Reviews

  • Sinbad, the Sailor (1947)

    Sinbad, the Sailor (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Presented as part of TCM’s lineups of “Reframed: Classic Films in the Rear-view Mirror’” of March 2021 (i.e.: Popular films from the Hollywood golden age that, when seen from a contemporary perspective, contain problematic elements that would not pass without criticism today), Sinbad, the Sailor clearly belongs to that category for its stereotypical depiction of Arabic characters and culture. Not only do you have Caucasian Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. playing Sinbad in dark makeup, you also have a festival of clichés in its Arabian setting, lines that would be considered blasphemous to Muslim viewers, fake-Arabic dialogue and cultural misappropriation galore. It’s a lot to take in, but little of it actually distracts from the swashbuckling effectiveness of the film. Shot in lush Technicolor to take advantage of the colourful sets and costumes, it’s an adventure film with lavish production values and a scope to match. Telling us about Sinbad’s “eighth voyage,” it’s a trip featuring villains (Anthony Quinn!), damsels in distress (Maureen O’Hara!), sword-fighting and deliciously florid dialogue delivered with gusto. In other words — yes, it’s dated, but dated in interesting ways… and I’m not the right audience to ask about whether I should be offended by a work of pure fantasy. This is, to be fair, really not Hollywood’s worst offender when it comes to Arabic culture: Have a look at The Thief of Baghdad or any of the versions of A Thousand and One Nights to realize that Hollywood used Middle Eastern settings as a fantasy playground throughout much of its early history. Meanwhile, Sinbad, the Sailor is mildly enjoyable — not a swashbuckler of the highest order, but something reasonably entertaining, with a spirited performance by Fairbanks and plenty of visual delights. Even though it’s not possible to exonerate it, I can think of some far more problematic films.

  • On with the Show! (1929)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) I may be overdosing on Broadway backstage musicals at the moment, but that won’t stop me from acknowledging On with the Show’s place as one of the earliest full-fledged examples of the form, executed almost as easily as it was possible to do so with that newfangled talkie technology. The story will be familiar to generations of moviegoers, as a Broadway show struggles to get back on track after various problems (compounded by a robbery) prevent everyone from getting paid. There are several complications, as the actors clash and people struggle to use the show for their own advancement. But this is really one of the earliest examples of the first wave of movie musicals, taking inspiration from Broadway to take advantage of sound technology but before Hollywood affranchised itself from the theatrical musical tradition. Apparently shot in colour (in 1929!), only a black-and-white version survives today — not that it makes much of a difference. The film itself is merely acceptable when compared to later examples of the form: the mixture of genres doesn’t completely work, the pacing is off, the musical numbers are fine without being spectacular and everyone on set is still trying to find their footing in the universe of sound. Vaudeville legend Joe E. Brown makes an appearance as a competitive comedian. On with the Show remains primarily of interest to movie musical fans, although it’s fun enough to be interesting to others, even despite the roughness of the production.

  • The Houston Story (1956)

    The Houston Story (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Taken at face value, The Houston Story is a mildly interesting crime thriller set against the then-unusual backdrop of mid-1950s Texas, playing up a mixture of crime tropes with slight noir elements. The plot has something to do with stealing oil, so at least that’s covered. The performances are fine, the story is fine and while the film tends toward dull mediocrity, it does work as an evening’s entertainment away from the usual urban landscapes of 1950s Hollywood. But the film gets more interesting once you start digging into its production. For one thing, it originally starred Lee J. Cobb — except that the oppressively hot and humid shooting conditions led Cobb to a heart attack that led to him being recast by Gene Barry! For another, more interesting element, the film is directed by William Castle — yes, that William Castle, but a few years before his claim to fame as a consummate horror film promotional showman famous for gimmicks such as The Tingler. He delivers a far more restrained film here, suitably moody with its shadows but otherwise really not as lurid as his later titles. If you’re protesting that the most interesting elements of The Houston Story are the elements that aren’t in the film, you’re right — and let that be your guide as to whether this is worth a detour.

  • 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag (1997)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2021) As I’ve written elsewhere, many of the late-1990s criminal comedies made in the wake of Pulp Fiction’s success have aged more gracefully than you may have expected from their reviews at the time. Reviewers on the theatrical beat at the time quickly overdosed on those movies, and their reaction was harsher than modern viewers may have now that the fad has died. A fresher not-so-jaded perspective may help appreciate those films to their best value, and 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag is one of those films. While admittedly an awkward mixture of silly comedy and hitman crime, this is a film that, as can be gathered from its very title, plays loose and fast with severed heads as a comic device. The story has to do with a spectacularly irritating assassin getting mixed-up in a family vacation in Mexico, with the titular duffel bag getting picked up by strangers, not to mention the narrative trajectory of the seven heads. Joe Pesci plays the assassin and never misses an occasion to advertise how truly detestable his character is, even from the opening moments aboard a plane where he displays behaviour that would get him kicked out these days. It continues in that vein for the entire film, with the heads going from one character to the other, Pesci torturing other characters in amusing fashion (such as banging together two stethoscopes), the protagonist’s mother (the very attractive Dyann Cannon) shrieking on a near-continuous basis and a rather happy ending at the end of it. 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag is still not, to be clear, a great movie even with more than twenty years’ worth of insight: It’s inconsistently amusing, doesn’t give much to do to its protagonist, doesn’t give a comeuppance to its antagonist and often struggles in keeping things going at the same rate. But it’s entertaining enough to be worth a nostalgic look — not quite the bomb that contemporary reviews suggested, but somewhere closer to the average for the post-Pulp Fiction imitators.

  • The Mouse on the Moon (1963)

    The Mouse on the Moon (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Little-known follow-up to The Mouse That Roared, sequel The Mouse on the Moon takes the first entry’s inspired lunacy (which sees a tiny European country start a war with the United States in order to lose and get financial reparations, but ends up accidentally winning thanks to an improbable series of accidents) and re-applies it to the race to the moon. As with the original, the film is an adaptation of Leonard Wibberley’s novel — although this time around, the absence of an egomaniac actor like Peter Sellers seems to have let the filmmakers stay truer to the original text. The satire takes off early, as the fictional country of Grand Fenwick once again finds itself in a perilous financial situation: its wine bottles are exploding, so the Duchy asks the United States for a loan. Alas, things escalate and so Grand Fenwick soon finds itself in possession of a Soviet rocket and the intention of making it look as if they’re going for a moon shot of their own. Thanks to a resident genius scientist (naturalized after the events of the first film), the Duchy eventually beats both the Americans and the Soviets to the moon, to the merriment of all. The atmosphere of Cold War politics and Moon Race technology makes for entertaining period entertainment, as ridiculously contrived as the comic devices can be. While it’s not that funny nor that polished, Mouse on the Moon has moments of wit and the entire thing plays like a farce — keep in mind the production date in evaluating it against what really happened afterwards in the Race to the Moon.

  • Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)

    Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Just so that everyone is clear on where I’m coming from, I still think that the idea of Zack Snyder’s Justice League (i.e.: giving the director an estimated 70 million dollars to finish a film he had to abandon midway through) is one of the dumbest — rather than waiting for a new superhero movie that wasn’t built on such shaky grounds, fans deluded themselves into demanding a director’s cut, and the brand management geniuses at Warner Brothers thought it was a good idea to spend that much money to prop up the corpse of a middling film now four years old. So here we are now with a strange object, patched up through deleted scenes and special effects and reshoots to result in a staggering four-hour-long film that is unexplainably presented in dull TV aspect ratio betraying the point of a superhero epic. (Yes, I know about the IMAX argument — no, I don’t think it makes sense.)  My memories of the original aren’t particularly vivid (that’s what happens with a middling film), but this expanded version of Justice League does bring more to the table. Sometimes ridiculously so: Each character is introduced at least twice, and the editing of the film never attempts to be snappy when there’s slow motion to be used or generous pauses between each angle or line of dialogue. Still, there’s new content to feast upon. Rather a lot of content, including entire special-effects action sequences, such as The Flash’s second introduction. There are more character moments as well, including a far more developed arc for characters such as Cyborg and The Flash. Some story beats make more sense, and while we lose the overly humorous “magic lasso” truth-telling scene, the result is not quite as grim as the rest of the DCU up to Justice League. To answer the crucial question: yes, it’s a better movie. But is it $70M’s worth of a better movie? Is the punishing length of the result worth the added effort? No amount of patching can hide the ill-conceived structure that attempts to introduce new characters in a film meant to pay off audience involvement — as the running time demonstrates. No amount of “original artistic vision” can erase the ponderous pacing of the result and the overstuffed plotting. All that effort to earn, at best, half an additional star on an average film seems like self-indulgence writ large enough to be confused for fan service. I do like many aspects of this Justice League: The actors all do well: Ben Affleck is particularly good in this expanded version of Batman, and actors in small roles seem to have more to do. Snyder remains a great visual technician despite his bad storytelling instincts, and the special effects show what a team of highly paid professionals can do with additional time and compensation. Still, the final object is often more dumbfounding than satisfying. It makes plenty of effort (still) to set up later instalments that now have practically no chance of ever existing, considering the changes made in the DCU since then. At some point, why bother? I’m not naïve enough to think that the $70M spent on this Justice League could have been allocated as-is to a fantastic new original film project, but this endless rehashing of past failures for marginal improvements is not a good thing for the future of film.

  • Down by Law (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, March 2021) Jim Jarmusch has a checkered track record as far as I’m concerned — some of his movies I like, many I don’t, but they nearly all have something unusual and distinctive about them. Down by Law is no exception, and it may even qualify as one of the ones I like. Shot in black-and-white, it follows three men (Tom Waits, John Lurie and Roberto Benigni) as they are arrested by New Orleans police, brought together in a cell and eventually escape. It’s not a prison film — most of it is a series of dialogues between the three men as they try to find a way to live together in their special circumstances. We do get some evocative shots of New Orleans and the bayou along the way. It’s interesting to see a younger Waits at work here, although Lurie is sometimes just a bit more impressive, and Benigni is far more spectacular with his exuberantly broken English. The film is not as relentlessly downbeat as other Jarmusch movies, and there’s more flow to the narrative as well. While my affection for Down by Law is limited, it’s still somewhat higher than a good chunk of his filmography. Wary expectations may clearly be paying off.

  • The Pretty One (2013)

    The Pretty One (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, March 2021) Strange plotting things start to happen when you use twins as a plot device. In the case of The Pretty One, it means being able to treat a quasi science-fictional device in a realistic fashion, as a young woman takes over her dead twin sister’s life after a case of meticulously engineered identity confusion. Zoe Kazan carries the film on her shoulders in the dual lead role, both as the unpleasant outgoing glamorous career-driven Audrey, and the likable shy frumpy homebound Laurel. Invading some else’s life is easier when you look exactly like her, but it’s not easy, and much of the film plays along the lines of a classic thesis/antithesis/synthesis structure, as our introverted heroine learns to take the best parts of her sister’s life in order to improve her own. Jake Johnson does well as the romantic interest, with Ron Livingstone providing one of his usual handsome schmucks. Still, the film always goes back to Kazan in a challenging dual role, not simply playing different parts for a chunk of the film, but also playing someone playing a part and reacting to various strong emotions along the way. It’s all handled with some restraint and glossy cinematography by writer-director Jenée LaMarque, and the result is a minor but very enjoyable film that stays nicely grounded despite a premise that is more often found in genre fiction.

  • Step Up 2: The Streets (2008)

    Step Up 2: The Streets (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, March 2021) It’s been a wild ride through the Step Up series, as I (let’s check my notes) onboarded on the third in theatres in 2010, waited eight years before seeing the first, then followed it up every six months by the fifth, then the fourth and finally the second film. Whew. In retrospect, the second film is the one that shaped the series — we may talk about Fast Five as a major pivot point in its series, but Step Up 2: The Streets extended the romantic comedy aspect of the first film into the dance musical extravaganza of the next few instalments and codified both the style and the recurring characters. Even from a narrative perspective, the film almost begins anew — Chaning Tatum shows up briefly in an early scene to bring the lead character into the fold and then disappears. Suddenly, with director John M. Chu taking ownership, the street aesthetics of the series become more pronounced, the mood lightens up, Adam Stevani makes his introduction as the compelling “Moose” (never the lead, but always invaluable as supporting actor), and the series moves toward intricately choreographed spectacle, setting the tone for the next movies. Don’t tell anyone, dear Internet, but (looks around carefully and whispers) I dearly love this series. It’s the closest recent American cinema ever came to recapturing the undiluted joie de vivre that was previously found in the best of Classic Hollywood musicals. The blend of dancing, music and vivid cinematography takes advantage of all facets of movies as an art form, and the result is impossible to watch without a smile. Never mind the perfunctory plot — the fun of Step Up 2: The Streets is in the dance set-pieces all the way to a rain-drenched street demo as a climactic sequence (an idea so good that it was reprised in the next film in the series, where it was also a showcase). The cast of characters is quirky enough to be interesting, and the film has the good sense not to talk too long on the way to the next dance sequence. It’s all kinetic and fun, with great beats and even better choreography. I suspect that one of the reasons it took me so long to watch all five films is that, now that I’m done, I feel sad: The series stopped in 2014 (save for a Chinese spinoff in 2019), and there isn’t even a tidy box set available for fans. Too bad — I’d be first in line to get a copy.

  • The Uncanny (1977)

    The Uncanny (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2021) I suppose that if you look long enough, you’ll find horror movies on every imaginable topic. The Uncanny brings us closer to the fullest understanding of this axiom by featuring no less than three stories about the evil of cats, and a framing device to hang it all together. A late-1970s Montréal-based English-Canadian production, it’s clearly made on a small budget and technically rough around the edges. Fortunately, there’s a bit of a story to go with it. The framing device, as we eventually discover, has to do with a publisher meeting the author of a manuscript documenting how cats are the evil force controlling the world — and the three stories are meant to illustrate the thesis. In the first one, cats take revenge upon their mistress’s murderer. In the second, a young girl avenges her cat’s disappearance through witchcraft. In the third, a cat takes revenge on a Classic Hollywood actor for murdering her mistress. By the time we get back to the framing device, cats are ready to kill in order to protect their secret, and they’re theatrical enough to wait until their target is walking down picturesque stairs). You get the idea: cats and revenge are this film’s main themes, with a budget that doesn’t quite allow more than two or three sets per story. While well-known names such as Peter Cushing and Donald Pleasence show up briefly, the main attractions here are the short stories. If they don’t quite work, just wait a few minutes and there will be another. The pacing is not that good — nearly every story has its lulls, especially when it’s obvious how they’re going to end. Still, as a concept, it’s cute, and French-Canadian viewers may be surprised to recognize some old-school actors and actresses in minor roles.

  • Tales from the Hood 3 (2020)

    Tales from the Hood 3 (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) This is my first exposure to the Tales from The Hood series, and I should probably have a look at the previous volumes. A black-themed horror anthology, it’s heavy on supernatural revenge stories, starting and ending with a framing device (“The Mouths of Babes and Demons”) that sees the would-be aggressor punished. “Ruby Gates” starts things off with a tale of fiery eviction and just-as-demonic comeuppance. “The Bunker” features an unrepentant white racist, but is a two-minute joke stretched over five minutes — striking in concept, but a bit too long for maximum impact. I liked “Operatic” a bit better than the other segments, with a story of schemers getting schemed pumped up with musical history and life-sucking creatures. “Dope Kicks” best showcases that the film was shot in Winnipeg, although its main idea is once again supernatural retribution. Tales from the Hood 3 isn’t all that memorable, but it’s a horror anthology that remains watchable throughout, and showcases a bit of diversity in the horror landscape. Writers-directors Rusty Cundieff and Darin Scott do well here, although their creative ideas may want to get away from straight-up revenge fantasies once in a while.

  • Whistling in Brooklyn (1943)

    Whistling in Brooklyn (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Considering that Red Skelton stars in Whistling in Brooklyn, it’s a fair bet that the result is going to be a silly comedy. It’s, in fact, the third in a trilogy of movies featuring Skelton as the “radio criminologist” Wally “the Fox” Benton — and I haven’t seen any of the other ones. This familiarity with the character may serve to explain the unusually fast-paced opening, as audiences at the time would have been quite aware of Skelton’s character. (Not that this was Skelton’s sole brush with that kind of role — Benton feels a lot like his crime-writer character in the previous year’s Ship Ahoy.)  Here, Benton comes to be suspected of being a serial killer. Multiple complications ensue, especially when he gets in a cross-fire between the police and the real serial killer. There are a surprising number of non-comic suspense sequences here, although Skelton’s usual brand of humour eventually wins the day. An extended sequence takes place in a baseball stadium, starring then-celebrities. Whistling in Brooklyn is not a great or even a good movie, but if you’re a good public for Skelton’s humour and can tolerate an hour and a half of silly crime comedy, then it will do just the trick.

  • The Key (1934)

    The Key (1934)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Not every film featuring a favourite actor is a success, and while I have a problem being overly critical of The Key given that it stars William Powell, the result is just a bit too ordinary to be worth much more than a few scattered notes. Here, Powell sheds a bit of his screen persona in service of a more serious melodrama, as he plays a British officer sent to Dublin in the 1920s. Never mind the action potential in this situation, because The Key is more interested in raising the stakes by putting the protagonist in contact with an old flame, now married to another British officer. As the complications pile up, they force the protagonist to confront his old lover and (predictably) fall on his sword for her happiness. Powell is not bad as a stiff upper-lipped Brit (surely I wasn’t the only one who laboured under the misapprehension that he was originally from the United Kingdom?) but The Key is not a film that takes advantage of his talent for comedy or dry wit — it feels like the kind of role many other actors would have played, and in the middle of an unremarkable film that would be forgotten today if it wasn’t for Powell in the lead role.

  • Spiral (2019)

    Spiral (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) I was bamboozled by the TV guide! The Spiral described as playing as a cable premiere was the 2021 horror film follow-up to the Saw series featuring Chris Rock and Samuel L. Jackson, but this Spiral is a 2019 low-budget Canadian horror film featuring a same-sex couple confronted with supernatural fear and loathing in their new house. It didn’t take me a long time to figure out that this was in no way a Saw series film, but still: not what I was expecting. At first, once the bamboozling abated, I thought the film I was watching had some potential — using the alienation of a same-sex couple in 1990s small-town setting is an effective melding of theme and narrative, and the low-budget of the film wasn’t much of an obstacle in the kind of slow-burning style the film was going for. But as Spiral advanced, I found myself less and less happy with the results. While the visual polish of Kurtis David Harder’s direction remains high, the story gets increasingly worse, with inexplicable character decisions, bemusing plotting, on-the-nose dialogue and increasingly senseless characterization. Spiral trivialized its plotting by giving too much space to dream sequences (making it harder than necessary to keep track) and ended on a needlessly gruesome scene that did not do justice to its slow build. (In addition to butchering the film’s most sympathetic character, and I don’t use that verb lightly.)  While the intentions of the film are at the right place, the execution gets increasingly wobbly as it goes on, and the result does not manage to meet the expectations set by Spiral’s first half. Too bad — there’s clearly something interesting here, but it’s just not executed properly.

  • Cover Girl (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Just as I thought I had seen all of Gene Kelly’s better musicals, here is Cover Girl to reassure me that I’d missed at least one. A good musical by most standards, Cover Girl was singled out by at least one film historian as the first in an illustrious series of musicals in which the plot was advanced during the songs, and the first collaboration between Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen. It’s also one of Kelly’s first efforts at choreographing his own dance numbers, and a film that hones in the typical self-aware style of Classic Hollywood musicals with wit and humour. Rita Hayworth shares the screen with Kelly, a pairing that works surprisingly well. The dance numbers are varied and well-executed, with a decent amount of visual innovation throughout the film. Surprisingly enough, it’s not an MGM musical — Kelly was loaned to Columbia (for their first colour musical) on the promise that he’d be able to stage the film’s numbers, but MGM definitely took notes when the film was a box-office success. Latter MGM/Freed films would come much closer to the example set by Cover Girl, and the result was an extraordinary string of timeless musicals. As for Cover Girl itself, it’s good — not great, but interesting enough in its own right that it’ll charm musical fans. Oh, and there are plenty of cover girls to gawk at, so the title is not misleading advertising.