Reviews

  • The Darkest Minds (2018)

    The Darkest Minds (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) Weren’t we done with dystopian Young Adult novel movie adaptations? Apparently not, but thankfully The Darkest Minds is so dull and generic that you will forget it before long, or at least mesh its generic plot details with other similar movies. Let’s see—here we have a group of virtuous teenagers facing off against an adult-led dystopia, so that’s familiar. (Well, there’s a twist to that, but it actually makes the film even dumber and less coherent.)  The psychic powers that the teenagers have are colour-coded for your convenience, meaning that they’re so rigidly defined that we’re to act surprised when they’re not. As usual for those products aimed at less-discerning teenagers, our group of protagonists goes on the run, fleeing the killer adults to join some kind of underground rebel group. There’s a love triangle, just in case you feared that this particular contrivance wouldn’t show up. The plot twists here aren’t as telegraphed as much as they are paraded around on the mistaken belief that this is the first movie we’ve even seen. Thankfully, the box-office receipts were so poor that we’ll never see a sequel. If the film has one meagre saving grace, it’s that it features the likable Amandla Stenberg, a welcome spot of protagonist diversity in a genre almost exclusively led by Caucasian boys and girls. It’s not much, but if you’re looking for one point of differentiation, there it is. It doesn’t make the rest of The Darkest Minds any better, though.

  • The Prodigies [La nuit des enfants rois] (2011)

    The Prodigies [La nuit des enfants rois] (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, April 2019) I did not approach La nuit des enfants rois with the best of intentions—after all, I read the original Bernard Lenteric novel back in the mid-1990s and thought it was gratuitously depressing tripe even back then—which, considering that it’s about misunderstood nerds taking revenge at a time when I felt that I was a misunderstood nerd, was something that spoke for itself. To its disservice, the film does leave out some of the more ludicrous material of the novel, but doesn’t do much to fix the book’s basic shortcomings and adds a whole lot more new dumb stuff. Now feeling like a paean to misunderstood teenage psychopaths, The Prodigies takes delight in mistreating its teen geniuses until they get to become vicious criminals with thoughts of global destruction. Our protagonist isn’t much better, raising all sorts of questions about why the film actually exists. Worse yet: Director Antoine Charreyron’s The Prodigies is hyper-violent, except that it doesn’t have the maturity to justify this level of gore and violence. The way it revels in an extended rape sequence that becomes a driver for the film’s entire second half is a troubling indicator of the filmmaker’s lack of maturity. Executed as an animated film, it does attempt a bit of style, but the animation itself is amateurish to the point of nullifying any stylistic aspirations. To put it bluntly: the film is not stylish, it’s just cheap. Despite a few (very few) visually ambitious moments, The Prodigies is a chore to sit through—it’s immature yet violent in ways that amplify the bad mixture of the two, and it’s fundamentally ugly to watch most of the time.

  • Regression (2015)

    Regression (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, April 2019) Any discussion of Regression will mean spoiling the ending, so prepare yourself or stop reading. There’s a huge paradox at the heart of the film: It’s bad most of the time, and its sharp improvement at the end comes at the expense of robbing the film of any satisfying narrative. Let me explain: Much of Regression is spent with a policeman (Ethan Hawke, solid) in 1990 small-town America, investigating the testimony of a young woman (Emma Watson, better than expected) who claims to have been sexually abused. So far, so conventional, except that the film becomes abruptly dumber once it leads us to claims of a satanic cult, regression hypnotherapy, sacrificed babies and small-town conspiracies. By the time our protagonist is maybe drugged and maybe raped and maybe stared at by members of the local satanic conspiracy, viewers can be forgiven if they give up all hopes of the film ever becoming anything more than a standard horror film of that type. At that point, Regression isn’t just being unoriginal both for its content and presentation—it revels in tired old clichés and discredited material (both hypnosis and satanic cults) that belonged in the 1990s. Fortunately, director Alejandro Amenabar has something up his sleeve, and it’s to spend the last five minutes of the film unbolting its own narrative and telling us that it was all lies, that satanic cults don’t exist and that regression hypnotherapy is a bunch of hooey. Having destroyed itself, Regression ends. What are we left to think? That it’s good that the ending got back to reality, or bad that whatever narrative structure was being built was pulled from underneath us? I’m still not sure. It may be possible for a film to redeem itself and yet leave us unsatisfied. But it’s not the ending: much of the film’s bulk is as uninteresting and generic as what it initially purports to be—there are more fundamental issues here than an ending designed to upset viewers. If it had been an interesting but ludicrous ride to a self-destructive ending, I wouldn’t have minded so much—but Regression makes the double mistake of being both (intentionally) stupid and (unintentionally) dull and the combination is deadly to the film’s enjoyment.

  • Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)

    Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) There’s a very different kind of rhythm to Fried Green Tomatoes that makes it remarkable. A mixture of southern atmosphere, women’s in-group language, not-so-tall tales spun with homely wisdom, and a few good actresses getting a chance to show what they can do. There’s a surprisingly dark bite to the stories being told here, with abuse, divorce, child death, righteous murder and even cannibalism being on the menu. But the way the script is structured and the film is directed by Jon Avnet make it all interesting to follow as we hop back and forth across four decades of history in an attempt to understand a character. Kathy Bates turns in a good performance as a woman rediscovering life thanks to another free-spirited friend—but this is really Jessica Tandy’s movie. Fried Green Tomatoes is a bit long at more than two hours and a quarter, but it’s not difficult to watch, and the southern atmosphere is often a delight.

  • Needful Things (1993)

    Needful Things (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2019) The more I think about it, the more I realize that the way that Hollywood and I consume Stephen King’s novels has much in common: big binges every few years, between which King has the time to write an entire set of books that would put other authors’ entire bibliographies to shame. Now that King is very much back in vogue as inspiration for horror movies for the third time after peaks in the early 1980s and mid-1990s, it’s time for me to take a look at a film adaptation that was released during King’s second Hollywood binge and read during the first of mine. Needful Things is memorable in that it’s a thick book that uses most of its duration to make us comfortable with an entire small New England town—an ensemble cast of ordinary characters whose existence is upset (or terminated) by the arrival of a mysterious man who can find something special for you somewhere in his new shop. It’s a familiar setup—what if an entire town sold its soul to the Devil?—but in King’s hands it becomes a sweeping, comfortable novel with big ideas in a small context. The movie obviously doesn’t have the running time to do justice to the entire story, but it does manage to nicely condense the narrative in the time it has. The cast is cut down, the plotting is streamlined and if the immersion isn’t nearly as complete, the result is more effective than not. The big sweeping opening sequence begins the inglorious work of establishing the geography and the characters. It’s easy enough to watch, and quietly fascinating in the way the plot and director Fraser Clarke Heston gradually manage to work itself up to an explosive climax after setting half the town against each other by weaponizing small sins. Movies of this kind depend on their actors, and we have a capable lead trio in between the ever-dependable Ed Harris, a very nice Bonnie Bedelia, and a savvy performance by Max von Sydow, who manages to find an appropriate balance between the creepiness of his character and the innate campiness of the concept. In short, an unspectacular but effective adaptation that should please both King fans and casuals. Movie aside I have one semi-related complaint: Why do movie channels such as AMC, heavy on muting out bad language, even choose to broadcast movies with language to mute out? It’s really annoying and makes a mockery of the channel’s so-called cinephile orientation.

  • The American President (1995)

    The American President (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, April 2019) At this point in American history, the idea of a likable, virtuous, law-abiding president is the stuff of comforting fantasy, so here’s The American President to remind us of what that was like. This rather charming romantic comedy takes on the premise of having a widowed president woo a lobbyist. Written by Aaron Sorkin, the film can certainly be seen as a dry run for The West Wing—voluble, clever, and idealistic at once. (Checking the film’s original English-language quotes, it’s obvious that the film loses something in translation.)  Even though other movies and shows have mined the same terrain since 1995, The American President still provides an interesting glimpse at the heart of a presidency, and doesn’t forget to tackle the more honest aspects of the power dynamics of a relationship between the president and a citizen. A great cast anchors Rob Reiner’s straightforward direction: While Michael Douglas gets to play the president opposite Annette Bening’s fiery lobbyist, the film can also count on Martin Sheen (I told you it was a West Wing dry run), Michael J. Fox and John Mahoney. The American President is a good movie, but the current political context makes it even better, with its romance being as idealistic as its political nature—presupposing a president of good moral character and a concerned effort to curb emission gasses. It is a bit disheartening to hear a film nearly twenty-five-year-old tackling things that really should have been done back then. But when it comes to escapism, Hollywood does it best.

  • The Petrified Forest (1936)

    The Petrified Forest (1936)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) By 1936, Humphrey Bogart was a repertory player in the Warner Brothers stable inching toward leading-man status, and they were clearly trying a few things for him to see how he’d catch the audience’s attention. One of his early successes was The Petrified Forest, a thriller in which he plays a gangster evading a police chase, and taking hostage the patrons of a small desert diner. It’s clearly not meant to feature Bogart as a lead character—that would be Leslie Howard as a writer turned drifter who’s affected by the characters and events of the diner. As a semi-confined thriller, the film makes a good double-bill with Bogart’s latter Key Largo, but does make effective use of its desert atmosphere to crank the tension between its characters. Bogart, young and with a full head of hair, is convincing as the heavy (something that would clearly be noticed in later films) but the film isn’t quite a gangster picture. As the third act rolls in, it becomes closer to a contemplative meditation on life and death, as befits its theatrical origin. That’s when our intellectual protagonist is transformed into someone who discovers, perhaps too late, a reason to live. Great dialogue and great characters make this a potent 1930s film, although let’s be honest—most viewers will seek this out for Bogart first.

  • The Crow (1994)

    The Crow (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2019) Considering that I started seriously watching movies in the mid-1990s, I long thought that I would be unable to see movies of that decade as “dated” beyond the usual technological markers—those are, after all, the films I watched as they were released, as a young ticket-buying adult. In many ways, I still have trouble thinking of the 1990s as a historical period the way I do for earlier decades. But then I come across movies like The Crow, which were intended as such stylish statements of their times that they become the go-to example of what everyone mean when they talk about 1990s movies. Young directors like Alex Proyas, who made his mark through music videos, were not exactly responsible or sophisticated in their use of digital special effects and quick-cut editing—that all leaves a mark. This is even worse in The Crow’s enthusiastic embrace of gothic tropes, both visual and thematic—it’s so goth that its climax takes place atop a cathedral. For Proyas, The Crow is a clear front-runner to Dark City’s nighttime urban landscapes: everything here is dark, grimy, littered—nobody in this alternate reality ever cleans up, and in fact it’s not clear if there’s ever a daytime. The very moody soundtrack, to make matters even more cliché, is exactly the kind of thing that was goth-defining at the time. It’s obvious why The Crow became a cult classic—it feels like the unbridled product of a goth imagination turned up to eleven, even killing off its star Brandon Lee in the process. Oh, it’s easy to become a bit sarcastic about the film, but it does feel heartfelt some of the time. The superhero avenging angel is offset at least once by a scene of welcome humanity and realism with a policeman. Lee’s performance is not bad—and you can see parallels here with Heath Ledger’s Joker. Plus, there’s Bai Ling as an evil character. Even the extremely dated atmosphere has become fantastical and stylish rather than simply old. I can’t say that I liked The Crow all that much, but it does find a place in the list of distinctive 1990s movies—you’re missing out on an emblematic film if you don’t see it.

  • Dead Again (1991)

    Dead Again (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2019) I’m not going to be such a milquetoast as to state that Dead Again is all that weird a movie—but it’s weird and unusual enough to be interesting even thirty years later, and that’s not too bad. While Kenneth Branagh has a Shakespearian motif as a director, his filmography is varied enough to include this neo-noir romantic thriller that delves into classic Hollywood, past-life regression, hypnosis and full-bore romance. It’s quite a lot, but this joyously off-beat mixture of reincarnation, crime mystery, decade-long grudges and romantic thrills is executed stylishly enough to keep our interest. It is somewhat enjoyable is you take it the right way, which is to say dismissing the film’s plotting as a big ball of nonsense in service of a romantic atmosphere. Branagh is not bad in front of the camera, and Emma Thompson is quite cute in her dual roles. Robin Williams also turns up in a small but predictably surprising turn. The twists and turns are enjoyable to watch, and some of the historical material is quite immersive—especially if you know about 1940s Los Angeles. Branagh’s filmography is expansive enough to include an MCU film, a Tom Clancy-inspired techno-thriller, a Disney live-action adaptation and two Agatha Christie murder mysteries, so I’m not sure we can credibly claim that Dead Again is too weird for him. But it still stands out as an oddity against other movies in general, so on that basis alone it’s worth a quick look.

  • Carnival of Souls (1962)

    Carnival of Souls (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) The history of horror films is littered with examples of highly imaginative low-budget efforts that managed through sheer execution to overcome the limits of their production. Another example would be Carnival of Souls, a very low budget effort from the mid-1960s that relies far more on eerie atmosphere and scene-specific chills than an overall coherent story. It does understand one thing: horror must be grounded, and much of the film’s more pedestrian moments end up creating a fascinating depiction of life in early-1960s Salt Lake City. The plot itself doesn’t hold up—the point of the film is the striking imagery. Despite the limited budget, there’s a clever imagination at work here from writer John Clifford and director Herk Harvey, resulting in numerous scenes of surprising effectiveness even today: man appearing at a car window; a feeling of not being with the living at a commercial centre; a tour in an abandoned building with ghostly inhabitants. The cinematography is clean and crisp, with the featureless backgrounds of Salt Lake City bringing further focus to the actors in front of it. Said acting is not that good, at one crucial exception: Candace Hilligoss, a timeless beauty around which the film revolves. The gothic music and atmosphere add quite a bit to the atmosphere. When it’s all over, Carnival of Souls leaves with a lingering sense of unease—it’s surprisingly successful at unsettling viewers, and clearly hits above its weight. No wonder it has re-emerged as a classic after being rediscovered by later generations.

  • Christopher Strong (1933)

    Christopher Strong (1933)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) In looking at Christopher Strong, many twenty-first century cinephiles will focus on Katharine Hepburn’s performance for a few good reasons—it’s her second movie role, and while it casts her in a tragic “other woman” character, you can already see her strong-willed personality shining through it. Playing off the romance of 1930s aviation, Christopher Strong has her as an aviatrix seducing a respectable married man—it doesn’t end well for her. On the other hand, the film does feature Hepburn in a silver form-fitting moth costume: it’s hard to find any kind of Hepburn retrospective that doesn’t feature a photo of it. Absent Hepburn, however, Christopher Strong isn’t much of a film: The absurdly complicated romance at the heart of the film makes it melodramatic to the point of having no reasonable way out, then shifts tones from comedy (with moth costume) to drama, ending at tragedy more out of default. This is really Hepburn’s show, even at such an early stage and secondary role.

  • The Yearling (1946)

    The Yearling (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) While I’m not one to turn up my nose at black-and-white films anymore, I get almost unaccountably giddy every time I see 1940s films in colour—the garishness may feel off, but it makes the films feel more alive than many of their contemporaries—and that’s particularly the case with pictures largely shot outdoors such as The Yearling. The subject matter remains unusual, focusing as it does on seventeenth-century Florida homesteaders as they work their way through isolation, the death of most of their children, withholding of parental affection and the adoption of a baby deer as a pet. While the plot itself is meandering (something to blame on the source novel) and rests on shaky foundations for modern parents, the film’s animal scenes quite impressive: the bear sequence alone still holds up. Young Gregory Peck is fantastic in the lead role. Still, the highlight is probably the great outdoors cinematography—much of the film was shot on location, and that clearly shows on screen. (Amusingly or not, legend has it that there was a previous attempt to film The Yearling at the same place four years earlier with Spencer Tracy, but It had to be dropped due to the bugs, the heat and Tracy’s distaste for the material.)  I’m not that fond of the result, but The Yearling certainly remains unique.

  • The Heiress (1949)

    The Heiress (1949)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) For all the flack that golden-age Hollywood often gets for its happy endings and predictable plots, it could throw us a curveball occasionally, and The Heiress is certainly proof of it. Olivia de Havilland is somehow cast as a plain girl, albeit one with a rich father and an unusually persistent suitor. There are plenty of questions to ask about his motives and you may think you know where it’s going, or at least hope you do—but the film’s conclusion is merciless in summing up the film’s plot threads. This is a romantic drama with an emphasis on the second word. Montgomery Clift makes the most of his image as a romantic lead, while de Havilland tones down her own sex-appeal to pass (not so successfully) as plain. The Heiress does feel a bit long at times, stretching out moments that would be handled much faster nowadays. Still, there is a classic Hollywood glamour quality to the images, and heft to the entire film (weighted down by the ending) that other lighter stories may not have—no wonder it was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award and won four Oscars. It’s easy to watch despite the heavy tone. The conclusion may not make romantic fans happy, but it’s still, in its own way, a small triumph over adversity.

  • Biloxi Blues (1988)

    Biloxi Blues (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, April 2009) I have a strong nostalgic attachment to Biloxi Blues, and it has a bit more to do with fond memories of watching it (in French) as a teenager at my grandparent’s house. Years later, it turns out I remembered more of it than I would have believed, and yet not enough to make this re-watch uninteresting. Of course, the other part of my nostalgia for the film has to do with the very deliberate attempt by the film at inducing it. It is, after all, an affectionate romanticized memoir of author Neil Simon’s army training experiences at the end of World War II, and the film is dedicated to comforting us with a nice portrait of the time. Despite the drama of a barracks environment, everyone is well-mannered (even the villain isn’t that villainous, even the disagreements aren’t that disagreeable), the fashions are impeccable, the world makes sense and the ending explicitly claims that those were the best years of the author’s life. Compare and contrast this with the near-contemporary Full Metal Jacket for the proof. Matthew Broderick here stars as an intellectual New York writer thrown in the mix of a group of young men not like him, facing down none other than a young and wiry Christopher Walken as his drill sergeant, and many colourful characters at his side. There is a resolute lack of surprises in Biloxi Blues—the drill sergeant will pick on someone and punish the group for them, the prostitute has a heart of gold, the villains get their ironic comeuppance—and yet it’s that lack of surprises that makes the film what it is. Visually, Biloxi Blues isn’t much—the strength of the film, borne out of its theatrical origin, is in dialogue and interpersonal conflict, but it does pull some stops when it needs to: The opening and closing shot have some lovely helicopter shots of a train crossing bridges, and those shot help a lot in establishing the romantic nature of the film even if they probably cost a significant chunk of the film’s total budget. While certainly less overly funny than Simon’s other works, Biloxi Blues is comfort cinema at its purest as far as I’m concerned … but you had to watch it as a teenager to experience the same. The French dialogue is markedly inferior to the pugnacious original, but it does add to my nostalgia factor.

  • The Equalizer 2 (2018)

    The Equalizer 2 (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2019) I’m not sure that anyone but the producers of The Equalizer were asking for a sequel, but I can understand the undeniable attraction of seeing people get beaten up for righteous reasons, and Denzel Washington’s possible insistence to set up a sufficient college fund for his kids. This sequel coasts a very long time on Washington’s natural charm and presence. It takes a while to get going, although it does make up for lost time by a rather remarkable climactic sequence set in a hurricane-swept coastal town. The climax does feature a terrific sense of geography, meticulously established through some careful scene-setting by Washington acolyte director Antoine Fuqua. The way to get there is a bit more laborious. It’s fun to be in Boston, fun to have a showdown in suburbia, fun to see a Malibu being used for car-smashing mayhem, fun to spend a bit more time with an unusually stoic hero even by Washington’s standards. This is a first sequel for the actor (and the director) but there’s nothing essential to it—at best, it allows viewers to revisit an easy character to put in action scenes, and if the point of the movie seems to be the action scenes (as they’re the best sequences of the film) then it’s a vehicle to an end. The subplots do get intrusive, especially when they slow down a film that should be all about leanness (in keeping with its spartan character) and forward propulsive pacing. Still, The Equalizer 2 gets a pass from me—I think I’m going to remember those set-pieces a while longer than the first film which, to be honest, only had the Home Depot sequence going for itself.