Reviews

  • Green Book (2018)

    Green Book (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) Considering our increasingly sophisticated understanding of (North)American racism, it’s getting obvious that the approach of previous eras isn’t quite enough today. At a time when the Oscars are being awarded between Black Panther, BlacKKKlansman and Green Book, well, it’s infuriating when the Academy ends up picking the absolute safest choice. Green Book, is, in many ways, a throwback to the comfortable anti-racism message of previous decades: White people should be nice to “The Other” so that they should feel better about themselves. In this simplistic message, the inner lives and culture, agency, and aspirations of “the Other” are irrelevant to showing the evolution of the white person. That’s not enough today: “The Other” deserves a full personality, deserves to be the heroes of their own story. In that context, Green Book isn’t all that impressive: as the story of a white protagonist driving around a black musician across the deep south and keeping him out of trouble, it’s clear that the film is more interested in making white audiences feel superior to the cartoonishly racist antagonists of the film. Not to take anything away from the performances of Viggo Mortensen (as the driver) and Mahershala Ali (as the musician, a character of such welcome complexity that the film short-changes him by shoehorning him in a simple story), nor a welcome supporting role for Linda Cardellini, but the result has its limits when comparing it to other best-of-the-year movies. I’d be lying if I didn’t confess to enjoy much of Green Book: there’s a straightforward propulsive quality to the screenwriting that makes it an easy movie to watch and enjoy. I do have the white privilege of liking the film’s reassuring message. But coming off the movie high of BlacKKKlansman, which confronts racists in its ugliest contemporary forms and refuses any easy comfort by making the point that the fight is still ongoing, well Green Book looks like thin soup. There’s a bit of Spotlight Rot at work here, in that a perfectly good genre piece wilts when examined by sustained attention from audiences outside its comfort zone. But at this moment, with the top echelon of the American government not even hiding its inherent racism, I have little patience by comforting lies when “The Others” are not being merely marginalized or harmed but often killed. Green Book may be a feel-good fable, but I want more.

  • Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

    Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) It’s been decades since I last saw the first Friday the 13th film trilogy and considering my distaste of slasher film, I probably could have gone on the rest of my life without seeing the other film in the series. But this is October and the cable channels are cranking up their horror movie schedule and I figure that this may be as good a time as any to record the rest of the series and make it an endurance contest. First up is the fourth entry The Final Chapter (which was a lie, considering that it was succeeded by no fewer than eight other movies). Made at a time when the slasher craze was fully defined and getting familiar, this Final Chapter is very much in-line with the previous instalments: Here, once again, we have teenagers (some locals and some out-of-towners looking for a cottage vacation) having sex and getting killed by the killer’s nigh-omnipotent craziness. It’s all surprisingly boring despite the deaths accumulating at a fast pace. There isn’t all that much nudity, the deaths are gory without being as disgusting as they would become in later instalments (well, by my jaded 2019’s blood-soaked standards, anyway) and only the presence of a younger boy helps distinguish the film from the usual template. Trying to review these movies is a challenge when there’s so little to say. I won’t bring myself to comment on the quality of the on-screen slashing, and there isn’t much to the rest of the film to comment once you’re bored with those interludes. (Some of the stunts are good, though—there’s a length slow motion falling-though-the-windows-and-then-to-the-ground shot that’s spectacular in its own right.)  The 1980s flavour is there but it’s not going to cause any nostalgia along the way. Whatever special marketing hook this film may have had as “a final chapter” has been thoroughly nullified by the endless follow-ups. As a Friday the 13th film, The Final Chapter is pretty much what this series is about—meaning that it ties in a piece with the first three films in the series (indeed picking up moments after the third) but that it certainly won’t make any new fans of the franchise by that point. You already know if you’re going to like it.

  • Buzz (2019)

    Buzz (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) I watched HBO’s Buzz because it presented itself as being about Buzz Bissinger, author of the really good book Friday Night Lights and I wanted to check what he was up to. Well, it turns out that I had missed quite a bit in the past few years. As the film shows, long-form journalist Bissinger spent much of 2015–2017 with Caitlyn Jenner, accompanying her through a much-publicized gender transition, writing the Vanity Fair cover story that marked her coming out and the book that followed. But that’s only half of it—as we gradually piece together, Bissinger’s time with Jenner led him to feel freer to reveal more of his own true nature. Cross-dressing and enthusiasm for BDSM are big parts of it, but the freedom comes with a price as his gender-bending photoshoot raises questions from his very understanding wife, a strain that is further tested when he admits having had a session with a professional dominatrix. Much of the last fifteen minutes of the film are about whether the marriage will survive (it’s touch and go and while the film remains noncommittal about the issue, recent beauty product articles from Bissinger suggest that they’re still together). There’s a heartfelt message here about staying true to oneself, but tempered with how that balances with the demands made by others in our lives. I’m not entirely happy with the documentary itself, but it has far more to do about the way it’s executed (no voiceovers, very few title cards, mostly captured footage during the Jenner/Bissinger collaboration period and a few interviews), leaving a lot to piece together in between fragments of evidence, and missing many opportunities to dig into related themes. The result is cinematographic, though, and the subtlety does speak volumes at times. The other thing that leaves me less than comfortable isn’t as much Bissinger’s gender-fluid leather-heavy wardrobe (surprisingly expensive, as we learn—he does look cool in it) or BDSM preferences, but the exhibitionism on display in the film, which feels far more like a bit TMI videoblog than an actual documentary presenting its subject dispassionately. There’s enough evidence here to understand that this isn’t Bissinger’s first foray into transforming personal events into journalism (hence the detour in discussing his book Father’s Day) but the result does feel like a self-promotional piece more than an attempt at understanding what’s going on. What I really, really liked about Buzz, though, is indissociable from that naked display of personal issues—what readers may portray in their minds from reading a book (such as Friday Night Lights) is a very incomplete portrait, and if Buzz does something for casual Bissinger fans such as myself, it’s to add a few layers of dimensions to him. You do what you do, Buzz—and keep writing.

  • Amour (2012)

    Amour (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, October 2019) The real horror movies aren’t always marketed as such. In Amour, for instance, we’ve got a near-intolerable depiction of a realistic and heartbreaking situation: an elderly man having to take care of a severely disabled partner at the very end of their lives. There’s no way it will end well, as either the premise or the opening moments of the film suggest. Much of the two-hour film is a steady descent into the inevitability of death and there’s nothing remotely fun about it. In Michael Haneke’s usual style, the camera lingers long before, during and after the main point of a scene has been made: there isn’t much of a plot despite the film’s running time, and that makes the experience even more harrowing. Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant are heartbreaking as a committed couple who end up suffering through no fault of their own except for the breakdown of human bodies. Despite the straightforward plot, Amour is a lot to take in because it deals in inevitabilities. No genre element, no fantastic creature we can deny: just what happens to a lot of us as we age. If the film has any upside, it’s to make the thought of dying alone seem almost like a happy ending considering the alternative.

  • Stage Door (1937)

    Stage Door (1937)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) The links between Hollywood and Broadway remain an enduring source of fascination, especially in the early years of sound cinema where stage shows could finally be portrayed on film with some fidelity. Consider Stage Door, which takes us to a 1930s boarding house dedicated to young women trying to find a place in showbiz: an ideal environment to feature many young actresses, and to riff on themes of interest to movie audiences without quite talking about movies. To modern viewers, much for the initial attraction of the film will be its cast. Not only do we have Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, and Lucille Ball in leading roles, but Ann Miller (who was, amazingly only 14 at the time) is unmistakably recognizable in a smaller role. But as Stage Door begins, it’s the quality and the snark of the free-flowing dialogue between the ensemble cast that holds our attention. The women here have fast wits and some of the film’s best moments consist in merely hanging out in the building’s foyer with them as they chat about their careers, their dates and their shared dislike of the house’s food. Hepburn is magnificent as a haughty upper-class girl wanting to make it as an actress and becoming far more sympathetic in the process. She’s not the only one that changes quite a bit along the way, as the film goes from fast-paced comedy to drama somewhere around the beginning of the third act. Despite the sobering (but not entirely unpredictable) shift, that change of pace works rather well and provides to the film a dramatic heft that a purely comedic approach may have lacked. It certainly improves the ultimate impact of the result, with Stage Door surviving admirably well even today.

  • The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)

    The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) I’m clearly showing my age when I say that it’s weird to see a big-budget live-action version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame when it’s so readily compared to the Disney version. I know—it’s an unfair comparison, especially to the original Victor Hugo novel or the 1923 silent film. But it’s not entirely without foundation: The 1939 version, after all, codified many of the elements that even the 1996 Disney version reappropriates for its own use. There are a few other interesting things as well: Charles Laughton is quite good as the titular hunchback, even in the grotesque makeup he has to wear for the entire film. Meanwhile, Maureen O’Hara is spectacular as Esmeralda. Then there is the lavishness of the production, which doesn’t skimp on the massive crowds and the expansive sets that its premise requires, revolving around Notre Dame Cathedral and the rest of Paris as it does. (It was, at the time, one of the most expensive movies ever made by RKO studios.) There’s a little bit of weirdness in having the story interrupt itself to explain the power of the printing press, but that’s forgivable in its own way. This 1939 version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a big-budget spectacular in all senses of the word, and that quality does make it watchable even today.

  • Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

    Jaws: The Revenge (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2019) As I’ve mentioned before, every Jaws sequel gets worse and worse, and Jaws 4: The Revenge is a bad movie even on the bad movie scale. Not content with having a mere white shark on the prowl, this one has a roaring white shark tracking down surviving family members of a shark opponent all the way down from the northeast United States to the Bahamas. It’s … something all right. Built on such shaky premises, the rest of the film doesn’t go far. In between the incoherent plotting, lame character development and dull sequences, Jaws: The Revenge is an inglorious end to the series. And you won’t believe that inept ending. The best thing the film may have produced is the following quote about lead actor Michael Caine: “I have never seen it, but, by all accounts, it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific!”  What else can we add?

  • Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)

    Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) The 1970s were a melodramatic time for everyone, including directors better known for straight-up genre fare. In Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, here we have Martin Scorsese tackling a romantic drama, looking at lower-class Americans through the eyes of a new widow trying to make it as a singer. Of course, money is scarce, there’s her son to consider, and new romantic relationships are a path fraught with peril. As befit a New Hollywood film, it’s all dirty, grimy, realistic and depressing. We’re stuck around Phoenix, Arizona for most of the duration. Scorsese’s usual sense of style is muted here (well, other than a very stylish opening and a long tracking shot) but considering that he took the job in order to bolster his credentials as an actor’s director, he over-succeeded at his ambitions at the moment Ellen Burstyn (looking impossibly young here) won an Oscar for the role. Other than Burstyn, there’s a fun number of famous actors in the cast, from Kris Kristofferson to Diane Ladd to Harvey Keitel to Jodie Foster (plus Laura Dern in a cameo if you know what to look for). Still, the star here is Scorsese, who delivers a very atypical film by his later standards but was able to parlay his experience here in later more memorable projects.

  • Hollywood Party (1934)

    Hollywood Party (1934)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) I have an increasing fondness for some movies of the early 1930s, a time when sight and sound were available, the repressive Production Code wasn’t yet in effect and Hollywood hadn’t yet ossified in its traditional forms. Anything and everything was possible, and narrative cohesion wasn’t yet the all-ruling norm. That’s when you ended with films such as Hollywood Party, which weren’t much more than theatre variety shows put on film, taking advantage of available celebrities, the power of multiple takes to present fully polished material, and going quickly from one number to another. Hollywood Party does have a framing device as sorts, as a forty-something Jimmy Durante plays a movie star best known for Tarzan parody “Schnarzan the Conqueror.” Throwing a lavish party in the hope of securing a new gimmick for his film series, he ends up hosting comedians and singers in a series of numbers. Some of them are more amazing than others: Laurel and Hardy both drop by to engage in an egg-cellent battle of wits with the luscious Lupe Velez (it’s actually kind of gross). The Three Stooges are hit on the head musically. Mickey Mouse is there to introduce a colour animated musical number about a war between sweets that would be horrifying if it weren’t so oddly charming. The title song is a standout dance number featuring a fantasy version of glitzy telephone operators in form-fitting metallic outfits. Polly Moran and Charles Butterworth play an older couple hilariously eager to have extramarital affairs. Musical number “I’ve had my moments” is slyly suggestive of two promiscuous people coming together. (Pre-Code Hollywood is so cool.)  Durante has visions of his nose on various characters and animals (there’s a lot of phallic imagery even in the cartoon). Lions eventually wreak havoc on set. Hollywood Party is not what I’d call a terrific musical, even by the era’s standards—it’s a collage of various segments from various directors and it’s suitably inconsistent. (The ending is the only logical one that fits.)  But even as a loose collection of musical and comedy sketches (which are invariably more interesting than the rare musical moments), it brings together a bunch of then-known stars, and still offers an intriguing glimpse in early Hollywood. I enjoyed it quite a bit even despite its issues.

  • Hollywood Party (1937)

    Hollywood Party (1937)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) Closer to a technical demonstration than a real movie, the 1937 version of Hollywood Party (there’s a far better known 1934 Hollywood Party featuring Laurel and Hardy) is dull, infuriating, intriguing and charming at once. Plot-wise, it’s nothing more than an east-Asia themed variety show, with more stereotypical, fake accents and cultural appropriation costuming (Charley Chase doing a lame Charlie Chan impersonation … ugh) than modern audiences can tolerate. But here’s the thing: It’s filmed in bright Technicolor, generally set outside, and features a number of moderately well-known actors of the time. Modern audiences will be captivated by a far too-short appearance by the legendary Anna May Wong showing off a few wardrobe pieces, and exasperated by lame comic sketches. The song and dances are an often-uncomfortable mix of adequate and overdone (a white man playing an accordion while dressed in Chinese robes is … special), not wowing anyone compared to the best standards of the time but coming across as an amiable short film. Still, it’s the bright colours and sometimes-daring cinematography (through the use of Venetian blinds) that holds our attention today despite the often-dodgy content. A curio more than an essential viewing, Hollywood Party disappeared from public viewing for sixty years until it was rediscovered in an archive in 2000, and even despite the outdated stereotypes it’s good to have this historical document with us still.

  • Roar (1981)

    Roar (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, October 2019) Oh boy, what a movie. The story of the making of Roar is amazing in itself, but even if you see the movie absolutely cold you’ll be gobsmacked at what you will be seeing: a family of actors in their own rural home, interacting with a menagerie of wild cats running all around them. If you’ve grown up (like, well, everybody) with a healthy respect and primal fear of lions, tigers and panthers, that’s amazing enough. It’s hard not to be impressed by the way the actors and the animal share physical space with seemingly no barrier or protection: Far from the usual treatment of actors sharing the screen with dangerous animals, our protagonists make full physical contact with the beasts. It’s so captivating that it does take a while to realize that the story here hangs on only by the flimsiest of threads: It’s about a family joining their father in a big cat-infested house in Africa, and learning to like the animals. (Animal psychology is arguably more important in Roar than human psychology.) The scene-by-scene plotting is disjointed at best, with very little narrative cohesion from one shot to another. The editing is choppy. It feels improvised. These impressions are not accidental when you start reading about the amazing behind-the-scenes story of Roar and how it came to be. The quick version goes like this: While shooting a film in Africa, wife-and-husband Tippi Hedren and Noel Marshall came to like big cats and decided to illegally host as many of them as they could in their remote California residence. After altering the terrain to look like Africa and bringing together as many at 71 lions, 26 tigers, 10 cougars, 9 panthers and a host of other dangerous animals (including four Canadian geese potentially being the worst of them), they started shooting a movie with the noble goal of bolstering preservation efforts for big cats in Africa. Things, however, did not go as planned: The shooting took five years, not helped along by the animals’ lack of acting cooperation. There was a catastrophic flood, ruining sets, film, equipment and the producer/director/star’s own home. The finished film went unseen in North America. They went bankrupt. Animals died, either after escaping and being shot by authorities, or through illness. Roar’s five years of shooting extended to eleven years from pre-production to the final cut. Then there’s the fact that 70 people were injured on-set (some seriously, such as daughter Melanie Griffith and then-cinematographer Jan de Bont), because (as anyone knows) humans and big cats aren’t meant to live together. Imagine the crew turnover under these conditions. Hilariously enough, the film begins by the standard “No animals were harmed during the shooting of this movie”—when the film was re-released in 2005, the tagline added, “70 Cast and crewmembers were.”  The resulting footage is frankly amazing—By the time the characters share their beds with lions and tigers, it’s hard not to be scared and envious. (While nothing bad happens in the film, it was broadcast on a horror channel and my daughter flat-out refused to watch it, showing better self-preservation instincts than any character in the film.) But it does raise the question of whether this has been worth it—it’s easy to laugh in amazement at the kind of madness that led to the existence of the film, but only because nobody died along the way. Still, it exists, and its 2005 re-release did much to remind people of the fact: in the annals of moviemaking, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more amazing making-of than the story of how Roar came to be.

  • Saboteur (1942)

    Saboteur (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2019) I’m nearing the end of my essential Hitchcock viewing regimen (I’ve seen all his top tier, almost everything in his middle tier and am now focused on his 1930s production), and with that knowledge of his body of work it’s easy to recognize in 1942’s Saboteur a rough blueprint of plot elements he used during his entire career. Let’s see: a romantically antagonistic couple-on-the-run from The 39 Steps to North by Northwest. Musical Leitmotifs from The Lady Vanishes to The Man Who Knew Too Much. Climactic use of a national landmark, repeated in North by Northwest as well. The usual blend of small humorous touches and taut suspense sequences. The fuzzy nature of the antagonist’s overall allegiances à la not-to-be-confused-with Sabotage. Described as such, Saboteur does run the risk of being perceived as a collage of elements from other Hitchcock movies, but that’s ignoring the fact that it still works remarkably well: It may be a middle-tier work for him, but it’s still as enjoyable as it was in 1942—perhaps more so given the period feel and wartime paranoia so clearly described here. (Substitute “terrorist” for “saboteur” and you’d have a solid basis for a contemporary update.)  Hitchcock even at his most mediocre is still well worth watching, and Saboteur is a further proof of that.

  • The Land Before Time (1988)

    The Land Before Time (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2019) I find myself curiously laconic in describing The Land Before Time. What you need to know is that it’s an animated film from Don Bluth, which was trying at the time to compete with Walt Disney as a purveyor of animated family films. It’s set in prehistoric times, with a young dinosaur trying to find a place to live after the death of his mom (oops, there’s the Disney touch right there) and making friends along the way. Despite the film’s claim to fame as having spawned no less than thirteen direct-to-video follow-ups to date, it’s also as bland as it’s possible to be. Aimed at kids and not badly made in any sense of the word, it’s a by-the-number exercise in family movies. Dinosaur fans will appreciate, even though the film inevitably doesn’t reflect the dramatic accumulation of knowledge in the field in the past 30 years. The film is almost exactly what you think it will be from looking at a plot summary or the box cover: a kid’s friend dinosaur adventure. Nothing more, nothing less.

  • Blood, Sweat and Terrors (2018)

    Blood, Sweat and Terrors (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) Anthology films often get some deserved flack—by design, they’re a collection of smaller, lower-budgeted efforts often executed without narrative or even tonal consistency. Blood, Sweat and Terrors is more prone to these criticisms than most other similar movies in that it’s an authentic collection of shorter movies often made and distributed before being collected here. Unlike other anthologies, the movies were not all specifically commissioned for the project, and aren’t wrapped up in a larger frame. That last element can have an influence on audience reactions to the first few segments, as it becomes clear that the first one wasn’t meant to be a framing device for the others à la VHS. Unlike many other anthologies in which the theme is horror-based, Blood, Sweat and Terrors focuses on thrills and action, although not necessarily on a realistic register: some do end up in fantastic territory and many more take a rather heightened approach to filmmaking. Opinions will vary on the results. Opening segment “Empire of Dust” gets from a shootout to a demonic explanation, but it sets a tone that the rest of the film can’t quite follow. “Awesome Runaway” is, conceptually, more interesting but it stumbles in its execution: As a fever dream of someone idealizing an escape with over-the-top heroics, it’s not executed finely enough to fully realize its ambitions. “Jacob’s Wrath” is more ponderous in the ways it mixes reality with imagination, but I was pleasantly surprised to recognize Ottawa’s own Shaw Centre as a shooting location, and realize that filmmaker Alexandre Carrière is local. The best segment in the film is “Express Delivery,” which mixes some savvy action filmmaking, funny one-liners and enough plot to make it interesting: writer-director/star Beau Fowler has often used the film as a calling card and it’s easy to see why. The other noteworthy entry here (opinions will vary) is the closing “Fetch,” which packages a bit of neo-noir into a short but amusing package. The Canadian representation here is high considering that it’s packaged by Toronto-area production companies. Despite the international pedigree of maybe half the entries, Blood, Sweat and Terrors qualifies as CanCon for broadcasting purposes—meaning that it’s going to be a fixture of at least one cable channel for years to come. It’s not a bad choice if you’re an action/suspense fan looking for a few quick bits to watch: The quality is uneven, but the next one is usually better.

  • All the Right Moves (1983)

    All the Right Moves (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, October 2019) If you want your movie to accumulate some unearned posterity, there is no better way than having the lead actors become one of Hollywood’s superstars. In other words, I don’t think we’d remember All the Right Moves so fondly if it didn’t star Tom Cruise in the lead role. In many ways, it’s entirely forgettable teen movie. A bit grittier than most, it follows a crucial moment in the life of our protagonist, a high-school senior who wants to become an engineer, but whose only ticket out of town may be a football scholarship. As a product of the early 1980s that owes a lot to the New Hollywood of the previous decade, it’s often aiming to be a slice of blue-collar Americana, with The Mill looming large as the town’s biggest employer and the desperation to escape a small-town life being central to the character’s motivation. The drama comes in after a crucial football loss, with events leading our protagonist to antagonize the football coach and perhaps his only way out. But, of course, our protagonist is a likable guy stuck between various loyalties, and the way these Horatio Algeresque fables resolve themselves usually comes by having him rewarded for his virtues. All the Right Moves is not a complicated film: Even if the ending appears to pop out of nowhere, it’s meant to be a bit of a sop to conventional moral values. The draw here was and remains a freshly faced Tom Cruise, in one of his early roles before Risky Business put him on the map. As a film, it’s a bit of an unremarkable high school drama. As a look at early Cruise, though, it does still have its merits.