Reviews

  • Driven (2018)

    Driven (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2020) Considering the outrageous nature of John DeLorean’s story in founding DMC at the beginning of the 1980s, it’s a wonder that a film about his life hasn’t been made earlier. But maybe some distance helped, as suggested by the darkly funny tone taken by Driven as it fictionalizes the incredible crime story that transformed DeLorean from a car maven entrepreneur to a convicted felon. Wisely, the film doesn’t focus on the grander-than-life DeLorean as much as one of the supporting characters in his story—the man who would eventually become an informant for the FBI and expose DeLorean’s drug deals to finance his company. It’s all very entertaining, but take everything with a grain of salt, of course—Driven isn’t interested in factual accuracy as much as its breezy, very seventies atmosphere and comic approach. A bunch of likable actors help make the film even better—Lee Pace as the very tall, white-haired DeLorean, Jason Sudeikis in the lead role, and notables such as Judy Greer and Corey Stoll in supporting turns. Despite the comic intent, the film does demonstrate the reasons why DeLorean turned to drug dealing for last-resort cash, and even finds some empathy for the doomed character stuck in ambitious schemes that could not come to a happy conclusion. While very watchable, Driven does come with a few warnings—there’s an undercurrent of sadness behind it all, the film isn’t too sure of how far it should push the comic tone, and it’s very distant from the true story of what happened. [July 2020: If you’re interested in the facts, take a look at the documentary Framing John DeLorean, which is even better than the fiction.]

  • Billy Bathgate (1991)

    Billy Bathgate (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2020) At first glance, Billy Bathgate looks like the kind of slam-dunk entertainment that 1990s Hollywood made so well—a mixture of coming-of-age drama set within a fascinating gangster context, with a little bit of romance to sweeten the whole thing. Throw in the 1930s period recreation, a bestselling source novel written by EL Doctorow, a strong cast of actors, plus story elements so familiar that they become comfortable, and Billy Bathgate looks like a ready-made audience pleaser and potential awards contender. Except that it didn’t turn out that way.  Production of the film was marred by endless rewrites, significant cost overruns and Doctorow distancing himself from the adaptation. Things didn’t get better upon the film’s release, as critics savaged it and audiences ran away. Now a largely forgotten relic of a decade now long past, Billy Bathgate has become a curiosity. It hasn’t improved with age—the blend of coming-of-age drama with gangster thrills is still awkward, and curious creative decisions keep haunting the film and making it duller than it should be. On the other hand, it does have some nice period detail, a fun episode set in a small upstate New York town, a rather amazing cast made of then-known names (Dustin Hoffman, Nicole Kidman, Bruce Willis) and people who would later become far more prominent (Stanley Tucci, Steve Buscemi), as well as far more nudity from Kidman than you would expect from the nature of the film. For film reviewers, it’s not a bad idea to go back in time to see not only the classics, but also the failures like Billy Bathgate. Decades past the media pile-up that often happens in such cases, it can be instructive to look at the wreckage and wonder—well, what happened here?

  • The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

    The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, May 2020) There is something both familiar and comfortable in the very enjoyable film noir heist movie The Asphalt Jungle. It was a bit of a sensation at the time—a film that stripped away the glamour of Hollywood to approach cinema-vérité and spent more of its running time with the criminals planning a heist than the policemen hunting for them after the crime. Those are now standard features of crime movies, of course—and this may mask some of the impact of the film as it was perceived back then. Fortunately, John Huston’s direction here is masterful and has aged very well. While The Asphalt Jungle can’t escape a certain scattered effect in the midway section, it tightens up in time for the conclusion. The mid-century Midwest atmosphere is very convincingly rendered, and it’s supplemented by the corrupt characters and unescapable fatalism so beloved of the film noir genre. Sterling Hayden turns in one likable lead performance in an otherwise fairly grim cast—although there’s an early turn by Marilyn Monroe to make things even more interesting. The Asphalt Jungle makes for compelling viewing even with the familiarity of its narrative—when something works, it works well enough decades later.

  • The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974)

    The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2020) Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is a classic of Canadian literature (widely acclaimed, often cited on best-of lists, taught in schools, etc.), and its reading is almost mandatory if you want to claim that you know anything about CanLit. The film adaptation is along the same lines for Canadian film, perhaps even more so given that it was one of the first commercially and critically successful films that blended regional themes and settings to produce a film that was unquestionably Canadian. For modern viewers, there’s some added attraction in seeing a very young Richard Dreyfus in the leading role, Dennis Quaid in a supporting role and (for French-Canadian film fans) a young and surprisingly attractive Micheline Lanctot. The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz takes us, as did the novel, into Montréal’s anglophone Jewish community. It’s uneven, and almost frustrating by design (it is, after all, blatantly about a young man’s coming of age and these things don’t always go smoothly) but it does have a few high points—including a comic set-piece about an exceptionally pretentious bar mitzvah video documentary. The French-Canadian dub has a weird mixture of formal and informal French, which makes sense given the setting (and how Micheline Lanctot dubs her own lines in her very distinctive voice) but still rings a bit weird to viewers used to a more consistent level of language.

  • 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.