Reviews

  • Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

    Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, September 2017) At some point, someone will need to sit down with Mel Gibson and ask if he’s all right, because most of his movies as a director include unnecessary gore to a level that approaches ridiculousness. Hacksaw Ridge is no exception, but it feels even more ridiculous given how dissonant the film gets once it heads to war. The first half of the film is easily the most interesting, as a young man (Andrew Garfield, effortlessly likable) enlists but refuses to take up arms due to religious beliefs. The army doesn’t take his conscientious objection very well, and the action soon moves to the courtroom as our protagonist defends his right not to bear arms in the service of the nation. There’s a conventional romance, but the angle through which Gibson explores national service is interesting. Then we head over to the front and Hacksaw Ridge becomes an entirely different animal. As combat rages on, soldiers are killed in increasingly gruesome ways only made possible by CGI and our protagonist must continue to operate in this hellish environment. If viewers had been worried they wouldn’t get war sequences after a pacific start, those worries are soon put to rest by a Grand Guignol carnival of exploding heads and severed limbs. Some viewers may want to tune out, not just because of the gore, but mostly because the film pretty much loses any dramatic interest from that point on. There will be bullets. There will be heroic sacrifices. There will be redemption for a protagonist regarded as unreliable by his fellow soldiers. It plays out almost exactly as anticipated, although the visuals are indeed nightmarish enough. Uneven in its approaches, Hacksaw Ridge undeniably has some interest, but it is needlessly graphic in its portrayal of violence. 

  • Rumble Fish (1983)

    Rumble Fish (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2017) I’m glad I saw Rumble Fish shortly after The Outsiders. Those two movies will forever remain a curio pairing of teenage dramas made back-to-back by writer/director Francis Ford Coppola, with much of the same cast and crew. But while they share themes and settings, they couldn’t be more different in execution, as The Outsiders plays everything straight, while Rumble Fish allows itself fanciful impressionistic segments that truly set it apart from the genre to which it belongs. From splashes of colour in an otherwise black-and-white film, to literate references, a very stylized fight, an out-of-body experience, unnatural skies and a noir aesthetics borrowed from German expressionism. The plot is almost inconsequential to the various moviemaking flourishes, but there’s still a heartfelt brother-to-brother relationship at the heart of it all. All of this being said, I still can’t quite commit to liking the film. On the other hand, I found it far more interesting than The Outsiders, and I’m far more likely to revisit Rumble Fish in a few years than most of the more ordinary films of its period. 

  • Love and Death (1975)

    Love and Death (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2017) The good thing about rediscovering Woody Allen’s movies by going back in time is that they get funnier along the way. So it is that Love and Death is classic comic Allen, taking his usual nebbish character and placing him in the middle of an epic Russian war story. Much of the pleasures of the film are about seeing Allen’s character try to rebel against the conventions of the form, and cheerfully throwing contemporary anachronisms in a story that could (and has) been executed with such a straight face in other movies. The period detail is often very credible, and the jokes are funny enough to earn real laughs. Literate philosophical dialogue is a treat (especially as it forms the basis or further jokes), even though I suspect that I’m not catching even half the references to Russian literature or classic cinema. For a film that quite predictably ends with the death of its main character, Love and Death is remarkably upbeat even in its tragedies. Allen is near the top of his classic comic persona, while Diane Keaton is very good as his sparring partner and Olga Georges-Picot unlocks the hidden sultriness of the subgenre that the film parodies. I’m not sure what I expected from Love and Death (again; going back in time on Allen’s filmography sets very strange expectations) but I feel as if I got considerably more than I even hoped for.

  • Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)

    Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On TV, September 2017) As a Canadian, it amuses me to point out that John Rambo, a character that has come to embody the worst excesses of American jingoism, was twice created by Canadians—novelist David Morrell for the novel that gave rise to the PTSD-ridden Rambo of First Blood, then screenwriter James Cameron who developed Rambo-the-war-machine of First Blood Part II. The real story is a bit messier than the sound bite (starting with the influence of all-American Sylvester Stallone in re-writing and playing the character), but it’s a reminder that the character has a far more nuanced origin story than simply seeing Stallone re-win the Vietnam war by himself. It’s practically impossible to re-watch Rambo II today from a simple-minded entertainment perspective: the film itself cries out for socio-critical commentary, either as a gold-plated representation of the Regan-era mindset, as a repudiation of post-Vietnam humility, as wish fulfillment writ national, or as a dispiriting proof that audiences will be gleefully cruel as long as you appeal to their base instinct. Because, not to put it too bluntly, Rambo II is in many ways a terrible film. The set-up makes no sense; the dialogue is blunt to the point of being ridiculous, the plot threads are barely disguised and the overall plot couldn’t be more obvious. Appealing to unsophisticated plot elements, the film gleefully multiplies Rambo’s enemies because, well, why not? It’s not enough to fight Vietnamese soldiers holding American hostages—let’s throw in even-more-evil Russians and duplicitous American weasels who clearly can’t measure up to John Rambo, Esq. as a true-blooded depiction of what it means to be American (mostly by killing everyone else). Sarcasm isn’t just easy in commenting Rambo II: it’s almost mandatory. But here’s the thing: it seems to work in a low-level cunning way. I’d draw the parallels with the rise of reactionary elements in American politics circa 2017, but you’re probably ahead of me in this regard—maybe it’s better to sign off while acknowledging than even in reaching for the lowest common denominator, Rambo II does find one and exploits it for all it’s worth.

  • Rambo III (1988)

    Rambo III (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On TV, September 2017) The four-movie Rambo series may be all about an American icon, but it’s fascinating to see, peering closer, that all four movies have their own particular aesthetics. The first film is a gritty post-Vietnam drama about PTSD. The second in an all-out revenge fantasy. The fourth is a reprehensible pile of gory grittiness without much of a point. The third … is just plain dull. Heading to Afghanistan to help the soon-to-be Taliban in fighting the Soviet Empire, Rambo III goes through the motions of an eighties action movie without doing much more than the required minimum. The first half of the film has a mildly compelling arc in bringing back Rambo to the battlefield (so much so that it would form the backbone of the Hot Shots Part Deux parody), but the film’s second half loses itself in well-worn action movie tropes, although the ending sequence finally has some energy in it. It doesn’t make for a very good third entry in the series. While Rambo III’s troubled production may account for some of the lack of focus, the lack of excitement does doom the film to mediocrity—if Sylvester Stallone and the Rambo series weren’t linked to this film, it would be essentially forgotten today. 

  • Half Nelson (2006)

    Half Nelson (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2017) Had I seen Half Nelson back in 2006, I may have snapped out of my unfortunate “Ryan Gosling has a punchable face” phase (largely driven by Murder by Numbers) well before 2007’s Fracture. While I’m no big fan of Half Nelson’s gritty naturalistic drama, Gosling is quite good as a competent history teacher by day who turns into a crackhead by night. Half Nelson does grapple with a number of issues about class, race and power relationships, but its biggest asset is Gosling’s ability to be charming or pathetic at will. Shareeka Epps is also quite good as a student who discovers her teacher’s biggest failings, while Anthony Mackie has an early turn as a neighborhood drug dealer. Half Nelson is as far removed from glossy entertainment as you can imagine, and while this obviously has some appeal, it can make the viewing experience draining, especially as it drags on and there is only the barest hint of a redemption at the end, following a demoralizing rock bottom. The film does get better once you compare it to the heroic-teacher subgenre in which white people teach lessons to black students from the ghetto—the clichés are completely upended here, and the film delights in refusing a redemptive arc. Most notably, a subplot with Monique Gabriela Curnen is positively infuriating in refusing an upbeat closure. If Half Nelson doesn’t feel like your cup of tea, that’s OK—it’s not meant for everyone, but it certainly remains a must-see for anyone digging into Gosling’s filmography.

  • The Right Stuff (1983)

    The Right Stuff (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second or third viewing, On DVD, September 2017) I’ve been on a semi-streak of American space program movies lately and revisiting The Right Stuff was practically mandatory as a bookend to Apollo 13. Adapting Tom Wolfe’s superlative docufiction book, writer/director Philip Kaufman’s film is epic in length (nearly three hours) and clearly in myth-making mode as it draws a line leading from cowboys to astronauts by way of test pilots. It’s a long sit, but it’s filled with great moments, enlivened by a surprising amount of humour and a joy to watch from beginning to end. It helps that it can depend on great performances, whether it’s Ed Harris as a clean-cut John Glenn to Fred Ward as Gus Grissom, among many other known actors in small roles. It’s an astonishing ensemble cast for a wide-spectrum film, though, and it manages to compress quite a bit of material in even its unusually long running time. As a homage to the space program, it remains a point of reference—even the special effects are still credible. Despite a generous amount of dramatic licence (including the infamous Liberty Bell 7 incident, now thoroughly debunked thanks to the 1999 recovery of the capsule), the film seems generally well regarded when it comes to historical accuracy. From our perspective, it credibly humanizes yet mythologizes the test pilots who were crazy enough to go atop rockets when they were known to explode shortly after launch. It’s a stirring bit of filmmaking for viewers with a fascination for technological topics and the history of spaceflight, and it has aged rather gracefully. I loved the movie when I first saw it (in French, on regular TV interspaced between ads) and I still love it now. As suggested above, The Right Stuff is an essential double feature with Apollo 13, and both movies even feature Ed Harris in pivotal roles.

  • Coming to America (1988)

    Coming to America (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2017) There’s an arc to Eddie Murphy’s career, which started in edgy adult comedy in the early eighties and now seems to be mired in cheap comedy for kids. In that arc, Coming to America seems to be in the sweet spot: accessible to the entire family, but still generally clever and controlled. You can see the seeds of latter bad-Murphy (such as playing two separate characters, or the accents, or the straightforward plotting) but everything seems under control most of the time. It helps that the supporting cast (Arsenio Hall, but also James Earl Jones) is on their game, and that the film doesn’t lose sight of its main goal. It adds up to a competent comedy, and one that hasn’t aged all that much since its release. The love story is standard, but the fish-out-of-water details of two royalty members choosing to look for love in lower-class Queens are amusing. Samuel L. Jackson makes an early appearance as a would-be robber. 

  • La La Land (2016)

    La La Land (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2017) I will always be receptive to a good old-school Hollywood musical, and La La Land does get started with a terrific freeway dance number that clearly sets the tone for what follows—a classic musical paying homage to Hollywood dreams without being bound to strict realism. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone star as star-crossed artists who struggle to achieve their personal vision. Charming and likable like golden-era Hollywood stars, Gosling and Stone couldn’t be more suited for their roles as eager upstarts. Still, the real star here is writer/director Damien Chazelle, orchestrating a big musical with enough modern sensibilities to feel both timeless and contemporary. The dusk musical number (the film’s second-best highlight following the freeway opening number) is spectacular enough that I could have sworn it had been shot in-studio and heavily post-processed, but it turns out it was actually captured on location in few takes. More daringly, the film not only goes for a bittersweet ending in which our characters don’t necessarily end up together—but also shows us an alternate montage depicting what would have happened otherwise. I’m impressed but not entirely satisfied by that choice, something that is also true for the rest of the film: for all the crowd-pleasing moments, there are also odd choices and obsessions elsewhere. I’m getting too old and jaded to be swayed much by idealistic appeals to artistic purity, so a chunk of La La Land’s thematic appeal feels a bit jejune. But it is a film about ideals, and musicals don’t do well with pure realism (hence my ambivalence about the ending), so let’s enjoy the colours and the bounciness and the Hollywood satire and the idea that we’ve got such a film to tide us over in dour bleak 2017.

  • The Meaning of Life (1983)

    The Meaning of Life (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, Netflix Streaming, September 2017) Middle-age is the time in our lives when we confront some of the things we thought we understood about ourselves, and as I finish watching The Meaning of Life, I struggle to articulate the possibility that … maybe… I just don’t like Monty Python as much as I thought I did. Heresy thus being stated, I’ll immediately backtrack by saying that the material in The Meaning of Life feels very familiar: Not only was Monty Python an omnipresent reference in my nerdy pre-web Internet hangouts back in the nineties, I watched the film back then and must have internalized most of it. Still, watching it today, I wasn’t particularly moved to laughter by the on-screen antics. While there is a lot of clever stuff, much of it feels said, overdone, or rather done better elsewhere. Leaving aside the seminal influence of the film over latter generations of comics, I found the musical numbers interminable and the comedy somewhat obvious. Now annoying more than amusing, The Meaning of Life has aged poorly not in its depiction of circa-1983 life, but in the grade of comedy being attempted. Here we have some very smart people trying for shock crude comedy and while the attempt to mesh comic philosophy with an assault on conventional values is interesting to discuss, the impact feels muted today. Out-shocked by its descendants, The Meaning of Life remains clever, but the crudity takes away what should have remained effective. Or maybe, facing the truth again for one ghastly moment, I simply don’t like Monty Python as much as I thought.

  • Born in China (2016)

    Born in China (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, September 2017) The good news are that Born in China, as with all other DisneyNature films, is a terrific collection of nature footage, following animals in their habitats with glorious high-definition detail. Taking into account three families of animals (pandas, snow leopards and monkeys) set deep in China’s countryside, the documentary builds a very human-friendly narrative around the footage. It’s all done very professionally, but parents with young children may want to note that one of the stories really doesn’t have a happy ending, and wrapping up a sad epilogue in stirring circle-of-life narration may not soften the blow. Best seen in high-definition, Born in China doesn’t revolutionize the nature-documentary genre nor question is manipulative-narrative conventions, but it’s serviceable enough and offers plenty of great images.

  • Psycho (1998)

    Psycho (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, September 2017) There are a lot of remakes, but very few shot-by-shot remakes sticking as closely to the original as possible, down to the dialogue and specific shots as this 1998 version of Psycho does. But what Gus van Sant has done with his version of the classic film is unexpectedly fascinating rather than annoying. Moviemaking techniques evolved considerably between 1962 and 1998, and one of the most interesting aspects of this Psycho is comparing the extra details in the same frames, the depth of perception and the increased energy of the camera. Some changes are fully justified, from the opening bird-eye introduction to the characters to mercifully shortening the end monologue introducing the concept of split personalities to 1962 audiences. Other changes aren’t so remarkable: Vince Vaughn is (to put it bluntly) no Anthony Perkins, and Anne Heche is rather dull as a heroine. Still, trying to make sense of this film as a standalone thriller is difficult (the structure is lopsided enough), and simply treating it as a remake misses the point that it actively tries to be the same film, except made for 1998. I’m not going to call it good, but I will call it interesting.

  • Cape Fear (1991)

    Cape Fear (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, September 2017) If you’re going to remake a classic film, you might as well get Scorsese to direct, and get the original film’s two main actors in minor roles. That’s as close to a stamp of approval as you’ll ever get, although a title sequence by Saul Bass and reprising the original’s music score by Bernard Hermann also helps. Suffice to say that overall, the 1991 version of Cape Fear is a good movie and a successful remake of its predecessor. It updates the story, adds more details for savvier audiences (including the whole “restraining order” stuff missing from the original), cranks up the violence, doesn’t shy away from details that would have been too intense for audiences of the original 1962 film, and uses every trick of then-modern cinematography. With Scorsese at the helm, the direction is intentionally jarring, and the actors are following a coherent plan. While Nick Nolte is solid as the father trying to defend himself and his family against a dangerous ex-convict, it’s Robert de Niro who steals the spotlight as the villain Max Cady, with some assistance from Juliette Lewis as a teenage prey. The only problem in de Niro’s performance is that it’s based on an overcooked character: Not only is Cady dangerous in the criminal sense, he’s also implausibly well informed in matter of law and literature, making him seem less real than the rough and canny bruiser in the original. I’m also not terribly happy at the way the film dispenses with the character as compared to the original in which the family got to keep some of its innocence. Some artistic choices do date the film more precisely than I’d like—the credit sequence and some gratuitous recolouring of some sequences now seem more ridiculous than threatening. Still, all in all, Cape Fear is a good thriller by a master of the form, a decent homage to the original while polishing some of the first film’s most disappointing aspects. See it, but see it alongside the original.

  • Alpha Dog (2006)

    Alpha Dog (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On DVD, September 2017) If there is a problem with true-life crime movies, it’s that they’re inevitably constrained by the real events, and any deviations from the truth, even to heighten drama, is seen as a betrayal. For filmmakers, the balance is tricky—too much drama and you may disappoint viewers, not enough and you risk boring them. As it stands, Alpha Dog stands closer to boredom even despite changing quite a few things about the real events that inspired it. It really doesn’t help that it chooses to tell itself through grainy naturalistic cinematography, bathing everything in grime and lowlight artifacts. The events described are depressing in their unravelling, as a fake kidnapping evolves into a real murder in a group of disaffected teenagers constantly up to no good. Their coterie of girlfriends doesn’t help, nor the dog-eat-dog aggression of their clique. Alpha Dog may be realistic, and that makes it even more dispiriting. While handled well, it does suffer from a far too long running time and a conclusion that spirals into nothingness. Addressing both of those issues, however, would have meant even greater deviations from reality, so who knows if these choices were the correct ones? Despite the film’s dullness, there is still some interest in seeing the young actors assembled here—many of them would go on to much better things over the following decade. Justin Timberlake is remarkable as a supporting player, while Emile Hirsch, Ben Foster, Anton Yelchin (among many others) also show up in main roles, with Dominique Swain, Olivia Wilde, Amanda Seyfried share inglorious small roles as the girlfriends. Alpha Dog may not be an easy film to like, but it does have its high points.

  • Another 48 Hrs. (1990)

    Another 48 Hrs. (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On DVD, September 2017) If ever you find yourself watching Another 48 Hrs and wondering where much of the plot went, be comforted by the fact that the first cut of the film ran nearly an hour longer, and got mercilessly over-edited in the few weeks before its wide release. In other words, much of the story got left on the cutting room floor, leaving only the set-pieces in place. Which isn’t nearly as insane as it sounds: As with a number of buddy-cop movies spawned by its predecessor, Another 48 Hrs is unremarkable for plot (except when it’s missing) and noteworthy for the banter between its characters and the quality of its action sequences. Here Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte are back in more or less the same shape as in the first film (egregiously so in the case of Murphy’s character, as the film goes out of its way to ensure that he has remained in jail in the interval rather than have him evolve a bit), and director Walter Hill ensures that the film goes on its merry humdrum way. Another 48 Hrs does have a few strong moments: the bus-flipping sequence is cool; there is another intimidate-the-bar sequence to ape the first movie, and the motorcycle-crashing-through-the-adult-cinema-screen sequence reminded me that I did see Another 48 Hrs at the drive-in back in 1990, even though I remembered nearly nothing else about the movie itself. It’s a noticeable step down from the already average original, but at least there’s Nolte and Murphy bickering to make up for the dull shootouts, incoherent story and generic direction. That’s what sequels gave you back in 1990.