Reviews

  • Banshun [Late Spring] (1949)

    Banshun [Late Spring] (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, May 2020) Give me the choice, and I’d rather watch a middling genre movie than a great dramatic one, but even I will admit that there’s something quietly soothing in writer-director Yasujirō Ozu’s Late Spring. It shows ordinary people living ordinary lives, does not feature a villain, and simply follows along a personal-scale story. It helps a lot that the characters are so sympathetic, especially the father/daughter pair that drives the plot. The heroine is immensely likable, especially as played by Ozu stalwart Setsuko Hara. Late Spring is a down-to-Earth look at postwar Japan (reading about the script censorship by American authorities makes for fascinating cross-cultural shock). There’s nothing flashy in Ozu’s direction, but that allows the actors to do what they do best. I suppose there’s something poignant for me here about a father letting go of his daughter for her own good. Don’t obsess about the plot, just let the film flow by.

  • Bulletproof 2 (2020)

    Bulletproof 2 (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) I don’t hold the original Bulletproof in any particular regard, so the idea of a direct-to-video sequel wasn’t much of a draw. Still, I gave it a shot and don’t really regret the experience—Bulletproof 2 is not a good movie, but it’s on the enjoyable end of the low-budget cash-in spectrum of action spinoffs. There is some wittiness in the script, especially how it positions itself vis-à-vis the twenty-five-year distant original: Here, the first movie exists as a fictionalized adaptation of an article on a real-life pair of buddies. They even comment on the choice of actors to play “themselves.” Those amusing links aside, much of this sequel is fairly standard action/comedy, with enough of a budget to be convincing and throw in a few decent action sequences. The plotting quickly gets forgotten in the mixture of comedy and action that are the film’s most memorable aspects. The action is generally reliable, with a club shootout and a desert car chase sequence clearly giving a pulse to the film. There are some intriguing characters in-between the stock material (more notably a matriarch antagonist), but the script’s best moments are best attempted in dialogue, and that’s where the comedy becomes hit and miss—while Bulletproof 2 does have some raunchy funny dialogue, a lot of it is pseudo-macho bantering between the two leads that turns into homophobic vulgarity. I liked the romantic banter better than the buddy-bonding chatter—and Kirk Fox should probably stick to his own style of comedy rather than to try to imitate Adam Sandler. (The attempts to milk some laughs out of “I’m a fan of six/seven” get tiresome on the second repetition, let alone the fifth.) Faizon Love fares a bit better as the other protagonist but frankly, I was just happy to see Cassie Clare and Pearl Thusi having some fun in substantial roles. Bulletproof 2 is good enough, but I do wish that someone else could have had a go at the script to fix some of its most glaring problems.

  • A Perfect World (1993)

    A Perfect World (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, May 2020) An interesting pairing of manly icons of different generations; a problematic situation that is not made worse by flashes of humour; a result on autopilot in many ways. Those are the main ingredients of A Perfect World, a Clint Eastwood film featuring Eastwood and Kevin Costner in a pairing that promises much more than it delivers. The action starts as Costner’s character escapes from prison and takes a young boy as a hostage, with Eastwood’s law enforcement officer hot on the trail. Road movie, coming-of-age drama, crime thriller and meditation on fatherhood—A Perfect World tries to round up the bases and dresses it all up in a nostalgic 1950s period setting. The bit about the convict slowly becoming a father figure to the hostage is a bit of cinema hooey that acts as the foundation for much of the film’s last act—some viewers will be convinced and others not. Still, it’s hard to avoid thinking that, despite Eastwood’s usual by-the-numbers direction, the film does score a few interesting moments along the way. The ending does get more tragic as it advances, which may strike some as a very appropriate conclusion.

  • Dead in Tombstone (2013)

    Dead in Tombstone (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, May 2020) No one will ever mistake Dead in Tombstone for what it’s not. After all, it’s a low-budget direct-to-Video supernatural western featuring Danny Trejo and directed by Roel Reiné—all hallmarks of cheap unambitious genre movies made for an evening’s entertainment more than lasting artistic statements. This being said, Dead in Tombstone is better than average within the confines of its chosen lane. Trejo doesn’t just do a fly-by cameo: he’s got the lead role, plenty of dialogue and some action scenes to anchor. Meanwhile, director Reiné is known for maximizing even low budgets, and so the film is packed with slick images and strong visuals. Unfortunately, the film’s choppy editing frequently undermines the visual aspect of the film—for shame. What’s also a shame: that the plotting doesn’t quite equal the strong premise of the protagonist being resurrected for the explicit purpose of taking revenge on those who killed him. I’m also not that fond of Mickey Rourke, even if he’s cast as Lucifer here. Those little slights do damage what the film had to play with. What remains in Dead in Tombstone is not a great movie, but it more than fulfills the modest conditions for its greenlight: it’s reasonably fun, better directed than usual in its class and is a great showcase for Trejo. There can be worse ways to spend an evening.

  • Les enfants du paradis [The Children of Paradise] (1945)

    Les enfants du paradis [The Children of Paradise] (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, May 2020) I’m certainly aware of Les Enfants du paradis’s reputation as one of the finest French movies ever made, and I can almost see why it would earn such acclaim. But at a very lengthy three hours and ten minutes, it’s an ordeal more than a simple viewing. There’s a lot to like in the film’s recreation of the 1830s Parisian showbiz scene, what with its actors, producers, mimes and others interacting around a theatre dedicated to popular entertainment. But it takes a lot of patience (patience that I don’t have these days) to make it through the repetitive romantic entanglement of the plot (what with our heroine being pursued by no less than four ill-suited suitors.), the free-floating digressions and the very stylized presentation. The film does have a thick atmosphere, but it’s an atmosphere in which we’re stuck, and the fact that it’s being told everything without economy doesn’t help. I did start liking Les enfants du paradis better as it went on, although by the ending I was once again back to exasperation.

  • Fame (2009)

    Fame (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) Having seen the original Fame a while ago, I was more curious than hopeful that the 2009 remake was going to be any good, especially considering my decidedly mixed feelings about the first one. I was not exactly surprised nor disappointed. The first film had a serious problem in trying to cram years of high school for an ensemble cast into almost two and a quarter hours. Now the remake makes things even worse by shortening the time to barely 107 minutes and magnifying the superficiality of the treatment in such a way that the characters barely get a handful of scenes to move through an entire four-year arc. (It doesn’t help that the blandest characters get the most screentime.) I’ll say it again for good measure: the best way to do something like Fame is to do a miniseries. Four years in four hour-long episodes, if you want to be snappy about it (plus the audition as a first episode of five). Then there’s the dummying-down of the themes: The R-rated original definitely felt rough and gritty in presenting the darker underbelly of performance arts even at the high-school level—suicide, attempted rape and dead-end aspirations were its stock-in-trade. While this PG remake doesn’t quite scrub everything clean, it’s considerably more upbeat about what happens to its characters: suicide is prevented, sexual assault headed off, characters not graduating but doing it with a smile on their face. Fame clearly doesn’t want to stray too far away from the performance art dreams of the High School High generation (and various reality-TV shows promising instant fame) in making it look exhilarating and cool and glossy. This is a group of students able to think up an impromptu multidisciplinary jam at lunchtime, and the film does juice up the glamour of even a Halloween party. I’m not, surprisingly enough, completely opposed to a big glossy musical—at times, I could see in Fame the rough outline of what a twenty-first century musical could be. But being too closely wedded to the original movie puts this remake in an uncomfortable position, unable to do justice to the serious themes of the original, and yet unable to strike out on its own. No wonder that it sank without much of a trace—and, poignantly enough, that none of the young cast has gone on, eleven years later, to fame—the only recognizable names and faces here are the established actors playing the teachers, from a gruffly likable Kesley Grammer to straight-talking Charles S. Dutton or the ever-wonderful Bebe Neuwirth. This Fame remake is watchable enough, especially if you’re in a generous (or mindless) frame of mind, but it’s nowhere near where it should or could be.

  • 13 Ghosts (1960)

    13 Ghosts (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2020) With legendary horror schlockmaster writer-director-producer William Castle, the gimmick was the thing—his films may not have been very good, but he had an uncanny instinct to meld movies with promotional stunts in a way that still sticks in mind even decades later. With 13 Ghosts, he turns the 3D gimmick upside down by introducing the picture himself and explaining the “special glasses” distributed to theatre patrons, the blue filter showing ghosts filmed in red (“For those of you who believe in ghosts”), and the red filter erasing the ghosts from the blue backgrounds (“For those of you who don’t”) The story is pure “must last the night in a haunted house” stuff, with inelegant integration of the gimmick in an otherwise black-and-white film. It’s ludicrous and clunky, doesn’t add much to the film (there’s no possible “psychological horror” interpretation from watching the film without the ghosts, for instance) and yet it powers the film with an undefinable, irreproducible charm. I did like the film’s ham-fisted narrative: Castle had a very approachable, audience-friendly style and while it lacked sophistication, there was no denying the approachability of the result—I do like House on Haunted Hill quite a bit more, but I’m not hating 13 Ghosts.

  • La casa sperduta nel parco [The House on the Edge of the Park] (1980)

    La casa sperduta nel parco [The House on the Edge of the Park] (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, May 2020) Ugh, do I have to talk about The House on the Edge of the Park? It’s the kind of grimy low-budget exploitation film that quickly gets on my nerves: a home invasion that turns murderous. It’s clearly an exploitation film, and an ugly one at that. There is no fun to be had here—not in the gory violent torture, not in director Ruggero Deodato’s nihilistic tone, and not even in the nudity given that it’s always followed by something much worse. (See that straight razor on the poster? Yeah.) While it delves more deeply and frequently into eroticism than most other home invasion movies, it’s a misplaced fixation that is really not to the best of effect. There’s a twist at the end, but I don’t really care. Italian horror circa 1980 could be dynamic and inventive, or it could be stomach-churning and depressing. The House on the Edge of the Park clearly belongs to the second category.

  • Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955)

    Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2020) To say that Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing is okay may not seem like a ringing endorsement, but compared to what it could have been, it’s almost a complete triumph. Consider that it’s a romance between an American journalist and a Eurasian woman in the late 1940s, as seen from mid-1950s America. Plus, it features all-Caucasian Jennifer Jones playing a character of mixed ethnicity through heavy makeup that she herself disliked. (The film’s production history is rich in anecdotes about how Jones did not get along with anyone on set, least of all co-star William Holden.) Also consider that the film dealt directly with adultery (well, “they’re separated” degrees of adultery) and interracial relationship in the waning years of the Production Code (a special dispensation was obtained, almost solely because the story was adapted from a popular novel). There are all sorts of ways in which Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing could have gone as wrong as other films of the time and… it didn’t. The sensible treatment of cross-ethnicity romance was somewhat daring for its time, and doesn’t feel all that terrible nowadays. What it does feel like is an overwrought romantic drama, but that’s not such a bad thing: it still feels romantic, and it still feels important. It’s easy to see why the film was nominated for eight Academy Awards (snagging three for song, score and costume design)—including some splendid colour cinematography of mid-1950s Hong Kong. Could it have been better? Absolutely, and that would be near-certain for any contemporary remake. Could it have been worse? Also, yes—this film is held together almost entirely by its sympathy for both of its lead characters.

  • Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes (1965)

    Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2020) We’re unlikely to ever see another epic comedy quite like Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and that’s too bad: Comedies are now low-to-medium-budget propositions (when Hollywood bothers doing a comedy in the first place) and so we’ll never see the mixture of lavish practical gags, stunts, widescreen cinematography and expansive scope that characterizes this film. The premise is simple—an international race from London to Paris at the dawn of the aviation age—but the execution is absolutely maximalist, with rickety contraptions somehow making it into the air and spectacularly colliding with other things, either airborne or on the ground. (Chances are good that you’ve seen bits and pieces of the film’s opening montage in other contexts, as it presents the goofy machines that people tried at the heroic age of aviation.) The running time nearly reaches two hours and a half and the international cast is large (and stereotypical; your mileage will vary as with the film’s sexism. ). It still looks visually gorgeous today by virtue of having been shot in 65 mm, even though not much of this was obvious on the standard-definition channel I was watching. It’s not without equals: Its sequel Monte Carlo or Bust! in 1969 or The Great Race, also made in 1965, touches upon similar epic comedy material, but neither have the grandiose nature of seeing comedy flying in the air. The stunts are obviously the point of it all. Generally absorbing despite a few lulls and all in good fun, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines is quite unlike any film made lately, and it will make you wish for a revival of epic comedies.

  • The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

    The Slumber Party Massacre (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, May 2020) While The Slumber Party Massacre remains notable in the 1980s slasher film canon for being one of the few written and directed by women, you would be hard-pressed to identify how this has led to a different kind of film. Coming in at a time when the slasher was firmly established and on its way of crashing, this film mechanically executes the characteristics of the genre, with meaningless gory murders every 5–10 minutes and as many opportunities it gets to show naked girls dressing after sleep, taking showers or putting pyjamas during their titular slumber party. Despite its female writer and director, the film is as guilty of lecherous male gaze (sometimes ridiculously so, as per the slow pan during the shower scene) as anyone else—director Amy Jones was playing the game like everyone else, even if she did have a penetrating insight on the genre by giving the psycho killer a big throbbing drill as signature weapon. It’s not even playing the whodunit card—an escaped murderer is mentioned early in the film and the rest is played straight. While the film occasionally has doses of dark humour (the film opens with misleading screaming, features a character watching a horror film while someone else is getting killed, etc.), this is really not the comedy that some people pretend. In most ways, this is exactly what people talk about when they talk about early-1980s slashers: At this point in the craze, everyone knew exactly what to do to give the audience what it wanted. At least, The Slumber Party Massacre is mercifully short at 77 minutes—and executed well by the standards of the genre.

  • The Trouble with Harry (1955)

    The Trouble with Harry (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2020) Alfred Hitchcock’s idea of a comedy isn’t the same as everyone else’s, and so The Trouble with Harry is all about what happens when a small New England community finds a dead body in the woods and tries to figure out what to do with it. In this film, a romantic subplot is given equal importance than an opening sequence in which nobody reacts in any conventional way at the presence of a corpse that several people they know may have murdered. It does have a bit of a pacing issue in its second half, partially redeemed by the pleasant climax of a group of people coming together to solve a problem. As darkly whimsical as Hitchcock could best be, The Trouble with Harry is as much a departure from his usual thrillers as it is a reaffirmation of his core strengths.

  • Ilsa the Tigress of Siberia (1977)

    Ilsa the Tigress of Siberia (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2020) One day, I’ll learn not to let curiosity get the better of me. After all, curiosity is almost the only reason to watch Ilsa the Tigress of Siberia after suffering through the first instalments of the exploitation series. I say almost, because of two things: Dyanne Thorne’s sizable assets, and the film’s explicit Canadian content. None of those things are respectable or even justifiable, but at least they offer something more than mindless sequel viewing inertia. Considering that the film was shot in Canada, the Siberian location is a low-budget narrative choice. But the film does explicitly make its way to Montréal by the second half. The nudity here is more blatant than in the previous instalments, but it’s unfortunately always followed by gory violence. Canadian content includes snowmobile jousting and death by a snowblower, but don’t imagine a more entertaining film than it is—Ilsa the Tigress of Siberia remains a cheap, dull, obnoxious, sordid exploitation film—hardly even funny, let alone exciting.

  • Little Man Tate (1991)

    Little Man Tate (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, May 2020) There’s a striking appropriateness in how Jodie Foster, a child prodigy herself, not only chose to direct gifted-child drama Little Man Tate, but also plays the role of the averagely intelligent mother trying to steer her child through the isolation of genius. Alas, that’s probably the most interesting thing about the film, which ends up being a predictable middle-ground kind of drama going for a middle-ground kind of sentiment. It reinforces unfortunate prejudices about gifted kids, settles for bland “it’s not how smart you are but how you use it” sentiments acceptable to the masses, and runs through a long list of known tropes about its topic. In many ways, Little Man Tate feels like the kind of smaller actor-driven films that Hollywood studios used to grant as favours to their box-office workhorses: something almost gone from the cinema landscape these days.

  • How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998)

    How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2020) Anyone who thinks that How Stella Got Her Groove Back is a one-quadrant romantic comedy solely destined to older black women is missing one thing—late-1990s Angela Basset was the complete package for all other three quadrants—simply a joy to watch given her versatility, precision in her acting choices, and devastating gorgeousness. The film knows it and wastes no effort in reinforcing it—she sports at least half a dozen hairstyles through the film and looks amazing in all of them. The story is also designed to let her go from one peak to another—she hits all of the right notes as the narrative takes her all the way from a tight-haired power broker to a lovelorn single mother to a grieving friend to a woman in limbo to, finally, affirming her own desires in their complexity. Refreshingly, the twenty-year-gap between the protagonist and her younger lover (a breakthrough role for Taye Diggs) is honestly dealt with. While there are no real surprises here (she does get her groove back: relief!), it’s a likable film even when it’s balanced on a bad idea. Add Whoopi Goldberg and Regina King and I’m disappointed I watched the film on a grainy standard-resolution channel. Obviously, your mileage may depend based on how you feel about Basset.