Reviews

  • Westworld, Season 1 (2016)

    Westworld, Season 1 (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2017) Early word on Westworld was not good. Hyped by HBO as their next big-budget SF&F show now that Game of Thrones is on its way out, the show suffered ominous-sounding production delays while scripts were re-tuned, which didn’t bode well in the wake of Vinyl’s failure. But while this first season definitely has its issues, the result occasionally reaches delirious peaks of peak TV goodness, playing with savvy audience expectations and delivering reality-altering perceptional shift. While the show begins and more or less ends where Michael Crichton’s original 1973 movie did, there’s a lot of complexity under the surface, and the attitudinal shifts in the show’s sympathies for artificial humans is notable. In-between Inception and Memento, show-runner Jonathan Nolan is known for mind-warping scripts and Westworld is occasionally no different: the first episode is a fantastically twisted introduction to a familiar concept, while the end-stretch of the series delivers solid revelations about the nature of some characters, narrative time-play and unexpectedly philosophical rambling. It’s hardly perfect: much of the stretch between episodes 2 and 6 could have been compressed in half the time, while the so-called deep thoughts of the conclusion feel both ponderous and nonsensical. But when Westworld works, it really works. Episodes 1, 7 and 10 alone are worth the long stretches in-between. Top-notch actors such as Ed Harris, Anthony Hopkins, Jeffrey Wright and Thandie Newton deliver good performances, the script cleverly plays to an audience that demands more from their TV miniseries and the visual polish of the result can be astonishing. Even the most pretentious aspects of the script can be seen as a plus given how high it aims. The sympathy of the series for its synthetic characters is a notable representation of the maturing of media Science Fiction—especially when humans act this rotten, can we really blame the robots for turning on their masters? I’m not sure where season 2 can take us, but as far as HBO is concerned, it’s mission accomplished for Westworld—expectations run high for the follow-up.

  • Hot Shots! (1991)

    Hot Shots! (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second or third viewing, On DVD, October 2017) I first saw Hot Shots! as a teenager before seeing Top Gun, which may have coloured my perceptions of the so-called serious movie. But having recently seen Top Gun in its entirety makes a re-watch of Hot Shots! even funnier. This spoof, is the pure ZAZ lineage, relies a lot on deadpan jokes and actors playing ridiculous material as seriously as possible. Peak-era Charlie Sheen makes for a credible mixture of action-hero looks and comic timing, while Valeria Golino is both spectacular and hilarious as the obligatory (but not perfunctory) love interest—female roles in spoof comedies rarely get as good a character as she does here. While Hot Shots! is focused on Top Gun, it does have time to indulge in broader gags and isn’t content (as with many worse recent spoof movies) simply running through the original plot with extra slapstick and pop-culture references. As a result, Hot Shots! has aged well, even for those who haven’t watched Top Gun recently. In fact, it may even have appreciated slightly since its release given that the bottom has fallen out of the comedy subgenre. A competent spoof upon release, Hot Shots! now stands as a remarkably funny film today.

  • Empire of the Sun (1987)

    Empire of the Sun (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, October 2017) “Christian Bale plays J.G. Ballard” is a really weird sentence to contemplate for anyone who knows a bit about twenty-first century blockbuster movies and new-wave sixties prose Science Fiction. It’s even half-true. Empire of the Sun certainly features Christian Bale in one of his first major roles, and adapts J.G. Ballard’s semi-autobiographical novel to the big screen. However, Ballard’s autobiographical experience mostly applies to the first part of the film, which depicts the lavish lifestyle of the British upper-class in early-WW2 Shanghai and their internment in civilian camps after the Japanese invasion. There are differences, though, as explained in a fascinating 2006 essay on the novel and the film by Ballard himself: Ballard spent the war in a camp with his parents, modified his character’s arc to differentiate it from himself and generally provided more closure than reality afforded. Still, as reported, Christian Bale did introduce himself to the author by saying “Hello, Mr Ballard. I’m you.” (The essay multiplies the strangeness—the film was partially filmed near Ballard’s home, leading some of his neighbours to feature in the film as extras.) The film itself is a study in the kind of old-school epic war drama that seems to have disappeared from the current movie landscape in favour of CGI-fuelled fantasy spectacles. There are a number of scenes with thousands of extras, a story that spans years, gorgeously fantastic sights captured in-camera without special effects (such as a stadium filled with objects taken by the Japanese) and an overall sweep to the story that feels prodigious. Bale is fine as the sometimes-unwitting protagonist of the story, but John Malkovich is delightfully amoral as a survivor trying his best to make it through the war, while various other notables such as Miranda Richardson, Joe Pantoliano and Ben Stiller (!) show up in smaller parts. The depiction of Shanghai is gripping, as is the way normalcy is disrupted in small and big ways after the Japanese invasion. The airplane motif is well done, and the film does earn its relatively happy conclusion. Dark humour and vertiginous sights (such as a faraway glimpse at nuclear explosions) enliven an already satisfying story. The result is still surprisingly engaging thirty years later—but then again, it’s a Steven Spielberg production.

  • The Crying Game (1992)

    The Crying Game (1992)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, October 2017) I’m old enough to remember the hubbub surrounding the release of The Crying Game, and the numerous references/jokes/parodies to the film’s “big secret” that popped up in its wake. (In retrospect, much of it amounted to transphobia, and I would hope that today’s audiences would react in a more mature fashion.)  But viewing the film today, spoilers firmly applied, reveals a film that’s both better and worse than its critical reputation. The worst aspect of the film is its pacing. It takes forever for the premise to be cleared up, there are two first acts to the movie, and there are entire stretches where not much happens. On the other hand, The Crying Game does have quite a bit of dramatic power when it does get going. Knowing all about the film’s dramatic reveal does help in appreciating the subtle humour of the film (ending with “Stand by your Man” is cheeky, but beginning with “When a Man Loves a Woman” is even cheekier), but it also helps in appreciating Jaye Davidson’s unique performance. He’s the standout in a film that also features no less than Stephen Reas as an everyday-man terrorist, Forest Whittaker as a soldier in unique circumstances and Jim Broadbent as a bartender with an impressive head of black hair. The Crying Game has often been reduced to a punchline, but it’s far more heartfelt than its caricature would suggest. I would really be curious to see a remake in the next decade or so, largely in order to appreciate the progress on transgender issues since 1992. In the meantime, it’s an efficient drama, with a solid emotional core and far more entertaining than I assumed.

  • The Void (2016)

    The Void (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2017) Hype is a terrible thing but consider that even if The Void fails to measure up to the hype I heard about it, the hype did get me to watch it. For a low-budget Canadian horror film, that’s no insignificant achievement. As often happens with high-concept horror, The Void is better during its first mysterious half, then progressively more disappointing as it rushes to a conclusion without quite making sense of what came before. The basic nuts and bolts of the premise are not without interest: A policeman rushing to a hospital on the verge of closing down, a siege from crazed cultists, sombre horrors from the basement, mysterious characters acting in nonsensical ways… Add to that the strong Carpenter influences, the Lovecraftian tropes, the very gory practical effects and there’s enough there to please horror fans. This isn’t writers/Directors Steven Kostanski and Jeremy Gillespie first horror movie, and they are getting better at it. The Void slides from eerie thriller to full-blown creature horror more quickly than I expected, which presents its own challenges: it’s hard to keep up the pressure once everything goes crazy, and The Void increasingly stumbles in trying to tie everything back up in a single story. When all is said and done, there simply isn’t all that much to the final result, and even less that can be considered interesting. The ending feels like a mash-up of three or four very conventional movies, and isn’t necessarily well supported by everything that has come before. Still, I can’t help but go soft of a low-budget film that actually delivers a mildly entertaining experience even as it fails to reach its potential. The Void does measure up to the current standards of Canadian horror movies and that’s saying enough when there are almost always half a dozen worse choices available on specialized Canadian Cable TV channels.

  • Why Him? (2016)

    Why Him? (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2017) There’s a regular number of R-rated comedies these days, but it seems to me as if they’re coming off an assembly line. Take a comedian, take a serious actor, throw them in uncomfortable situations, be sure to feature a copious amount of profanity and make sure to wrap everything in feel-good themes about family, friendship and/or romance. No worries if they all end up feeling familiar since there will be another one six weeks later. Why Him? is PG-13 rated despite feeling like an R, but it certainly struggles with déjà vu: in-between seeing Bryan Cranston as a conventional family man visiting his daughter’s nouveau-riche boyfriend played by an unhinged James Franco, the film seems to have been assembled from familiar blocks in order to give audiences exactly what they would be expecting from the poster, the premise and/or the trailer. Jonah Hill can be spotted as producer and writer, which certainly explains a lot about the film’s well-worn comic elements. It’s not that Why Him? is bad (although some individual moments of the film are obnoxious) as much as it’s the same as half a dozen other recent movies. At nearly two hours, there’s a lot of fluff to the result (most notably a final act that just drags on and on), making the movie feel even more generic. While set at Christmas, I would be exceptionally surprised if Why Him? became anything like a holiday classic—heck, even the very similar The Night Before has a stronger shot at that title.

  • The China Syndrome (1979)

    The China Syndrome (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2017) Few movies ever reached topical relevancy as definitively as The China Syndrome, released barely twelve days before the Three Mile Island nuclear accident brought the film’s themes to the forefront of the public discourse. Nowadays, The China Syndrome still plays well, largely because it’s a solid thriller with a capable trio of lead actors. What viewers may not remember (or expect) from the film is how it acts as a great primer on newsgathering in the late seventies, with Jane Fonda playing an ambitious reporter, helped along by a cameraman/technician (a dashingly bearded Michael Douglas, who also produced the film), inadvertently records evidence of a dangerous incident at a nuclear power plant. Trade details aside, the film soon moves into solid conspiracy thriller territory as the characters do their best to go public before the incident reoccurs. The ending is dark, but not quite as bleak as I remembered it. Jack Lemmon anchors the conspiracy angle in reality. Convincing procedural details, either from the TV news angle or the operations of the nuclear reactor itself, keep the film grounded in the required realism. While the film’s surface sheen is clearly from the late seventies, The China Syndrome itself hasn’t aged all that much, and you could indeed imagine a remake that wouldn’t have to change much in order to remain relevant. Still, the 1979 version remains both compelling and reflective or its era. It is well worth a look.

  • The Lost Boys (1987)

    The Lost Boys (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, October 2017) Even at a time when we think we’ve seen it all with vampire movies, there’s a curious energy at play in The Lost Boys, which improbably blends comic tropes with a theme taken from Peter Pan in order to deliver a rather good horror-comedy. The idea of an idyllic Californian-coast town being home to a small group of vampires and becoming “the murder capital of the world” is amusing enough. But then there’s the protagonist falling in with bad influences, his brother getting acquainted with wannabe vampire killers who do end up being right, the mom hooking up with a suspiciously menacing shop owner … there are a lot of spinning plates here, and they all seem to belong to a slightly different genre. Surprisingly, it works—although there’s some freedom in clarifying that the film is not meant to be scrutinized too closely. Under Joel Schumacher’s direction, The Lost Boys is fast-paced, stylistically moody, generally enjoyable and, at times, an intriguing time capsule of mid-eighties conventions. The opening act is great, the middle act is good, but the third act does get a bit conventional, although still enjoyable in its own way. Jamie Gertz plays a convincing love interest, while Corey Haim and Jason Patric each have their own movie as brothers. Still, the highlight is a very young-looking Keifer Sutherland as the leader of the vampire pack. The themes are slight, but at least there’s something there that goes beyond the usual conventions of vampire movies until then. For the rest, The Lost Boys is a movie that has, through sheer daring and genre-blending, aged very well. It’s still worth a look, long after the vampire boom has come, gone and come back again.

  • Eraserhead (1977)

    Eraserhead (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2017) It is with some satisfaction that I report that really disliked Eraserhead. After all, that’s exactly what I was expecting: I don’t do surrealism and I generally don’t like (or get) much of writer/director David Lynch’s work, so why would this one be any different? The movie itself doesn’t care all that much about whether people like it—advancing at its own glacial pace through nightmarish body-horror thankfully filmed in black-and-white, Eraserhead is a bad dream put on-screen, with minimal plot and maximal non-sequiturs. The themes of parenting anxiety are clear enough, but I can’t be bothered to decode the rest when I care so little about the result. I’m satisfied that, having seen it, I can remove it from my list of films to see and that’s about it. 

  • Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994)

    Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, October 2017) One of the problems in watching the Naked Gun trilogy on successive days is that the series is so generally consistent in achieving its comic objectives that it’s difficult to tease apart any film-specific commentary. So what’s to be said about Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult? The film is funny; Leslie Nielsen is comedy gold with his deadpan portrayal of a veteran cop; OJ Simpson features in it. This third instalment gets more insistent with its movie-specific parodies, heralding the downfall of the subgenre later on. There’s also a crudeness to some of the gags that clearly makes this third volume the least successful in the trilogy, but that’s not really unexpected. At least the climax, set at the Academy Awards, allows for some pokes at Hollywood itself, although the references there are getting dated far more quickly than the rest of the series. Still, once you’ve started this series, there’s no real reason to stop—even as a third instalment, the film is funny enough to warrant a look.

  • The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991)

    The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, October 2017) While The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear is slightly less funny than its predecessor, the difference is slight enough as to be negligible, and the original started out high enough. The result is another solid comedy, perhaps a bit more dubiously motivated (what is Frank Drebin doing in Washington, all of a sudden?) but still effectively hitting upon the tropes of police thrillers. There are a few more outright nods to specific films, but they’re still controlled well compared to the grotesque excesses of more contemporary spoofs. The poke at Bush(I)-era American politics date the film more quickly than the generic cop-thriller stuff of the first film. Otherwise, there isn’t much to say about the film that wasn’t already discussed for the first film: It’s a consistent series, now without its flaws but good enough to be worth a few laughs. 

  • The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)

    The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, October 2017) Much of the fun in watching The Naked Gun is in seeing the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker team (along with Pat Proft) take on the police thriller as worthy of spoofing. Using Leslie Nielsen as a gaffe-prone policeman with more zeal than polish is inspired, but then again most of The Naked Gun comes from the short-lived but still-hilarious Police Squad! TV show. The basic elements being familiar to the filmmakers, the film itself seems well-practised, something that also probably has to do with the previous ZAZ spoof movies. In any case, the solid plot acts as a clothesline on which to add various gags, joke sequences and parodies. The number of outright parodies is low (the shift would happen in later instalments of the series) but the laughs are high, mostly because the film is spoofing a genre and generating a lot of jokes along the way. Leslie Nielsen is solid, playing his ridiculous character Frank Drebin with absolute dryness. Ricardo Montalban is also a highlight in his own way, while Priscilla Presley, George Hamilton and (ironically now) O.J. Simpson round up the main cast. The third act does get a bit long especially if you have no great interest in baseball. Still, no matter how you see it, The Naked Gun remains a terrific spoof comedy, as essential today as other classics of the genre such as Airplane!, Top Secret! or Hot Shots!

  • Tonari no Totoro [My Neighbor Totoro] (1988)

    Tonari no Totoro [My Neighbor Totoro] (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, October 2017) There’s a refreshing refusal to play by conventions that shines at the heart of Tonari no Totoro: The avoidance of conflict, the supernatural seen as wonder, domestic concerns and a constantly inventive imagination at play. There’s quite a bit of darkness in the film as it focuses on two girls waiting until their mother is well enough to be released from the hospital, but much of the movie is about discovering the hidden magic in their bucolic setting, with dream sequences and spirits helping out the two girls. Whatever drama in the film is limited to looking for a lost girl and the tension of knowing if their mother is doing well. I suspect that Totoro works on a level that escapes analysis or narration—it’s just cute, comforting, wondrous and unlike anything else. It plays like a pleasant daydream, non-threatening to a fault. The cute creature design may also help explain its popularity with kids of all ages. While I wasn’t as taken by the movie as I hoped I would, it’s squarely in Hayao Miyazaki’s impressive body of work and does rank highly as a must-see animation film.

  • Sleepers (1996)

    Sleepers (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2017) The mid-nineties were a surprisingly good time for solid thrillers, and Sleepers works not because of its atypical revenge plot or unobtrusive direction but largely because it managed to bring together an impressive group of actors. In-between Kevin Bacon, Jason Patric, Brad Pitt, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and the always-compelling Minnie Driver, it’s a nice mixture of generations and styles. It helps that the script is built solidly around an unusual conceit, with an ambitious lawyer doing his best to lose a case but make sure it’s widely publicized to take revenge upon childhood enemies. A blend of courtroom thriller and working-class drama, Sleepers may or may not be based on a true story, but it works well as fiction. Despite revolving around difficult subjects such as child abuse, Sleepers manages to be slightly comforting in how it ensures a victory of sorts for its characters, present a solid underdog story in an accessible fashion, and largely depends on familiar actors doing what they do best. Director Barry Levinson mostly stays out of the way of his actors, and the result is curiously easy to watch despite harsh sequences.

  • The Animal (2001)

    The Animal (2001)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Prime Streaming, October 2017) For such an easy punchline, Rob Schneider’s apex as a leading comedy actor is actually quite short, from 1999’s Deuce Bigalow to 2002’s The Hot Chick, with 2001’s The Animal in the middle of those two. Before and after that, Schneider is to be found in supporting roles and cameos in Happy Madison productions … sometimes effectively but usually not. The Animal certainly presents Schneider in a familiar role, taking advantage of a high-concept comic premise to be as crude as possible in the name of getting laughs. It very occasionally works here, but The Animal is more annoying than funny even while allowing for the usual Happy Madison lowest-denominator methods. What helps a bit is that Schneider is up against first-season-of-Survivor early TV Reality star Colleen Haskell in the lead romantic role. She may have charmed all of North America in 2000, but as an actress Haskell is an empty void—she’s cute but so bland that she’s a rare case study of non-acting in a Hollywood picture. She at least has the decency of looking suitably baffled as Schneider showboats all around her, exhibiting animal traits in a series of comic bits that would be actively embarrassing to explain to the preschoolers for which the film is seemingly destined. (“Yeah, he’s rubbing against the mailbox because … oh, let’s watch a Disney movie again.”) There are a handful of laughs in the movie, largely due to Norm MacDonald’s too-short appearance as an overly analytical mob member, and a final anti-racism joke that surprisingly lands despite the film’s best efforts to make it offensive. Otherwise, well, The Animal is surely sliding away as an unlamented dim memory, and that’s not a tragedy. Maybe, someday, we will forget all about Schneider as well.