more memorable than other comparable Liamsploitation films. At some point, we can all have fun seeing Neeson plowing into other guys all movie long. Wait, that didn’t come out right…