Reviews

  • Captains Courageous (1937)

    Captains Courageous (1937)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) It’s amazing to see what earlier era considered perfectly acceptable entertainment for kids. 1937’s Captain Courageous, for instance, adapted an 1897 Rudyard Kipling novel and refashioned it as a coming-of-age story for a spoiled rich boy swept overboard and rescued by fishermen, who teach him much about fishing and life. Considering that it’s a story that includes the gruesome death of a main character by sagittal bisection, well, I’m not going to begrudge the current crop of kids’ films. Still, the result can be surprisingly enjoyable. Freddie Bartholomew turns in a good performance as the boy, with an endearing turn by curly-haired Spencer Tracy, and supporting roles for both Lionel Barrymore and Mickey Rooney. Tracy has the best role here, as a loquacious Portuguese fisherman who helps the initially detestable boy protagonist become a better person. One thing that holds up surprisingly well is the depiction of fishermen working the Grand Banks of Newfoundland—the footage of real fishermen at sea (in sailboats!) is a terrific time capsule, and the integration of water-tank footage with rear-projection special effects is often better than you’d expect. Despite a drawn-out ending, Captain Courageous does wrap up in a satisfying fashion, capping off a film that still works well today, albeit to an older audience.

  • Summer Lovers (1982)

    Summer Lovers (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, April 2019) You can sometimes tell a lot about a film by looking at when and where it’s broadcast. I didn’t know Summer Lovers at all, but it was being broadcast in the same weekly time-slot that the French-Canadian TV channel had used for other steamy movies such as 9 ½ weeks and Last Tango in Paris, so… I knew what to expect, and the film delivered. A sometimes-awkward blend of naughty sex comedy and serious character drama, the film follows the adventures of a disgustingly rich, young, and good-looking American couple as they travel to a Greek island for the summer, and then gradually get caught up in a ménage à trois with a French archeologist. It’s meant to be something of a carefree escapist romp with just enough character drama to make it respectable, but it all falls apart along the way. (Of course, I’m old and grumpy enough to think that the only appeal of a ménage à trois is having one more person to do housework.) The film does feel very much like a male-gaze dominated fantasy: despite a few more serious moments examining the realities of such an arrangement, writer-director Randal Kleiser spends far too much time photographing nude bodies and staging erotic set-pieces to claim otherwise. What’s more, the ending merely kicks the dramatic can past the end credits in order not to commit to anything. Daryl Hannah stars in an early role (as the wife), and the feeling of being in a Greek vacation (complete with an intriguing glimpse at an early-1980s archeological dig) is bolstered with a pop soundtrack (“I’M SO EXCITED!”) that clearly anchors it to a point in time.  The nice Greek countryside can’t quite compensate for a story that borders on annoyance. As a result, Summer Lovers feels flawed, although I can’t really begrudge anyone from enjoying it. After all, you know what you’re getting into when watching a film in the late-night time-slot…

  • Sounder (1972)

    Sounder (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) It’s unfair to compare a wholesome family drama like Sounder to the blaxploitation movement of the early 1970s … or is it? At a time when (white) studio producers were consciously trying to appeal to black audiences, the obvious play was to go for gritty urban stories that could empower black audiences and bring in white moviegoers. It wasn’t as obvious to make a wholesome family movie taking place in 1933 rural Louisiana, detailing the struggles of a poor family on a hardscrabble farm trying to keep it together after the father is imprisoned for stealing much-needed food. The mood of this Martin Ritt-directed film is calm, loving, triumphant over quotidian struggles. It’s a film that openly preaches for the value of education and kinship as a way to climb out of poverty, uniting against misfortune, racism and adverse circumstances. Even modern audiences will find much to appreciate in its honest appraisal about the impact of incarceration on families: you could show Sounder alongside other more modern films without feeling out of place. While nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, Sounder is now most likely remembered as a footnote, except when discussing the history of black-themed movies (thank you TCM for showing it), which seems regrettable considering how inspiring the film can be. It also features career-best performances from Cicely Tyson and Paul Winfield. It’s also quite optimistic in its own way: Unusually for a drama that plays so much emphasis on the family dog (whose name is the film’s title), it doesn’t even die at the end!

  • The Bishop’s Wife (1947)

    The Bishop’s Wife (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) There have been many charming Christmas movies, but The Bishop’s Wife has the undeniable advantage of featuring Cary Grant as an impossibly suave angel come down to Earth to resolve a bishop’s problems. Complications ensue when the bishop’s wife proves irresistible to him—although, this being a 1940s movie, it’s all handled tastefully. Grant couldn’t be better as the angel and completely steals the movie, whereas David Niven is good in the ungrateful role of the bishop (he was originally supposed to play the angel, but Grant was the better choice) and Loretta Young is luminous as the bishop’s wife. A few interesting special effects reaffirm that this isn’t a realistic Christmas movie. Easy to watch and imbued with a decent amount of Christmas spirit, The Bishop’s Wife is still worth a look today.

  • Peeping Tom (1960)

    Peeping Tom (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2019) Some movie genres are older than we realize, and if you’re looking for early examples of slasher-horror movies, you’re going to have to go past 1970s Halloween or Black Christmas and land somewhere near the 1960 double-feature of Psycho and Peeping Tom. Daringly for its time and directed by respectable filmmaker Michael Powell, it’s about a serial murderer who (high-tech twist!) records his actions with a video camera. This is also an opportunity to play with some metatextual material about the nature of film and, as the title suggests, the audience as voyeurs as much as the killer protagonist. The atmosphere of the early-1960s London is also worth a look, anticipating the later British movies of the decade. Still, as much as the film does have a bit of material to chew upon, its very specific time also means that it has lost its lustre, and not very gracefully at that. It may have been transgressive and upsetting at the time—but it’s now, sixty years later, a bit too dumb and blunt to be taken seriously. Peeping Tom is interesting to horror enthusiasts, obviously, but otherwise not that gripping as a story.

  • Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

    Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2019) I approached Cannibal Holocaust very reluctantly, acutely aware of its terrible reputation as a schlock gore horror film that actually kills animals on camera—I’m a staunch film preservationist and I’m jaded when it comes to horror, but if it takes deliberate animal death to make a film then I’m more than willing to let all copies of it vanish off a pier. It doesn’t take a long time to feel that Cannibal Holocaust is not worth the animal deaths that went into it: It’s a film that revels in gore, nihilism and voyeurism, getting its kick out of bathing everything in blood and death. The plot has something to do with American academics examining found footage from an expedition sent deep in the Amazon to study a cannibal tribe, and you can guess where it goes from there. There is some intriguing material here about the observers being corrupted by the nature of the terrible footage they’re seeing, but that idea is not really explored, nor is it the point of the film. The point of it is death and the gore, shown in as much detail as practical effects or ignorance of animal cruelty laws will allow. I’m not impressed by this entire film subgenre (regrettably, there are many similar movies) and Cannibal Holocaust does nothing to make me change my mind. It’s slightly better made than many others, director Ruggero Deodato is certainly not going for the easily dismissed quasi-comedy that some other similar films can evoke, and it’s definitely far more disturbing for including real animals being killed on camera. I’m a somewhat jaded horror viewer, but even I had to tap out and fast-forward through the animal cruelty sequences. Alas, this will probably mean that I will remember Cannibal Holocaust much longer than I should. (Fake the killing of a human and I’ll shrug, but kill a turtle for real and you’re my enemy for life.) And there’s something else: The film’s closing lines have something to do with the nature of evil … and then the camera pans up to show the now-destroyed Twin Towers.

  • The Natural (1984)

    The Natural (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) Much as baseball is the great American pastime, I’m starting to suspect that baseball movies are the great American cinematic comfort food. Americans understand the rules, they know the game inside-out, they are comfortable with the pacing and they will find the tiniest of evidence to prove that baseball is life and life is baseball. Or something like that. Watching The Natural isn’t quite as mystical as other baseball movies (Looking at you, Field of Dreams), but it’s still not quite realistic, not quite ordinary, not quite believable either. (A prologue with a bat being carved out of wood felled by a lightning strike at least establishes the tone early.)  What The Natural does have going for it is Robert Redford being effortlessly charming, and a roster of supporting actors that include Robert Duvall, Glenn Close, Kim Basinger, Barbara Hershey and Wilford Brimley. The big hook of the film has to do with our protagonist being felled by a bullet from a psychotic fan before becoming a star, and then coming back to the game a decade and a half later as a natural talent. There’s a mystery to it that proves less impressive than imagined, but the rest of director Barry Levinson’s film does run on rails all the way to a crucial win. What keeps the film interesting are those incidents approaching the supernatural that are littered around the main plot. By the time our protagonist hits a climactic pitch right into the stadium lights and creates fireworks, you’re either so solidly in the film’s distinctive logic that you’ll cheer, or roll your eyes one last time and say “That’s it, I’m done.”

  • Et Dieu … créa la femme [And God Created Woman] (1956)

    Et Dieu … créa la femme [And God Created Woman] (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) I’m not sure who first made the point or where it was done, but there are plenty of historical “movie superstars,” especially actresses known for their sex-appeal, that are not associated with any great movie. They have a substantial body of work (if you’ll pardon the expression), but they won’t turn up in a modern look at their era’s most fondly-remembered movies because little of what they did stands the test of time. They’re famous for being famous, rather than specific roles. Insofar as I can gather, Brigitte Bardot is one of these stars—lauded as a sex kitten, famous for her opposition to baby seal hunting (well, at least in Canada), but not exactly known for any high-profile memorable roles. Aside from Le Mépris, the only exception I can find is that she starred in Et Dieu … créa la femme. But in a feat of circular logic, Et Dieu … créa la femme is known nowadays only because it was Bardot’s international breakthrough role. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the film is a showcase for her because there’s so little else going on. A coastal small-town romantic drama, this is a film built around Bardot, with a character showcased for her beauty and lack of inhibition. Tame by today’s standard but provocative by French mid-1950s standards and positively scandalous for late Production Code-era America, it’s a film that still has the power to make viewers understand what the fuss about Bardot was about. There is a bit of charm in the way the seaside French town is portrayed, in Bardot’s character’s carefree behaviour and in the colourful cinematography. Otherwise, though, Et Dieu … créa la femme is Bardot’s film: the dramatic structure would be meaningless without her presence, and she manages to overcome her own limited acting talents through sheer magnetism. Which brings us back to the symbiotic loop: she’s now usually known for the film that’s known because of her. (Random, non-Bardot thought: Seeing this film’s seaside setting got me thinking about how many French films take place alongside the sea, and what’s the place of the coast in the French imagination. To be investigated.)

  • Critters (1986)

    Critters (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2019) In the mid-1980s, you couldn’t swing a bag of popcorn without spilling some on high-concept horror movies that ended up spawning multiple sequels. As one such horror/Science Fiction hybrid, Critters starts out being a bit more ambitious than your usual creature feature, what with intergalactic bounty hunters hunting down tribbles carnivorous pests so that they don’t take over the world. But budgetary constraints quickly show up, as most of the action takes place in a Kansas farmhouse. While there are a few familiar names in the credits (Lin Shaye, Dee Wallace, M. Emmet Walsh), the most distinctive thing about Critters is its lack of distinction. If you’re looking for the median 1980s horror monster film with practical creature effects, this may be the one: not too depressing, not too funny, not too impressive but not too cheap either. The science fiction aspect does add a bit to it, but it’s a wonder as to why there were so many sequels. Oh well—you can do worse than watching the first one.

  • Super (2010)

    Super (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) While I’ll support any creator’s intent to deconstruct a genre, they should be aware that there are a few inherent dangers in doing so, including being so intent on the deconstruction that you forget about core narrative elements such as, well, character attachment, tonal unity or satisfying endings. With Super, writer-director James Gunn clearly takes aim at the superhero genre, turning in a horrifyingly serious look at what it would take for someone to become a superhero or a sidekick. Never mind the physical training—what kind of trauma would lead someone to take up a life of costumed vigilantism? The answer has nothing noble, and quite a bit of disturbing material. As a dark comedy that delights in shifting from comedy to horror in a few moments, Super includes gore, rape, realistically portrayed injuries, social awkwardness and merciless put-downs as part of its package. The result is not for the faint of heart, nor for uncritical superhero movie fans, nor anyone expecting a tidy ending, nor anyone who dislikes deconstructions of superheroic power fantasies. At least Rainn Wilson and Ellen Page are not too bad in the lead roles (although being saddled with “It’s all gooshy” as erotic dialogue can earn anyone sympathy points), with a nod to Kevin Bacon as a rather good villain, and a surprising ensemble of known actors in supporting roles. The similarities with Kick-Ass, also released in 2010, are not as interesting as those two movies appearing at that time as a signal of the subgenre’s evolution (Super is much harsher than Kick-Ass, which was already not a walk in the park). Now somewhat better known than in 2010 thanks to Gunn’s mega-success (directing, ironically enough, more superhero movies), Super nonetheless remains a half-success, not quite controlled enough to achieve its subversive aims without alienating a chunk of its audience along the way.

  • The Darkest Minds (2018)

    The Darkest Minds (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) Weren’t we done with dystopian Young Adult novel movie adaptations? Apparently not, but thankfully The Darkest Minds is so dull and generic that you will forget it before long, or at least mesh its generic plot details with other similar movies. Let’s see—here we have a group of virtuous teenagers facing off against an adult-led dystopia, so that’s familiar. (Well, there’s a twist to that, but it actually makes the film even dumber and less coherent.)  The psychic powers that the teenagers have are colour-coded for your convenience, meaning that they’re so rigidly defined that we’re to act surprised when they’re not. As usual for those products aimed at less-discerning teenagers, our group of protagonists goes on the run, fleeing the killer adults to join some kind of underground rebel group. There’s a love triangle, just in case you feared that this particular contrivance wouldn’t show up. The plot twists here aren’t as telegraphed as much as they are paraded around on the mistaken belief that this is the first movie we’ve even seen. Thankfully, the box-office receipts were so poor that we’ll never see a sequel. If the film has one meagre saving grace, it’s that it features the likable Amandla Stenberg, a welcome spot of protagonist diversity in a genre almost exclusively led by Caucasian boys and girls. It’s not much, but if you’re looking for one point of differentiation, there it is. It doesn’t make the rest of The Darkest Minds any better, though.

  • The Prodigies [La nuit des enfants rois] (2011)

    The Prodigies [La nuit des enfants rois] (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, April 2019) I did not approach La nuit des enfants rois with the best of intentions—after all, I read the original Bernard Lenteric novel back in the mid-1990s and thought it was gratuitously depressing tripe even back then—which, considering that it’s about misunderstood nerds taking revenge at a time when I felt that I was a misunderstood nerd, was something that spoke for itself. To its disservice, the film does leave out some of the more ludicrous material of the novel, but doesn’t do much to fix the book’s basic shortcomings and adds a whole lot more new dumb stuff. Now feeling like a paean to misunderstood teenage psychopaths, The Prodigies takes delight in mistreating its teen geniuses until they get to become vicious criminals with thoughts of global destruction. Our protagonist isn’t much better, raising all sorts of questions about why the film actually exists. Worse yet: Director Antoine Charreyron’s The Prodigies is hyper-violent, except that it doesn’t have the maturity to justify this level of gore and violence. The way it revels in an extended rape sequence that becomes a driver for the film’s entire second half is a troubling indicator of the filmmaker’s lack of maturity. Executed as an animated film, it does attempt a bit of style, but the animation itself is amateurish to the point of nullifying any stylistic aspirations. To put it bluntly: the film is not stylish, it’s just cheap. Despite a few (very few) visually ambitious moments, The Prodigies is a chore to sit through—it’s immature yet violent in ways that amplify the bad mixture of the two, and it’s fundamentally ugly to watch most of the time.

  • Regression (2015)

    Regression (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, April 2019) Any discussion of Regression will mean spoiling the ending, so prepare yourself or stop reading. There’s a huge paradox at the heart of the film: It’s bad most of the time, and its sharp improvement at the end comes at the expense of robbing the film of any satisfying narrative. Let me explain: Much of Regression is spent with a policeman (Ethan Hawke, solid) in 1990 small-town America, investigating the testimony of a young woman (Emma Watson, better than expected) who claims to have been sexually abused. So far, so conventional, except that the film becomes abruptly dumber once it leads us to claims of a satanic cult, regression hypnotherapy, sacrificed babies and small-town conspiracies. By the time our protagonist is maybe drugged and maybe raped and maybe stared at by members of the local satanic conspiracy, viewers can be forgiven if they give up all hopes of the film ever becoming anything more than a standard horror film of that type. At that point, Regression isn’t just being unoriginal both for its content and presentation—it revels in tired old clichés and discredited material (both hypnosis and satanic cults) that belonged in the 1990s. Fortunately, director Alejandro Amenabar has something up his sleeve, and it’s to spend the last five minutes of the film unbolting its own narrative and telling us that it was all lies, that satanic cults don’t exist and that regression hypnotherapy is a bunch of hooey. Having destroyed itself, Regression ends. What are we left to think? That it’s good that the ending got back to reality, or bad that whatever narrative structure was being built was pulled from underneath us? I’m still not sure. It may be possible for a film to redeem itself and yet leave us unsatisfied. But it’s not the ending: much of the film’s bulk is as uninteresting and generic as what it initially purports to be—there are more fundamental issues here than an ending designed to upset viewers. If it had been an interesting but ludicrous ride to a self-destructive ending, I wouldn’t have minded so much—but Regression makes the double mistake of being both (intentionally) stupid and (unintentionally) dull and the combination is deadly to the film’s enjoyment.

  • Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)

    Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) There’s a very different kind of rhythm to Fried Green Tomatoes that makes it remarkable. A mixture of southern atmosphere, women’s in-group language, not-so-tall tales spun with homely wisdom, and a few good actresses getting a chance to show what they can do. There’s a surprisingly dark bite to the stories being told here, with abuse, divorce, child death, righteous murder and even cannibalism being on the menu. But the way the script is structured and the film is directed by Jon Avnet make it all interesting to follow as we hop back and forth across four decades of history in an attempt to understand a character. Kathy Bates turns in a good performance as a woman rediscovering life thanks to another free-spirited friend—but this is really Jessica Tandy’s movie. Fried Green Tomatoes is a bit long at more than two hours and a quarter, but it’s not difficult to watch, and the southern atmosphere is often a delight.

  • Needful Things (1993)

    Needful Things (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2019) The more I think about it, the more I realize that the way that Hollywood and I consume Stephen King’s novels has much in common: big binges every few years, between which King has the time to write an entire set of books that would put other authors’ entire bibliographies to shame. Now that King is very much back in vogue as inspiration for horror movies for the third time after peaks in the early 1980s and mid-1990s, it’s time for me to take a look at a film adaptation that was released during King’s second Hollywood binge and read during the first of mine. Needful Things is memorable in that it’s a thick book that uses most of its duration to make us comfortable with an entire small New England town—an ensemble cast of ordinary characters whose existence is upset (or terminated) by the arrival of a mysterious man who can find something special for you somewhere in his new shop. It’s a familiar setup—what if an entire town sold its soul to the Devil?—but in King’s hands it becomes a sweeping, comfortable novel with big ideas in a small context. The movie obviously doesn’t have the running time to do justice to the entire story, but it does manage to nicely condense the narrative in the time it has. The cast is cut down, the plotting is streamlined and if the immersion isn’t nearly as complete, the result is more effective than not. The big sweeping opening sequence begins the inglorious work of establishing the geography and the characters. It’s easy enough to watch, and quietly fascinating in the way the plot and director Fraser Clarke Heston gradually manage to work itself up to an explosive climax after setting half the town against each other by weaponizing small sins. Movies of this kind depend on their actors, and we have a capable lead trio in between the ever-dependable Ed Harris, a very nice Bonnie Bedelia, and a savvy performance by Max von Sydow, who manages to find an appropriate balance between the creepiness of his character and the innate campiness of the concept. In short, an unspectacular but effective adaptation that should please both King fans and casuals. Movie aside I have one semi-related complaint: Why do movie channels such as AMC, heavy on muting out bad language, even choose to broadcast movies with language to mute out? It’s really annoying and makes a mockery of the channel’s so-called cinephile orientation.