Reviews

  • The Trip to Greece (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) And so The Trip tetralogy of film ends (so far)— The Trip to Greece features heavier material, an extended farewell, and some great footage of Greece… whether it’s landscapes, or our two protagonists eating and imitating other celebrities. It’s almost exactly what was delivered by the first three films of the series, but that’s the entire point of it. Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon reprise their roles as Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon with easy familiarity (helped along by the fact that the film is a distillation of a six-episode TV series, meaning that they have spent a lot of time together in the decade the series has been running). But there’s an air of wistfulness and loss to this (announced) last instalment tracing The Odyssey—even in themes and execution, the film is about death and closure, with the protagonists leaving each other well before the end of the film as they both pursue their own problems and reflect on mortality. This may be a bit too much for a series predicated on the two stars trading quips over good meals, but it may be necessary to provide the series with a sense of closure without necessarily precluding an eventual fifth instalment. (Considering the tonal shift between the end of the third film and the beginning of the fourth one, it’s not as if strong narrative consistency is a feature of the series.) Until then, The Trip to Greece remains a likable fourth outing with two affable performers, and a melancholic break that earns its gravitas from the journey through the three previous films.

  • Gambling on the High Seas (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) Short, simple and rather entertaining B-movie Gambling on the High Seas depends on a bit of legal fiction that makes no sense but continues to fuel the imagination: the idea that it just takes a few nautical miles to transform a ship into a lawless free-for-all in which gambling services can be provided safely (yet conveniently close) to the mainland. (Adding another layer of interest, the tables are all crooked because why not pile on the illegality while you’re at it?)  Wayne Morris and Jane Wyman hold the leading roles—he as a reporter trying to crack the story, and she as the secretary who has all of the information. At 55 minutes, the film barely has time to set up its story, let alone run with it—and there’s a distinct lack of thrills despite a mildly effective mole-in-the-police plot turn. Still, Wyman is cute, Morris is an engaging eager-beaver and the whole thing runs so quickly that it’s over before you have a chance to settle in. Completely unassuming, Gambling on the High Seas has the charm of what it was meant to do—a quick second feature to complete another film by the same studio for moviegoers who were going to get a complete evening’s package out of going to the movies.

  • Lumière! (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, August 2022) Now here’s something interesting—Lumière! is a dive deep into cinema history to showcase many of the first films ever made by the Lumière Brothers. The appeal here isn’t solely in giving greater visibility, in restored editions, to some of the earliest movies ever made, but in the narration (by Thierry Frémaux, who also wrote and directed the film) pointing out the ways these early directors worked within the technical limits of their medium, creating a brand-new cinematographic grammar along the way. The script cleverly points out the inconsistencies and incoherence betraying how the film was staged and remade, never missing even the tiniest detail that can inform the viewer. The effect is very much like being in a very entertaining film school class, with an eager teacher using every frame of his material as a teaching opportunity. It’s an eloquent demonstration that while the Lumière Brothers didn’t have much in technical terms, they had to be immensely creative and clever in the ways they used what they had. There’s a constant line of wry humour in the narration running over the films, and Lumière! is far more interesting than you would expect. A must-see for anyone interested in the first decade of cinema.

  • The Thief Who Came to Dinner (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) As far as 1970s jewel thief movies go, The Thief Who Came to Dinner is about as ordinary as they come. Ryan O’Neill stars as a computer programmer who decides to quit his job after being seduced by jewel thievery, and exchanges his first score for addresses of other places with jewelry stashes. Jacqueline Bisset plays the generic girlfriend role, while Warren Oates completes the main trio as an investigator who develops a fondness for the object of his pursuit. The rest is rather standard material, albeit occasionally convoluted for its own sake. I probably would have enjoyed the result more if I thought more highly of blandy-bland O’Neill and his inexplicable run of popularity in the 1970s. The atmosphere of 1970s Houston is interesting, and the result is quite watchable even if you don’t think much of it. It’s just that the film invites comparisons to other films that don’t work to its advantage—although The Thief Who Came to Dinner works better if your expectations are firmly in check.

  • The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) I’m not sure whether I expected too much or too little from The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. On the one hand, it does feature Paul Newman—a sure-fire crowd-pleaser and usually a dependable screen presence. On the other hand—I’ve seen far too many 1970s revisionist westerns lately, and I think I just had my fill before watching this one. Back to the first hand: It’s directed by John Huston, and features notables such as Tab Hunter, Anthony Perkins, Victoria Principal, Ava Gardner, Ned Beaty and Jacueline Bisset—how can you not be interested in this cast? But returning to the second hand: the film makes a bland protagonist out of a rather problematic figure (the inverse of what other revisionist westerns of the time were doing!) and its intention to tell its subject’s story over several decades means that the film works in stop-and-go episodes, not earning much narrative velocity or interest. Even at two hours, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean feels overlong and heavy. There’s a comic musical interlude (with a bear) in a film about a figure best known for presiding over violent justice. In other words, in a pitiful attempt at a conclusion where I throw both hands in the air: I just couldn’t get into this film despite elements that should have worked much better. I’m confounded by it, and may revisit it someday… but not soon: I feel as if I’ve given it a chance, and it fumbled it.

  • The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) Well isn’t this interesting—a pro-union romantic comedy set in the 1940s, featuring a rich man going undercover as a store employee to discover what’s going on behind the growing unrest. Jean Arthur stars in The Devil and Miss Jones as a store employee who, improbably enough, gets taken under the millionaire’s wings as he arranges for her to romance a union organizer. (Meanwhile, he’s got his own budding romance going on.)  There’s the usual amount of irony in a film where one main character is undercover and gradually gets seduced to a cause, but don’t fret—it’s all heading for a cute romantic finish, and it does so without betraying its labour sympathies. While The Devil and Miss Jones runs on some predictable subplots, it’s likable enough that little of it matters—the meatiest part of the film remains the unabashed pro-union viewpoint of the script. (Would it have fared as well ten years later in the middle of the anti-Communist witch-hunt?)  There’s also something interesting in that the two leads of the film are ultimately pursuing romance—but with other people. All of that is really to highlight the swift and competent way the script is written, with rather good dialogue and strong structure underlying a crowd-pleasing comedy that nonetheless takes inspiration from the class struggle. Not bad!

  • Les rois du gag (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) If you’re looking for old-school physical gag comedy, you could do much, much worse than to go back and have a look at Les rois du gag. Co-written and directed by Claude Zidi, le film features Gérard Jugnot and an adorably young Thierry Lhermitte as two men who keep coming up with contraptions for comedy gags in obscure venues. Things look up when an established comic with problems reaching out to younger generations hires then as gagmen, and when (later) they get embroiled in the shooting of a serious American film in Paris. Quite a bit of Les rois du gag is dedicated to the minutiae of gag-making and the making of a sketch comedy show—we get to see the ideas (rejected or modified) that get refined into an audience-ready product, and the bickering between different comic visions when it’s time to renew a show. The satirical look at “a great American director” late in the film also brings its share of jokes while bringing to mind many possible inspirations. There are more than a few chuckles here and there, even if the last act of the film struggles to deliver a satisfying conclusion to the film’s themes. Still, compared to a lot of other French comedies of the same era, Les rois du gags is better than most, and still worth a look today.

  • Bathory (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) Can we talk about the power of expectations? I watched Bathory on a horror-dedicated channel, and the combination of that plus the well-known subject matter led me to expect a full-on horror film with at least one blood bath. As a consequence, I’m perhaps a bit more upbeat about the result than someone who would have seen the film under different circumstances, properly briefed on what it was trying to do. For Bathory is not quite the schlocky house-of-horror tale of Elizabeth Bathory that I was expecting—It’s much, much closer to a weird well-funded historical drama in which the horror elements of the Bathory legend are used as spice to a story not entirely convinced of her murderous reputation. The result features humour, horror, mystery investigations, lavish historical re-creations and feminist revisionism. It’s significantly more ambitious than I expected, and far more interesting as well—although that scatteredness doesn’t quite bring up Bathory to a should-see status. Some of the visual polish of the film is impressive. (As someone with fondness for big manes of hair, I got an over-the-top satisfaction at seeing Anna Friel in the biggest, widest, wildest wig that hair engineering could create. It’s awesome in its own right.)  Where writer-director Juraj Jakubisko falters, however, is rooted in his own ambitions: the mixture of fantastic dream sequences with harder-edged political revisionism is both familiar and self-contradictory: Of course, the film will argue that Bathory was a woman too good for her times, persecuted for being modern in an intolerant time. (And apparently fond of baths in water tainted red by herbs. Hmm.)  But at the same time Bathory takes such liberties with history in style and content that it’s difficult to take seriously. Friel does quite well and the film exceeds expectations, but the result is not quite the solid film it could have been with more control over the material and its execution.

  • Hobgoblins (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) Some films are infamous for being bad, and so you will reliably find Hobgoblins with a secure spot on IMDB’s bottom-100 film list. (It’s currently at #31.)  As usual, this is all debatable—the worst movies in the universe are so bad that they never get the chance to be seen by wide audiences, while substandard-but-watchable films with some audience appeal end up gathering a bandwagon in their disfavour. Hobgoblins, to be clear, is not a good movie. It’s cheap, inept, incoherent, childish and badly put together. But occasionally, you can feel the sparks of something interesting or even likable under the surface. The premise has some potential, what with mischievous aliens held in a movie studio, able to modify reality to reflect their victim’s desire. (I mean, this is almost Solyaris right there.)  The execution does have a few moments of charm, whether it’s the rather cute stolen-from Gremlins creatures, the semi-cute girls or the earnestness of some cast members. It all crashes and burns in an incoherent mess that’s far too reminiscent of low-budget film failures, but there is just enough of a special something in Hobgoblins (including an execution that doesn’t take itself seriously) to keep audiences interested until the end. Writer-director Rick Sloane shouldn’t feel too proud of this film (much of his later career has been just as unimpressive), but there are far worse movies than Hobgoblins out there. Not that this is much of a recommendation, considering the far greater number of good movies that are also out there.

  • Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) Pleasantly weird, Get to Know Your Rabbit is notable for being an early studio effort from director Brian de Palma, directing someone else’s script. No one will be surprised, in reading about the film’s production history, to find out that de Palma got in arguments with star Tom Smothers, hated working with the studio, saw the film languish on shelves for two years, and spent the next few years working as an independent filmmaker (not to mention abandon comedies almost entirely to develop his own style of suspense films). Still, what remains viewable on-screen is one strange film that delves perhaps more than you’d expect into absurdist deadpan humour. Much of the story is driven by an executive’s midlife crisis, leaving his corporate job in order to learn tap-dancing magic under the tutelage of an eccentric teacher (Orson Welles!) and then travel the country as a performer. Corporate executives having midlife crises were a commonplace plot driver by the end of the 1960s, but this film gets weirder and weirder after that, with the madness getting deep in the credits themselves: Katharine Ross is credited as “Terrific-Looking Girl.” Welles, deep in his “I don’t care anymore” period, delivers a rather good turn reminiscent of his presence in Casino Royale. Alas, the film doesn’t quite make the most out of its wacky ideas—the deadpan tone alone robs a few sequences of additional comic energy, and the script is not streamlined enough to be as effective as it could be. Still, the idea of a tap-dancing magician is compounded by a lot of stylistic tricks (including an overhead travelling shot that immediately evokes a similar sequence in Palma’s much-later Snake Eyes) and ends up producing something just bizarre enough to be interesting despite self-defeating pacing and plotting issues. De Palma fans will not be disappointed… much.

  • Texas Carnival (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) Despite reuniting a few solid show-horses from MGM’s stable, there’s a reason why Texas Carnival isn’t shown as often as other musicals of the era—it’s duller and cheaper than the usual, and depending on Red Skelton as the lead is a double-edged sword. Skelton stars as his broad mugging self, this time as a carnival dunk-tank operator who comes to be mistaken for a millionaire rancher with predictable consequences all the way up to a romance. Esther Williams plays his disillusioned business partner, who also gets swept up in mistaken romantic shenanigans. Ann Miller shows up in a short but scene-stealing turn to sing and dance (and shoot!) a bit to “It’s Dynamite” (despite a few Native clichés along the way). Some of the other songs may be familiar — “Deep in the Heart of Texas” comes to mind, and for some bizarre electroswing-related coincidence I managed to recognize “I’m an Old Cowhand” played as an instrumental. Texas Carnival plays to its stars’ strengths but not too much—in between Texan clichés sanitized for a musical, we get Williams playing inside a pool and Skelton hamming it up as a pretend cowboy, but not to the extent of their better roles—which can be explained by the film’s short 77 minutes running time (much of it is dominated by Skelton’s antics) and its origin as a vehicle for someone else. All of this blended together delivers a solidly third-tier musical. It’s watchable but hardly memorable—aside from Miller being the clear standout in a high-energy number and a ghostly water-dance sequence featuring Williams. Considering the incredible number of musicals that MGM was churning out every year at that point (including the underdog Singin’ in the Rain, released that same year), they couldn’t all be winners.

  • La maison du bonheur (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, August 2022) Some movie premises transcend time and space, so if you’re a fan of Mr. Blandings Builds a House or The Money Pit, then there’s a good chance you’re primed for the French Dany Boon comedy La maison du bonheur. At its core, the plot is simple: a man buys a fixer-upper house and soon finds himself submerged by the mounting expenses of fixing it. The complications to the plot, on the other hand, get increasingly contrived as he is betrayed by a colleague, loses his job, sells his family’s current apartment, gets embroiled in legal troubles, is misled by his realtor and deals with incompetent handymen. The film is amusing enough but scattered when it comes to its comic tone: too often mean-spirited, it relishes the humiliations it hands over to its protagonist, and ends on nothing more than a huge plot cheat. Writer-director-star Boon (in the first of many hyphenate jobs) knows how to get a laugh, but there’s a limit to the sympathy the unpleasant protagonist can earn from the audience: he’s not an everyday man stuck in circumstances beyond his control, but actively courts the consequences of his actions. La maison du bonheur gets a few laughs, but no more : Too often, it feels like a prototype for the better Boon comedies that would follow.

  • The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) I remain… unconvinced by The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Part rehabilitation of a fraudster’s wife, part criticism of televangelism in the 1980s, it’s a film that doesn’t quite seem to figure out what story it wants to tell, or how to tell it. That doesn’t stop Jessica Chastain from delivering an Oscar-winning performance as Faye, or Andrew Garfield from doing his best in incarnating Jim Bakker in all of his boy-choir crookedness. The film moves from the early courtship of the two characters in the early 1960s all the way to the heydays of their TV ministry in the 1980s, and then on to their fall from grace when his accounting frauds come to the attention of the government, precipitated by sexual misconduct allegations. The Eyes of Tammy Faye is definitely sympathetic to Faye in that she’s portrayed as a Bakker dupe, unaware of his activities throughout the decades and nominally more sympathetic for her empathy for AIDS patients and the gay community. (That scene is both terrific and factual.) Most of the events of the film are now sufficiently distant that the historical record is mostly factual—although one notes that Faye is now dead and Bakker isn’t. (In fact, he’s still a televangelist on the dumber side of right-wing politics.)  Where the film takes liberties is in spray-painting its subject as maybe duped by her husband, maybe not quite as bad as him, maybe not entirely a willing participant in the repulsive prosperity gospel of the era. The Eyes of Tammy Faye doesn’t seem interested in presenting its subject as anything other than a martyr of other false prophets (thanks to a small but captivating performance from Vincent D’Onofrio as Jerry Falwell) and I suppose that’s one way of seeing it. I’m clearly not the target audience for this film, though—the acting is nice but the rest of it leaves me squinting suspiciously.

  • Five Across the Eyes (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) I’m not sure I can accurately convey just how unpleasant it is to try to watch low-low-budget horror film Five Across the Eyes. It does start with a nothingburger of a horror-movie premise: as five teenagers drive in a rural area late at night, a psychopath decides to target them for death. That’s already unimpressive, but it only hints at the excruciating visual style of the film or its exasperating plotting. To put it simply, the girls drive around, they are attacked, they escape, and the cycle repeats a few times. Meanwhile, everysinglething in the film is shot in panicked shaky-cam style, with no cinematographic refinements made to the consumer-grade equipment being used. Saying that it looks ugly is underselling it—it’s frequently unwatchable, nausea-inducing and irritating in its refusal to deviate from the worst possible choices it takes at every turn. The antagonist is cartoonishly evil, and her torments (some of them bizarrely sexual) seem picked more for shock value than anything else. Writer-director Greg Swinson (whose IMDB filmography only recently added a second film sixteen years after the first) seems to make his audience go through even more of an ordeal than his characters, adding terrible dialogue to cinematography that makes most found footage films look slick. The only nice thing I have to say about Five Across the Eyes is that… it’s an all-female cast. Bechdel test passed. That’s it. But still not worth a look—seriously.

  • The Indian in the Cupboard (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) A common failure point for fantasy stories is when the premise is let down by the execution: Out of limitless possibilities presented by fantastic premises, authors have to pick a few, and it’s not uncommon for viewers seduced by infinite potential to be disappointed by what the writers end up going for. So it is that for The Indian in the Cupboard, the idea of a cupboard with the power to bring any toy to life seems custom-designed for limitless opportunities. But the film is based on a children’s book, and that book has picked “The Indian in the Cupboard” as the main plot and that’s what we go for. Within the confines of that specific premise, The Indian in the Cupboard does better than expected—for one crucial thing, the titular Indian is portrayed with decency and authenticity by actor Litefoot, and the film largely revolves around cross-cultural understanding. Yes, it’s still more than rough around the edges—but the intentions are in the right place. On the other hand, it’s worth wondering how many kids have actually enjoyed the film since it came out, since it’s not exactly a super-fun-time story: As a few reanimated First Nations and Cowboy characters bond, weighty issues are discussed, characters are mortally wounded (with a young Steve Coogan playing an English medic) and the ending isn’t all that fun either. It may end up a fantasy film for kids that is best appreciated by adults—especially considering how badly some of the special effects have aged since 1995. If you’re detecting some strong ambivalence about The Indian in the Cupboard, then you get it—the mixture of good and less-good aspects doesn’t quite work in the end.