Reviews

  • In the Good Old Summertime (1949)

    In the Good Old Summertime (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) Given how much I like Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner and Buster Keaton and MGM musicals, I should like musical remake In the Good Old Summertime a lot more than the mild liking that I’ve got for it. Compared to everyone else, I’m the curmudgeon going “yeah, but it’s not as good as it could have been.” I strongly suspect that what sets me apart is my lack of affection for Judy Garland in general. Alas, this is a film revolves around Garland, presuming that everyone finds her irresistible. I don’t dislike her—not here, anyway (her decline had begun but wasn’t completely apparent, and there’s a scene early in this film where she lets her hair down and looks remarkably good). On the other hand, the film does put her front and centre of the plot, in which two feuding colleagues strike up an epistolary romance as audiences wait during the entire film for the truth to come out. Updating the time and place from a 1930s leather shop in Vienna to a 1900s musical instrument store in Chicago, In the Good Old Summertime cranks up the singing (inevitable, with Garland around) and dials down the sophisticated comedy in favour of more obvious gags. While I miss Lubitsch’s touch, it’s compensated somewhat by having Buster Keaton make a return to the screen after a long break: he not only designed gags for the movie, but parlayed one complex piece of physical comedy (the split-second destruction of a violin) into an acting role as a klutzy clerk. Elsewhere in the cast, Van Johnson is a decent lead, S. Z. Sakall has a typically good turn and this is technically Liza Minelli’s screen debut—as a three-year-old appropriately cast as Garland’s daughter. While I’m not bowled over by In the Good Old Summertime, it’s generally sympathetic and likable, a decent watch, and it features a few good moments. Just ignore me, as I rant in the corner about wanting more Lubitsch and James Stewart and Buster Keaton.

  • The Private Life of Henry VIII. (1933)

    The Private Life of Henry VIII. (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) Alexander Korda was a foreign-born British film producer who sought glory in many ways, and not necessarily his own personal glory. His filmography is packed with movies that extolled British virtues and crowd-pleasing entertainment that revitalized British cinema itself. He believed that movies could effectively influence minds, and he got an early reward for this belief in The Private Life of Henry VIII when that film triumphed at the box office, and won the first-even Academy Awards given to a non-American film. Later on, the uncouth and gluttonous portrait of Henry VIII as depicted in the film became, unfairly, how newer generations began to perceive the historical character. It certainly helped that the king was played by none of that Charles Laughton, looking quite young at times: it became his breakout role and the one that won him an Oscar. Surprisingly enough, this is a black-and-white historical epic that has aged far better than you’d expect—it’s often a gentle comedy even in the opening credits, as one character is said to be of no interest in being a “respectable lady.” The irreverent touches of humour continue throughout the film, with some moments playing in a very iconoclastic fashion. Better than expected, The Private Life of Henry VIII gets a few honest laughs: the chicken-eating scene is funny, as is the divorce negotiation sequence. The humour partly comes from the early matter of love and marriage in a royal context, partly from the court’s difficulties in adjusting to a difficult king, and also partly because of Laughton’s performance itself. Far less stuffy than a history lesson, The Private Life of Henry VIII clearly reached its audience and continues to do so—but be wary of thinking that this is a historically accurate film.

  • The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)

    The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) Taken by itself and in isolation, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer is a decent adventure film. It features Cary Cooper and others as British Empire soldiers sent to a remote outpost in India, where they get to smack down rebels, talk back to superiors and pick up a massive machine gun to mow down attackers. As a boys’ adventure is faraway land, it’s competently executed (albeit shot in the hills around Los Angeles), decently acted and scripted with an eye toward thrilling viewers. The problem begins when looking at the film’s legacy, or interrogating it from a modern perspective. The Lives of a Bengal Lancer was rewarded by good box-office results, lauded by numerous Oscar nominations, and provided Cooper with a steady paycheque playing that kind of character in that kind of movie for several years. So far so good, except—it was so convincing in its articulation of colonialism that it became one of Hitler’s favourite films, and spawned a subgenre of British Imperial adventure films—some of them horrifyingly racist (i.e.: Gunga Din). For a time, Hollywood became a more effective proponent of British conquest than the British film industry itself and that can all be traced back to this film. Looking at it with modern lens does it no favours either—it’s plodding and naïve, especially if you start questioning the foundations of what the film has to say about the presence of its English-speaking characters in such faraway lands. Clearly, the 1930s were a different time and the ability to appreciate films like The Lives of a Bengal Lancer requires a higher suspension of empathy than others.

  • Riot Girls (2019)

    Riot Girls (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) Every film depends on some amount of contrivance in setting up its premise, but those contrivances are more clearly seen in some movies than others. As a low-budget Canadian post-apocalyptic film, Riot Girls never manages to get past the “but why?” stage of contemplating its reason to exist. Having a post-apocalyptic setting following a disease that wiped out much of the adult population may be interesting (although if COVID-19 could do something nice for us, it would be to get rid of the entire post-apocalyptic genre altogether), but by the time the film clearly spells out a slobs-versus-snobs (or rather punks-versus-jocks) teenage rift in a small BC town, it’s hard to avoid thinking that this is a joke and that we’re not getting it. There’s an obvious fakery at play here that becomes difficult to take seriously, even if director Jovanka Vuckovic’s intention was to deliver something to be consumed without too much thought. For instance, it doesn`t take long to start noticing the conspicuous absence of anyone under ten—having teenagers take care of orphaned infants and toddlers wouldn’t have been as cool or funny as what it’s going for. If it’s trying to be a comedy, it’s not particularly good at it: the gore and swearing and girl-punk music all feel very juvenile. What’s more, Riot Girls muddies its message by setting up an Orwellian regime in the jock world to be brought down, erring far more on laughable caricature than meaningful plotting—which, once again, just falls flat considering the rest of the film’s lack of humour. Meanwhile, the slob punks are… dying? Maybe. We don’t know—rigour and worldbuilding are really not this film’s favourite things. Missed opportunities all around, considering that Riot Girls has serious problems maintaining any basic suspension of disbelief.

  • Cannibal Ferox (1980)

    Cannibal Ferox (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2020) There is such a clear kinship between Cannibal Ferox and Cannibal Holocaust that the two movies share a subgenre (cannibal horror, obviously), a plot premise (first-world young people go exploring the lost tribes of the Amazon), a clear intention (disgust viewers with gory effects) and an overall appreciation (Yuck.) No one will be surprised to find out that the true narrative is one of characters slowly being killed in gory ways. There really isn’t a whole lot of difference between the two—in both movies, there’s a little bit of first-world irony (here, one of the characters heads out to the wilds to prove her theory that cannibalism is a myth—while that’s probably the case in reality, she clearly doesn’t know the movie genre in which she’s stuck), some nature footage that quickly turns to horror once real-life animal abuse sets in and a nearly-everybody-dies-horribly ending with exposed internal organs. Even when the film is “effective,” it’s only in disgusting viewers. Cannibal Ferox’s violence against animals is particularly hard to watch, not so much when animals are at each other’s throats (oh, a cute tiger, oh a cute monkey, UH-OH THE TIGER IS EATING THE MONKEY!!) than when the filmmakers are clearly abusing or killing animals. In comparisons, the human gore effects are nausea-inducing but clearly within the realm of practical special effects. There was, unaccountably, a true wave of Italian cannibal horror movies around 1980, and I’m only watching tripe as Cannibal Ferox to round up my movie education. I would welcome any opportunity to never watch or even think about it again.

  • Westworld, Season 3 (2020)

    Westworld, Season 3 (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) Obviously, Westworld could never stay confined to the park for more than a few seasons, and so this third season of the series boldly takes us to the outside world, with androids not only exploring it but also changing it irremediably. It’s a bold move, introducing a new main character (played by Aaron Paul) and taking up the issues of control versus self-determination into a wider context. The production design of this third season is exceptional, credibly presenting (through shooting in modern East Asian cities) a future vision of 2040s Los Angeles with automated cars, mood-showing T-shirts and oppressive social control. Wait, where did all of that come from? Yes, that’s where Westworld is showing its seams. Down to the new visual motifs of this season, we’re presented with so many new elements in exploring this future that there’s reason to believe that half of it is being made up as the series goes along rather than being part of a coherent plan. There’s little in the first two seasons to suggest Rehoboam the all-controlling AI, except as a thematic counterpart to the morality plays taking place in the parks. As a result, much of this Season 3 feels half-rushed, half-indulgent. Even though the first two seasons’ ten-episode plans had plenty of fat to trim, this eight-episode series still couldn’t keep the series’ worst pseudo-profound moralism at bay. There’s no baseline depiction of the world under Rehoboam—our sole significant new character is an underclass, which doesn’t give us a good yardstick to judge the philosophical conflict taking place in this third season. It probably doesn’t help that I have somewhat significant differences with the series’ morality so far. I’ve been Team Maeve since the beginning; I see Delores as a villain despite a last-minute contrition; I have trouble seeing Serac as a monster despite the series’ insistence that I should; and most of all, I am terribly unhappy with the series’ “light the match, burn everything up, let the survivors choose” approach to global revolution and eventual human extinction event—the best way to effect social change is to coopt the comfortable middle class, but I’ve given up on the series taking such a reasonable technocratic approach when it can play with its characters becoming gunslingers, ninjas and social revolutionaries. But, of course, we’re midway through a six-season arc with no way of knowing where it’s going (except for increasingly loud hints of an apocalypse coming up). At least there’s enough to keep us interested on a micro level. Everyone is turning in decent work on the acting front (although I’ve never been much of an Aaron Paul fan), and there’s something quietly amusing in the way the series’ actors are constantly given different personalities to play. Still, some character arcs (maybe even the season as a whole) feel like throat-clearing and seat warming before later events. While Thandie Newton is a constant delight, her character seems a caricature of previous seasons. Jeffrey Wright’s Bernard also seems to be biding his time until there’s a real role for him to play, and Ed Harris’s William seems increasingly contrived. This season was clearly all about Rachel Evan Wood’s Dolores, but this is wearing thin when you could reliably predict that none of her many enemies would manage to stop her before The Plan was revealed. The series has good ideas and set-pieces (Williams’s self-therapy session being one of them), even though its reach often exceeds its grasp—the “genre” drug sequence didn’t quite match its potential. Still, and this is significant, Westworld remains insanely ambitious and daring for a flagship cable TV show—It could have contrived a way to remain in the park, but chose a vastly riskier route. I may not love the results as much as I did in previous seasons, but I’m still on-board to see where it takes us next.

  • Chakushin ari [One Missed Call] (2003)

    Chakushin ari [One Missed Call] (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2020) While Japanese Horror scored some notable hits in the 1990s (most of them eventually remade in Hollywood, with only The Ring being particularly good), it’s a stretch to suggest that One Missed Call is among the best of them—even if it was remade in America a few years later. It’s all the more confounding that the film is from notorious iconoclast director Takashi Miike, whose other movies span the range from amateurish to utterly grotesque. One Missed Call plays like a very basic attempt to play on the usual tropes of J-horror—the pale girl with long unkempt black hair, the use of modern technology to motivate a scary story (this time, teenagers receiving audio or video of their death two days later and transmitting death through their contact lists), an insane asylum setting, complex family trauma, and the like. While it does veer into some media satire, there really isn’t much else to say—there’s a sense that we’ve seen all of this in much better ways since then, no matter if it was inspired by this film or not. What doesn’t help is the third act losing its way through Munchausen-by-proxy family drama and plot twists that seem to ground what was a Science-Fictional initial premise far too deeply in reality. But that, too, is a frequent trope of J-horror: Starting with a banger of a premise, and eventually dismantling through a trite “explanation“ that only serves to make the entire film less effective.

  • They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970)

    They Call Me Mister Tibbs! (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) The nice thing about They Call Me Mister Tibbs! is that anyone with the slightest amount of 1960s movie literacy will know exactly what they’re getting—a further adventure with the protagonist of In the Heat of the Night. Sidney Poitier once again plays Tibbs, this time in his urban element. Employed in San Francisco, Tibbs investigates the death of a prostitute and uncovers a run-of-the-mill set of suspects, lies, and telling details about circa-1970 big-city crime and consequences. While Poitier is as great as always, the film itself plays like a middle-of-the-road crime movie of the week, with decent but not particularly impressive narrative and production values. This many not be as much of a problem as you think: Watch this film alongside Dirty Harry (also set in San Francisco, also during the early-1970s) and They Call Me Mister Tibbs! will strike you as somewhat more realistic and less grim as many of the urban decay crime movies of the era. It’s clearly a few steps down from the first film (and arguably not even related except for the title, considering the differences in characterization) but it’s not necessarily all that bad. The period detail may even make it a bit more fun today than back then.

  • Innocent (2011)

    Innocent (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2020) The main claim to fame for TV movie Innocent is being a belated sequel to the 1990 potboiler thriller Presumed Innocent (itself adapted from the bestselling 1987 Scott Turow novel). Well, that and an interesting cast, as Bill Paxton steps into Harrison Ford’s role, Marcia Gay Harden for Bonnie Bedelia and Alfred Molina for Raúl Juliá. Once again based on Turow’s own sequel, the premise is slightly ridiculous, as the protagonist is once again accused, twenty years later, of killing someone close to him—this time his wife rather than his mistress (although viewers of the first film will remember how it was the wife who killed the mistress, which would work in favour of suspecting him—except that the sequel doesn’t even seem to acknowledge that). It’s once again a complex legal thriller with murder, affairs and judicial shenanigans. It’s not uninteresting despite the contrivances, but still closer to a sequel cash-in than something that expands upon the themes and characters of the original—despite the better-than-usual production values, it’s still very much a TV movie. The twist at the end is rather pleasant, but it fulfills the expectation of a banger mic drop considering the example left by the first film.

  • Santa Sangre (1989)

    Santa Sangre (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) “Jodorowsky does the circus” is all you really need to know about Santa Sangre. I could stop there, but, if you insist, here’s his usual blend of weirdness, eroticism, surrealism and horror, except with better production means than usual. I can’t explain what happened in this film without a synopsis written by someone else, but it’s relatively rewarding to watch in the ways it keeps throwing strange visuals at you. Thelma Tixou is captivating as The Tattooed Woman, but the entire film is like a spell: weird, compelling and incomprehensible. The appeal of Santa Sangre is difficult to put into words, and seems as fitting as any quip to wrap up this review: Alejandro Jodorowsky does the circus.

  • Get on Up (2014)

    Get on Up (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, May 2020) There are a few problems with the idea of a James Brown theatrical biography, most of them revolving around who’s ever going to even try playing Brown; and second, how can you even try to fit Brown’s eventful, occasionally scabrous life in a film fit to show in cineplexes? Get on Up at least gets the first part right: a pre-stardom Chadwick Boseman makes for a mesmerizing Brown, nailing the physical portion of his persona and letting Brown’s vocals do their job during performances. The rest of the film… suffers from the predictable issues. Brown’s life and career were long enough that trying to do them justice would take us on a whirlwind tour of profound social change in addition to his own actions along the way—a tall order for something that’s not a miniseries. But 139 minutes is all the film will allow itself, and the squeeze required to fit everything in that time is prodigious. Hailing from backwoods rural America, Brown’s rise to notoriety is nothing short of miraculous, but Get on Up does manage to point out that the very same excess of self-confidence that led to his fame also led to considerable problems later in life in his relationships with women, bandmates, employees and the law itself. What’s not so successful is the scattershot, nonlinear approach to the events of Brown’s life that the script follows and director Tate Taylor tries to execute—it’s often difficult to know where Brown is emotionally because the film can’t always lay the required groundwork in a sequence. Considering this, the back-and-forth approach may mask the conventional aspect of this music biopic, but doesn’t bring any new or worthwhile effect to the film. Another device that doesn’t work as intended is Boseman-as-Brown occasionally addressing the camera—it should give us an idea of what’s inside his head but, in the end, doesn’t give us much more than if those moments had been skipped. It’s those flaws that make Get on Up an interesting, but not quite successful biopic—sure, you get the basics, but not necessarily a well-rounded portrait of a man that was, by all accounts, far more complicated than here. At least it does have the music—anyone could do much worse than listening to even a standard biopic filled with Brown’s greatest hits.

  • The Goldfinch (2019)

    The Goldfinch (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) The truth about filmmaking is that so many people are involved and so many things can go wrong that it’s almost a miracle when something good comes out of the process: Good movies are the exception, not the default. This is true no matter your budget, your actors or your source material. While you can try to stack the deck with seasoned professionals, the result is still often a game of luck. (And now you know why Hollywood loves the sequels.) So it is that with The Goldfinch, producers certainly did get the best of everything—an award-winning novel, a seasoned screenwriter, a handful of great actors, Roger Deakins doing cinematography, enough budget to do justice to the story’s globe-spanning narrative, and all of the other production niceties afforded to a prestige drama. (I’m sure the catering must have been really nice.) This thing is taking us to the Oscars, they must have thought. And yet, and yet—nobody knows anything and, in the end, The Goldfinch is a messy, unwieldy adaptation of a novel that probably should have been best handled as a TV series (if at all) than as an unfocused, herky-jerky two-hours-and-a-half train wreck. The weird result blends genre thrills and pretentious narrative conceits in an attempt at becoming a so-called serious drama. In this regard, it reminded me a lot of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close—along with sharing terrorism plot points and Jeffrey Wright—although I suspect that The Goldfinch is far too ludicrous to age as gracefully. If you’re looking for solace while you’re stuck in the film’s interminable length and ludicrous plot points, you can at least point at the actors, some of them used against type (Luke Wilson), others in more familiar characters (Wright) but none of them are any more comfortable with the results, as they are prisoners of a script that jerks characters around like puppets. While The Goldfinch is not strictly bad (it looks far too good for that), it’s just not very pleasant to watch most of the time. Even the structure tries for a collage and ends up with what feels like undisciplined flashbacks. But worse of all is the feeling that The Goldfinch had Best-Picture-of-the-Year ambitions and then, through hubris or complacency, completely wasted everything it had at its disposal.

  • Suburbicon (2017)

    Suburbicon (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, May 2020) The biggest disappointment of Suburbicon is that it features a few things I do like—Matt Damon as a despicable character, suburban satire, George Clooney directing, righteous anti-racism, a Coen Brothers script, dark comedy, Julianne Moore, film noir plotting, and Oscar Isaac—yet still mushes them up into this unsatisfying jumble. It doesn’t take a long time for the film’s audience to start sending distress signals—an opening sequence about suburban racism falls flat so quickly that it portends the film’s inability to bring something interesting to the table, and that the quasi-farcical treatment will not help. The rest of Suburbicon struggles to reach solid ground, as anything interesting is undermined by something worse—the overall tone is so absurdly mean-spirited that the wholesale slaughter of characters at the end of the story isn’t quite as meaningful as it could have been. If, watching the film, you detect a clash of sensibilities at work, don’t necessarily blame the differences between the Coens as screenwriters and Clooney as director—read up on the film’s production history and realize that they ended up combining two very different screenplays in the final script. In the end, the film’s two directions aren’t reconcilable: Sure, you can darkly joke about a suburban murder plot, but you can’t really laugh at a black family being the target of community-organized racism. I suppose that my own perspective as a perpetual suburbanite may be an issue here: I’ve experienced the reality long enough that I’m not happy with cheap shots and I demand something more interesting… and Suburbicon’s middle-of-the-road, confused treatment isn’t enough. What a waste. But Oscar Isaac’s two scenes are pretty good.

  • Bird on a Wire (1990)

    Bird on a Wire (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, May 2020) A good old-fashioned star vehicle combining action and romance, Bird on a Wire is about as generic and calculated a box-office bid as you can imagine—but it does work if you’re a fan of the actors involved. Mel Gibson and Goldie Hawn star as, respectively, a fugitive informant and his ex-girlfriend who finds herself on the run along with him after a chance encounter. As a pretext for chases and kisses, that’s all you need: action director John Badham dutifully handles the mayhem. The plot here clearly takes a backseat to the checkbox-ticking required of such craven crowd-pleasers: clear character-establishing introductions, one car chase to kick off the plot, one bedroom sequence, some funny bickering between exes, more action beats as the story moves from one location to another, and a sailing into the sunset finale. The story is familiar and plodding in order to let the stars show off why they were hired—the belligerent romantic tension is made-to-order, and the villains are merely perfunctory. But while some of the execution looks stodgy today (action scene standards are much higher than they used to be), Bird on a Wire will work if you like the earlier incarnations of Hawn and Gibson—what’s notable here is how she is ten years older than him, which is a still unusual-enough age pairing when it’s usually twenty years in the other direction. Overall, Bird on a Wire is not bad but not good either and more of a demonstration of circa-1990 Gibson and Hawn on autopilot than anything else.

  • Wild Nights with Emily (2018)

    Wild Nights with Emily (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) The greatest thing about the democratization of filmmaking is the possibility for new voices, oddball sensibilities and very specific subject matter to be made available to all paying audiences. So it is that Wild Nights with Emily is nothing less than a strange mixture of literary arcana, LGBTQ optics and awkward comedy taking as a topic the life of Emily Dickinson. It takes roughly thirty seconds before Dickinson French-kisses another woman, and that sets the tone of historical facts blended with modern sensibilities. Molly Shannon stars in an atypical historical role but a rather familiar awkwardness. Wild Nights with Emily is clearly a work of passion in making a historical literary figure relevant to modern concerns, addressing issues of LGBTQ erasure along the way. But there are two significant limits to its effectiveness what will make it beloved by its target audience, and a bit confounding to others. For one thing, you do have to like its brand of off-beat often-ironic humour—which is not always intended to be funny. For another, this is the kind of film that works best if you like and know about Dickinson: while she’s a significant literary figure, a quick read through her Wikipedia page may be indicated before watching the film—as much as I loathe to assign homework before watching a film.