Reviews

  • Silverado (1985)

    Silverado (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2020) By now, even the tiny number of Westerns that I’ve seen (compared to the entire corpus) is enough to last me a lifetime, or at least establish clear eras in Hollywood Westerns. There’s the innocent period (until 1939’s Stagecoach) where Westerns were cheap and easy to shoot in Hollywood’s backyard. There’s the heroic period (1940s–1950s), which shaped the myths of the genre, followed by the revisionist period (1960s–1970s), which did everything it could to question the heroic era of Westerns. By the 1980s, however, anything could happen in those now-rare Western films—movies that either celebrated or condemned the genre. Silverado, thirty seconds in, clearly announces its filiation to a more classical idea of westerns, although one that consciously exploits the iconography of the heroic period. As the opening shootout of the film ends and our protagonist opens the door of the dark cabin in which it took place, the camera crosses the threshold and the image expands to the limits of the widescreen frame to take in a gorgeous look at the American west in its most iconic glory. The credit sequence follows the protagonist by framing him against picture-perfect western backdrops and sets the tone for a film that reconstructs a fun kind of western, filled with good and bad guys shooting it out over cattle rights and revenge over past transgressions. Writer-director Lawrence Kasdan clearly wants to have a blast doing this film, and so Silverado never lets an occasion go to feature power chords, striking images and self-aware dialogue—or all three, such as when Danny Glover’s character holds up two rifles and says, “This oughta do.” Silverado manages to walk a fine line in recreating classic westerns with gusto yet without falling into the excesses that many imitators would adopt—it’s got action but few obviously over-the-top scenes; it doesn’t take itself too seriously without being a parody; and it finds an entertaining balance between drama and action. The story is very familiar, but it’s really a vehicle for Kasdan to show off that he could direct a straight-up western, and that works well enough. Special mention should be made of the ensemble cast, which features many actors what would become much bigger a few years later: Kevin Kline is a perfect example of civility in an uncivilized world (only topped by an unrecognizably bearded John Cleese as a merciless sheriff), Linda Hunt is a welcome bit of eccentricity, Jeff Goldblum pops up a few times, and a then-unknown Kevin Costner is a revelation here as a cocky gunslinger. Silverado ends up being a pleasant surprise: an unrepentant western not interested in critiquing the genre as much as in playing according to its rules. In many ways (including the gorgeous cinematography), it does feel like a more modern 1990s film. But no matter when it’s from, it’s still quite a bit of fun to watch today.

  • Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

    Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, February 2020) Some movies are gritty, but Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is grimy. Shot with an ultra-low budget, it certainly looks like it, with terrible cinematography, a handful of actors, and a sordid subject matter overcompensating for a multitude of other issues. Michael Rooker shows up at the titular Henry, who—as announced—spends the movie killing people. If you squint, you may pretend that this is a character study — but really, it’s not much more than an exploitation film with an appetite for gore. I’ll give it something, though: the atmosphere of the movie, being this close to cinema-verité, can often be unnerving. Henry is painted as such an irremediable monster that everyone in the film can be (and becomes) a target. It doesn’t make for a pleasant viewing experience, but it’s more effective than most of the horror movies out there that play safely with familiar genre elements. I still don’t like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and would gladly never see it again, but it gets quite a bit of mileage out of limited means—for better or for worse.

  • Ma (2019)

    Ma (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) I’m happy that Octavia Spencer can have a career in which she can play a murderous woman-child who goes psycho on a bunch of teenagers, but on the other hand… Ma is thin gruel for a talented actress, even if she just wants to have some fun once in a while. While there are a few interesting elements in this story about a middle-aged woman befriending and then stalking teenage protagonists, Ma is the kind of movie that comes and goes without leaving much of a trace. It’s a Blumhouse special, meaning high profit margins on a high-concept but ultimately familiar premise. Competently made but often too timid for its own sake (although I do like the relatively upbeat finale over the rumoured original script), Ma is too often too bland for its own good. The great antagonist meets barely sketched-in protagonists and the Midwest small-town horror atmosphere doesn’t bring anything new. While I’m not that happy about the attempts to explain the roots of the antagonist’s madness, even I have to admit that the film would be poorer and less meaningful without it. Still, this is a lower-end horror movie and it feels like it. Ma will do the job is this is the kind of thing you’re looking for, and it’s a surprisingly good turn to show off Spencer’s range, but otherwise there are far better horror movies out there.

  • Yentl (1983)

    Yentl (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, January 2020) So, Barbra Streisand dressing up as a boy is… curiously sexy? I didn’t have that on my list of expectations in tackling Yentl. [August 2020: Oh, and now there’s Seth Rogen making the same joke in An American Pickle…] It’s a surprising film in many ways—as the story of a Jewish girl who crossdresses in order to gain an education reserved for men in 1904 Poland, you would be right to expect a fairly maudlin tale with little entertainment to it. But the result, co-written and directed by Streisand herself, is a lot more than the pat drama you could expect—it’s got humour, intensity, musical numbers (although not that memorable), a pivotal revelation scene, a young Mandy Patinkin and what feels like an education in Jewish culture. Plus, Streisand is looking far too attractive with short hair, although I’ll note that since Streisand remained a significant screen beauty from the mid-1960s to well into the 1990s, it’s not that unexpected of a turn here. No, the real surprise is that Yentl is surprisingly watchable—far lighter on its feel than you’d expect for a labour of love fifteen years in the making, and yet dense with thematic material. I don’t exactly love it, but I found it far more interesting than I expected.

  • Shivers (1975)

    Shivers (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, January 2020) I would expect a mid-1970s horror film to be fairly tame, but that’s not a word to apply to writer-director David Cronenberg’s early-effort Shivers. Narratively, it’s basic horror stuff—scientific experiments, parasites, violently-sex-obsessed victims, gruesome deaths, an epidemic raging out of control: We’ve seen all of this before and since then. But Cronenberg tackles this project with youthful energy, and the film is far more aggressive in its execution than you’d think, even with unconvincing special-effects work and muddy nighttime cinematography. For Cronenberg fans, it’s an opportunity to see him work with the raw materials that he would later refine: the off-putting sexual content, the gory body horror, the sense of a normal situation terrifyingly turning out of control. It’s a bit of a laugh to see such a horror film explicitly set in Montréal (specifically on L’île des soeurs), with very typically 1970s Quebecker background actors. So, Shivers may or may not be familiar, but it’s rather well done for its budget class and technical limitations of the time. Not essential viewing (except for Cronenberg fans and anyone interested in tax-shelter-era Canadian exploitation films) but still watchable.

  • The Curse of La Llorona (2018)

    The Curse of La Llorona (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) Slick, overproduced and yet so, so underwhelming, The Curse of La Llorona is about as ordinary a horror movie can be when it’s the result of dozens of other movies blended together. Mixing ethnic folk horror with demonic possession, evil-fighting priests and child endangerment (plus a single mother as hero!), it still can’t make any of those surefire elements spark. Plenty of jump scares from director Michael Chaves can’t compensate for a lacklustre script and rote elements. The only thing that mildly works is the ethnic atmosphere of Mexican folklore that set up La Llorona, but don’t expect too much here either—although I’m told the movie did good business in Latin communities. Linda Cardellini is wasted here and can’t rescue the film on her own. At least the images are clear, crisp and clean—but that’s not much of a comfort when they don’t show anything of much value. It’s a bit sad to see “The Conjuring universe” get less and less interesting at every successive movie in the series, but what else do you expect? The real horror villains are always the Hollywood studio executives.

  • The Ultimate Warrior (1975)

    The Ultimate Warrior (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, January 2020) Some movies just can’t quite reach their potential, even when that potential is modest. Considering that The Ultimate Warrior is a dystopian 1970s thriller featuring Yul Brynner as the titular character and Max von Sydow as the leader of a band in post-apocalyptic Manhattan, you could at least expect something. The Ultimate Warrior came after the high-energy first wave of blaxploitation movies where action started being shot relatively well, even the idea of a modest exploitation thriller promises a lot more than what this film is able to offer. Seemingly shot on a mixture of a dirtied backlot and dusty subway interiors, the film is a chore to watch—uninteresting, trite and meaningless. Writer-director Robert Clouse (who did direct action landmark Enter the Dragon!) can’t get much out of the normally solid Brynner with his threadbare plot and indifferent direction. The Ultimate Warrior was somehow selected by the Criterion Streaming folks as representative of dystopian 1970s Science Fiction, but absolutely not essential.

  • Blade of Grass (1971)

    Blade of Grass (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, January 2020) I have a budding thesis that Hollywood SF grew up roughly at the same time as American civilization became aware of its mortality. It’s probably nonsense, but movies like Blade of Grass almost make the case for me (even if it’s a British movie)—as environmentalism became mainstream thanks to a string of horrifying events like Love Canal and, oh, rivers catching on fire, you also had movies considering the possibility of dystopian environmental collapse. Films like Blade of Grass go all-out on the catastrophe, to the point where humans are fated to extinction on a planet without any living plants left. The narrative has a band of survivors making their way from London to a possibly mythical farm out in the northern part of the country. Multiple deadly events occur before the ending, in an all-dancing parade of downbeat plotting, violence and humans being terrible to each other. This is clearly not fun viewing for the entire family, and my opening thesis may have been born out of sheer desperation in trying to escape the nightmarish world of the film. Still, there may be something to it—the post-WW2 years were characterized by the adult themes of noir, war movies emerged from the Vietnam defeat with a far more war-is-hell attitude, and while the 1970s saw SF become more than a genre for kids right about the time that prophecies of doom became commonplace thanks to the environmentalism espoused by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and the gloomy overpopulation predictions of the Club of Rome (1968). Doesn’t it also hold true for people as well? Maybe you grow up when you realize that you’re going to die.

  • Rollerball (1975)

    Rollerball (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, January 2020) For viewers like me, raised on the notion that Rollerball was just this dumb dystopian movie about some fantasy sports, actually watching the film is in order. Not the remake: The original one, with James Caan somehow playing an elite world-famous athlete. Because there’s a lot more in the margins of the film than you’d ever expect: Darkly funny, perceptive stuff that adds so much depth to it that you’ll regret ever thinking it was a silly film. (But that’s OK: You can blame the remake.) With chameleonic director Norman Jewison at the helm, how could it be silly? Jewison has done many movies, and if some of them weren’t as good as others, none were stupid. So it is that Rollerball, beyond the brutal roller-skate sport, quickly starts sketching the bread-and-game nature of the event in a society dedicated to social control. The film draws a merciless portrait of the rich (down to them burning down a tree for fun) and of information control—one of the best throwaway lines has an entire century having been accidentally deleted from the computer memory banks now holding all knowledge. Now, I wouldn’t necessarily want to portray Rollerball as this underrated classic—it’s got more depth than you may expect from the marketing, but it’s no masterpiece of dystopia. Even the more generous commentators won’t be too sure whether the added material is just fluff around the Rollerball raison d’être of the movie, or if the Rollerball is the hook to talk about the then-fashionable idea of a dystopian future. But I was surprised—I wasn’t expecting much, and got something somewhat better than expected. The final tally is a Science Fiction film of the mid-1970s that’s not quite as depressing or childish as many of its contemporaries. That’s already not too bad—see it with Soylent Green for a change of pace.

    (Second viewing, Criterion Streaming, June 2020) I’m not sure why I returned to Rollerball after only a few months, but here we are, and the film does hold up to a fresh revisit. Much of it isn’t as satirical as it must have been intended at the time: corporate anthems and violent manufactured sports are a thing of reality, and it’s enough to make anyone wonder why we’re not seeing as many science fiction films actually attempting to anticipate a future (either as satire or realism) these days. What is worth a look is the film’s pre-Star Wars approach to SF in a 1970s context: The OCR computer font is a dead giveaway, but so are the social issues tackled here. It’s also not shy at all about its social themes—they’re explicitly discussed in the film by the characters themselves, and reinforced by the decadent aristocracy changing the rules on whims advantaging them. The blend of such commentary with action sequences is the film’s notable trait (and Jewison’s direction certainly changes during the rollerball scenes), although it may weaken the film is other ways, the flash outshining the substance. Rollerball could have been better, but it’s still surprisingly good.

  • Kes (1969)

    Kes (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, January 2020) Ugh, the curse of being a cinema completist. It means watching widely acclaimed films, such as this perennial mention in longer “best of all time” lists that completely fails at creating empathy, interest, entertainment or affection. That’s Kes for you—a neorealist examination of a poor young boy and his pet bird of prey. Coming from writer-director Ken Loach in the very late “kitchen sink” realism period of British film, it’s about as grimy, miserable and unromanticized as one can expect. Its saving grace (if you have the patience) is some profound social content taking aim at the ways the British lower class was being held down by the system, and everything related to that (but especially the public education system). An uplifting story about a boy and his pet this is most emphatically not—the ending is not meant to comfort you. So is Kes a good movie? Yes! Is it a great one? Probably! Did I want to escape its misery at every moment? For sure!

  • The Allnighter (1987)

    The Allnighter (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2020) I’m about this close to declaring a critical forfeit about The Allnighter, my reasoning being that this is really a movie produced for someone else entirely—female twentysomethings of the mid-1980s… and what do I really know about that? I ogled them at the time, and I suppose that I can still appreciate the big curly hair today. There have been silly movies for teens for decades and there will still be many of them in other decades as well—this just happens to be time-stamped 1987. As such, The Allnighter is a curiously tame “sex comedy” from the point of view of college girls as they go out to have the best night of their lives. There are a few references for celebrity trivia fans: Bangles singer Susanna Hoffs stars in a film directed by her mother, with a young Joan Cusack as a co-lead, and Pam Grier as a police officer in the inglorious phase of her career. It’s all more amiable than funny, and I think that this is one of those films enhanced by time rather than damaged by it: It’s a bubble-headed comedy, but it now has the atmosphere, colour and fashions of the 1980s going for it. The Allnighter is not essential viewing by any means, but not that objectionable either.

  • Sea of Love (1989)

    Sea of Love (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) Prime-era Al Pacino is always a treat, and seeing him at work in a neo-noir thriller like Sea of Love is even better. It was a significant film in his career: the first after a four-year hiatus following a significant box-office bomb, it also set the stage for the grander-than-life hoo-ha Pacino streak that was further developed in his next few movies, lasted for the next ten-fifteen years and is still what we think about when we think about Pacino. As far as narrative goes, Sea of Love is simple, nearly archetypical stuff, what with Pacino playing a cop tracking down a serial killer preying on men posting Lonely Hearts classified ads, and then falling for the primary suspect. Violence and lust, with a bit of an unexpected ending to shake things up. Pacino’s quite good here—not quite as intense as later movies, and slightly forlorn around the edges by looking for love in all the wrong places. Ellen Barkin is surprisingly attractive here—and even looks like Helen Hunt at times. John Goodman is not bad in a supporting role, and there are a few more known names in the roster. While I’ll maintain that the 1990s were a golden age of sorts for mid-scale thrillers, you can see Sea of Love pointing the way, and bridging the gap between the 1980s neo-noir movement (plus the reactionary “killer women” streak of the late 1980s) and the later surge of suspense films. Sea of Love is not the best at anything, but it’s certainly watchable without effort, and as I said—Pacino plus neo-noir is a great mixture.

  • Without Love (1945)

    Without Love (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) While Without Love may not be Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn’s finest comedy, it’s not without its share of high points. As a story of two bachelors who marry out of convenience and patriotic duty then truly begin to fall in love, this is not exactly the sharpest premise in the book. But all is in the details, and the pleasantness is largely to be found in small moments, lines of dialogue and seeing both Hepburn and Tracy play off each other. (One very funny scene has Hepburn sneezing in a diver’s helmet.) The setting is hopelessly dated in many ways: much of the plotting is propelled by World War II concerns, something the film inherits from its theatrical origins. For science nerds and theatre geeks in the audience, the film does throw in a few jokes about distracted scientists (which Tracy’s character is), and pre-famous Lucille Ball does show up in an early supporting role. Anyone who champions Hepburn as a sex-symbol should watch Without Love if only for the brief scene in which she turns up with loose curly hair. As for everyone else: the film is fun, funny and ping-pongs between characters who think they’re too intellectual to fall in love, then spend much of the film trying to deny it’s happening. The very abrupt ending is a bit of a surprise—it ends well, but an additional scene may not have hurt. On the other hand, that’s how they often wrapped things up back then—cut to the trailers, and on to the next short comedy.

  • Robin and Marian (1976)

    Robin and Marian (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) There is a strong streak of melancholy running through Robin and Marian, a story about the last days of Robin Hood and Maid Marian. A romantic drama blended with a bit of medieval thrills, it’s a film about heroic icons aging into legend—he is back from a punishing crusade; she is now a nun. It’s also, perhaps more significantly for film buffs, a strange and intriguing paring between two screen legends: Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn (in her first film in nine years). Connery looks like himself with the graying beard, but there’s something truly uncanny in seeing Hepburn with curly hair (and I say this as someone who usually finds nothing wrong at all with curly hair). But none of it is as surprising as a tragic climax that ties in merciful death for nearly everyone—this is meant as romantic tragedy, capping one last passionate moment between two characters that never made it work. As such, it does feel like the kind of film that could only be made in the New Hollywood era—a film that takes a chainsaw to a myth with one final tragic story. I didn’t like Robin and Marian all that much—but I have to admire its audacity.

  • Tom Sawyer (1973)

    Tom Sawyer (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2020) There’s a straight correlation between the crash of the movie musical in the 1970s and that decade’s insistence in adapting known properties as downbeat musicals. This being said, I’m not sure that Tom Sawyer is worth my usual eyerolls and criticism of 1970s musicals—in adapting the classic Mark Twain novel as a musical comedy largely shot on location, it avoids becoming an overly reverent stuffy take on the source material, and keeps its tone as a pleasantly mild comedy. It’s not that distinguished, but it’s not terrible either and things could get much, much worse in 1970s musicals. Amusingly produced by none other than Reader’s Digest magazine, the film hops from one episode to another in adapting the novel, and strings along the upbeat songs to go with the narrative. Jodie Foster shows up in one of her earliest roles. This version of Tom Sawyer is not something that you’ll remember for a long time, but it’s still an interesting take on one of the most sacred novels in American literature.