Reviews

  • 55 Days at Peking (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2022) There is, admittedly, something interesting about 55 Days at Peking—at least in theory. It’s hard to approach a Nicholas Ray film starring Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner and David Niven without at least some interest, and seeing that the film is a historical epic set during turn-of-the-twentieth-century Beijing is unusual enough. The story, very loosely adapted from historical facts, is about westerners besieged by Chinese revolutionaries in Beijing’s international compound during the 1900 Boxer Rebellions. In practice, however, it feels both overstuffed and underwritten—the demands of a large-scale epic not being a right match for Ray’s character-driven approach, and yet he can’t balance the demands of an audience-wowing spectacle with the more dramatic moments between the actors. Niven, for all of his usual charm, doesn’t get much to do here and the same goes for Gardner. It’s true that a lot of money went into 55 Days at Peking—lavish recreation of long-gone Peking with consequent set design, costumes and countless extras. Such expense comes with oversight and a desperate drive to complete the project no matter what, and the film’s production history records how Ray was overwhelmed by the scope of the production, the late-arriving script, a production exceeding its schedule, and a lack of chemistry between the lead actors. No surprise then, if it doesn’t feel like anything else in Ray’s filmography (indeed, this would be his last significant film—what followed the following decade-long pause wasn’t a return to form): it’s visually striking, but inert on a dramatic level and far less interesting than you’d expect, considering the film’s production means and lead actors. (Also: don’t expect much of a reflection on colonialism.)  Not every epic film made during Hollywood’s attempt to recapture the TV-viewing audience was successful, and 55 Days at Peking basically broken even.

  • All My Puny Sorrows (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2022) It’s a mistake to believe that films should be universal. Most movies are very specifically made for very specific audiences, and one of the most frustrating experiences in reading online movie reviews is encountering a reviewer who’s not in the target audience trying to approach the film on less-than-friendly terms. The only decent thing is to state biases up-front, and so: wow, am I the wrong person to fairly assess writer-director-producer Michael McGowan’s All My Puny Sorrows. From the title onward, this is the kind of mainstream drama aimed at a very specific audience, one that doesn’t have much use for genre thrills. To me, the result is like watching paint try, as much of the film is about two sisters—one suicidal, the other one trying to rescue the other from the brink. There’s a complex tissue of familial subplots, but much of it is quite simple. It doesn’t help that it’s all executed in dour, literary fashion in a way that seems to scream for awards or at least respect from the highbrow audience. (Accordingly, it got nominated for a slew of Canadian screen awards.) I didn’t buy into it—even being as lenient as possible, the film, its characters and subplots all left me exasperated and bored at once. A lot like reading a mainstream Canadian literary novel, of which this is indeed an adaptation. Not exactly a recommendation—but then again, I’m not among those for whom All My Puny Sorrows is made for.

  • Vivement dimanche ! [Confidentially Yours] (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2022) The only people to hold film noir in greater veneration than the Americans are the French, and Vivement Dimanche is not just writer-director François Truffaut’s last movie before his untimely death, it’s his ultimate homage to film noir. While not an out-and-out comedy (there are several murders after all), it’s light-hearted, ends on a sunny note and is far more audience-friendly than Truffault’s few previous films. You can almost feel the aging director easing a little bit, going back to his noir roots but without the doom-and-gloom expected of such a turn. It helps that there’s a strong mystery to chew on, with a plot that features old standbys such as adultery, mistaken accusations, gambling and an amateur sleuth’s investigation. Jean-Louis Trintignant and Fanny Ardant (Truffault’s lover at the time) are quite good, if not always likable, in the lead roles. I have misgivings about the way the male lead is written too dourly for the material, but that adds interest to Vivement Dimanche’s not-quite-conventional take on familiar film noir tropes. Despite Truffault’s obvious intent to pay homage (to Hitchcock, among other things), there are a lot of tweaks at work in this film, and they all add up to something interesting: a light murder story far more humanistic than you’d guess. Truffaut did not intend this to be his last film, but I suspect he would be amused that it ended up that way, so directly does it reach back to his early career.

  • The Christmas Clapback (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2022) Either I haven’t been paying attention, Canadian rights weren’t available, or BET didn’t churn out as many new BET+ original Christmas movies this year. The only one I saw on the schedule was The Christmas Clapback, and it’s actually not too bad. Of course, it’s a straight-to-TV Christmas movie, so its standards are low. This one forgoes (well, only by two thirds) the overused “girl goes back to hometown” cliché to dwell on family reunification subplots, loosely linked together by three sisters having a baking competition for a visiting influencer. The influencer angle is lame, sure, but the film is on much firmer ground when it comes to the three sisters, their ongoing rivalries and individual subplots. Director Robin Givens’s filmography is shaky so far, but she seems more at ease here than in her previous outings. It helps that the three lead actresses (Nadine Ellis, Porscha Coleman, and Candace Maxwell) look good and do well—the film can’t be good without them being compelling. As The Christmas Clapback develops, it turns out that it’s not that original—the subplots are a blend of clichés that make this a romantic comedy blended with food/family comedy in a Christmas wrapping. Points for the mixture, I guess, even if all the ingredients are very familiar. The dialogue is not that good but not terrible either. By the end, The Christmas Clapback is… fine, I guess. Better than it could have been, not quite good enough to make a strong impression. In the subgenre of made-for-TV Christmas movie, this is called a solid hit.

  • The Reincarnation of Peter Proud (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2022) There’s a special subgenre of downbeat 1970s horror films that simply don’t work for me. The Reincarnation of Peter Proud is one more of those, a slow-paced horror melodrama in which a man seeking the meaning of vivid recurring dreams realizes they’re visions from an earlier life and goes (back?) to Massachusetts to learn more and eventually inhabit the life he left. The film, to its credit, does zig and zag in mildly unexpected directions, finding its way into horror after spending most of its duration in eerie drama. Director J. Lee Thompson turns in a mysteriously photographed, darkly-tinted result that aspires to more than a shlock monster film. Does it work beyond being watchable? Maybe. Getting there is a journey, considering that The Reincarnation of Peter Proud takes a very long time to become interesting. I’m sure that devotees of other similar horror films of the period will get more of a kick out of it.

  • Muppets from Space (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2022) As someone who mistakenly thought that Muppets from Space was titled Muppets in Space, I spent far too much time wondering when the Muppets would actually get into space rather than playing host to alien visitors and realizing their own otherworldly origins. But that’s the Muppets movie we get—shenanigans about Gonzo realizing his real history, the Muppets leaguing against a national security research institute, and a finale featuring an alien ship landing on Earth. “Disappointed” is far too strong a word to describe my muted reaction to the result—“underwhelmed” is closer to it. While there’s enough here for a few chuckles, the humour of the earlier Muppet films isn’t there. The rather strange choice to make this a Gonzo-centric film and sideline the rest of the gang doesn’t help, but there’s also a lower joke-per-minute ratio and fewer imaginative set-pieces as well. It’s not much of a surprise, then, to find out that this was a commercial failure and hence the last of the first-generation Muppets movies before their revival in 2011—it clearly smacked of fatigue and lack of inspiration. (Behind the scenes, things were also not going well for the Jim Henson Corporation.)  Not that I would necessarily turn down another viewing of Muppets from Space at some point: even when operating at half-speed, the Muppets are still more fun to watch than many other family movies… whether they fly off to space or not.

  • The Trigger Effect (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2022) There’s something typically American about movies in which people start shooting at each other the moment order is temporarily eclipsed by extraordinary circumstances. It tells us more about the low-trust people believing in immediate social breakdown than those who would, in theory, hasten that breakdown. Meanwhile, in the real world, most recorded instances of such sudden catastrophes show people helping each other in difficult circumstances—but that would not make a good catastrophe movie. So it is that The Trigger Effects follows an ordinary suburban American man—husband, father, good guy—as the entire area/state loses electrical power. It takes about five minutes for riots to begin and our audience stand-in to start stealing medication and brandishing guns himself. It’s both funny and sad that the film cranks up the paranoia to eleven so suddenly, but that’s the film that David Koepp (in his first but not last feature-length outing as director and screenwriter) wants to deliver. On a surface level, it’s not that difficult to watch—although the film errs in leaving the suburban house to head out to the desert in its second half, as the semi-episodic structure doesn’t seem to build upon itself. On the other hand, despite some very intentionally grim moments, the film isn’t easy to take seriously. The lead trio of Kyle MacLachlan, Elisabeth Shue, and Dermot Mulroney is quite good in an unstable-suburban-menage-a-trois kind of way, even if their issues are also shunted to the side during the last half of the film. While The Trigger Effect has apparently become some kind of cult classic since its unimpressive theatrical run, there are far better movies out there dealing with a social breakdown—and some of them may even be documentaries.

  • Cat People (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, Criterion Streaming, December 2022) If you’re about to watch the 1982 version of Cat People hoping for a repeat of the subtle dread of the 1942 original, then stop and reassess your expectations right away, because this is from an entirely different era and the result is an entirely different film. While it starts from roughly the same place (people who can transform into killer panthers), this 1982 film comes from the era of trashy slashers and copious nudity, so it’s not that much of a surprise to see plenty of gore, naked women, salacious elements and mounting casualties. The only thing I remember from a first mid-1990s viewing was the gore, and it’s still over-the-top. Writer-director Paul Schrader is far, far away from Val Lewton’s subtle touch—his take is about bloody graphic dismemberment, incestuous siblings, torn-apart prostitutes and more associations between big cats and female eroticism than you’d believe are possible. It sort-of-works, though—clearly not in the same register, but as a far more respectable early-1980s horror film than the slashers that were popular at the time. The New Orleans setting is used well, and if the film runs into some serious pacing problems in its third quarter, the early bits of the film do a solid job at establishing the characters and their environment. It’s not meant to make you comfortable, though—the ending is disturbing on a number of levels, and that’s well after some material that doesn’t play nicely. Considering the film’s emphasis on sexuality, I would probably respond better to it if I found Nastassja Kinski more attractive—but that’s my problem, not the film’s problem. (I much preferred Annette O’Toole in her supporting role, but she would not have been a good pick for the demands of the female lead role.)  Elsewhere in the film, both Malcolm McDowell and John Heard have two good roles here, and Ruby Dee pops up briefly. There’s plenty of thematic material to dig in if you want, but the film (mostly) works on the surface level if you’re willing to grant it some indulgences. I don’t quite like the 1982 version of Cat People as much as the moodier 1942 version, but it’s not a bad movie in its own right.

  • The Keep (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, December 2022) I’m not one to demand movie remakes at the drop of a hat, or that special effects technology are, by themselves, a reason to update a film. But this being said… I’d really like to see a younger director (maybe Mike Flanagan, maybe James Wan) take on the F. Paul Wilson WW2-era novel The Keep and show us how it’s done. Because Michael Mann went at it in 1983 and the result is charitably described as… weird. The production history of the film tells us that things did not work out smoothly, that a chunk of the necessary material was left on the editing floor and that the state of special effects (not helped by the untimely death of the film’s VFX supervisor) at the time was clearly not up to the task of representing an ancient evil being loosened upon a fortress held by Nazis. Then the studio took over the film and kicked out the director from the editing process, which, as we all know, seldom ends well. The concept is still really good (and the novel remains tons of fun to read), so there’s a lot of unrealized potential here. But the film itself is an interesting dud—not interesting by itself, but in seeing how it can’t quite deliver on what it wants to do. The casting is surprisingly good (Jürgen Prochnow, Gabriel Byrne, Ian McKellen), while the story includes both Nazis dying horribly and a Jewish academic having fun with that. Still, Mann is typically far more interested in visual sheen than in the story. (The released version being half as long as Mann’s first cut probably doesn’t help.)  It’s all promising until the film plays and it’s just… there, uninspired or incoherent. Promising but disappointing, The Keep is exactly the kind of film that should be remade—there would be no sacrilege in improving upon it.

  • A Dandy in Aspic (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2022) You can see how dour Cold War spy thriller A Dandy in Aspic has many of the elements that could have made it a success—a blend of neo-noir pessimism, Swingin’ Sixties aesthetics, spy game hall-of-mirror intrigue, a few decent quotes, picturesque London/Berlin locations and a decent cast. (Laurence Harvey, Tom Courtenay, Mia Farrow.) Much of the story revolves around a British secret agent asked to take down a Soviet spy… who is actually himself. But the result is far less involving than it should have been. Part of it is a common pitfall with espionage thrillers desperately wanting to keep audiences guessing: there are so many crosses and double-crosses that very little of it feels significant. Absent a solid centre, audiences disengage quickly when the lead may or may not be someone in which it’s worth investing emotional stakes. Then there’s the murky aesthetics anticipating far bleaker 1970s thrillers: For something that should be fun (or at least engrossing) with striking characters that may not be honest or sane, A Dandy in Aspic works overtime to make everything feel like a chore to watch. The decision to adopt a more serious tone doesn’t quite match the wild plotting shenanigans, and it’s worth noting that veteran director Anthony Mann died during the making of the film—could exhaustion have been a contributing factor to the film’s lack of energy and underwhelming climax? There’s clearly a layer of compelling execution missing from the film that takes away from what should have been significantly better.

  • The Commitments (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Third Viewing, On DVD, December 2022) I was apprehensive about revisiting The Commitments decades later. Holding the film is very high esteem, and having owned the DVD version for years, I was afraid that it wouldn’t measure up to my memories of it. But a chunk of my movie schedule is dictated by a very specific list, and that list said that my next movie was to be The Commitments. All right then. To be fair, the film doesn’t always measure up to what I remembered: The first act is noticeably slower and features a lot that I didn’t remember. This makes perfect sense considering that what remains of the film is the music and the overall storytelling arc of a band that flames out early in its life. Ask fans of the film about their favourite bits, and I suspect that they’ll talk about the musical numbers. Digging into classic American soul music, the film offers near-incredible renditions of “Mustang Sally,” “Chain of Fools” and “In the Midnight Hour.”  Since the first musical number is several minutes in the film (the blissful singalong to “Destination Anywhere,” the first hint that the band idea is going to work) and it takes a while for the group to cohere gracefully, it makes sense that the last two thirds of the film is what sticks in mind. The character comedy becomes stronger because we get to know the characters, the narrative arcs play out, and the music becomes better until the group implodes. The Dublin working-class atmosphere is nicely rendered without too many sentimental flourishes, and I still think Maria Doyle Kennedy looks terrific here. Andrew Strong’s voice remains powerful, Johnny Murphy is the wildcard, and director Alan Parker assembles everything with matter-of-fact competence. After the first act, The Commitments quickly measures up to the charm and narrative interest that I remembered from my first two long-ago viewings. If you haven’t yet seen it, do yourself a favour and catch it as soon as you can—just power through the first half hour and it will click for you too.

  • Infinite (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, December 2022) After taking in Infinite, the first question that comes to mind is something like: What fresh nonsense was this? It’s as if everyone involved in its production stopped caring about things like verisimilitude, logic, consistency or even the need to entertain. The overly convoluted backstory to this fantasy tale has people being reincarnated into new bodies after death, effectively making them immortal. But then it gets worse, or at least more incoherent—because, being unsatisfied with serial immortality, the script then goes on to add two duelling societies (okay…), of which one wants to destroy the entire world (why?), with Mark Walhberg playing a character twenty years his junior (um…) who develops superpowers because reasons (wait, what?)  By the time Infinite ends, we’re served with an action sequence in which people are running on top of a forever-crashing plane, jumping off in the air and fighting each other without parachutes. I mean—at some point, where does this nonsense end? I’m as big a fan of dumb action movies and fantasy spectacle as anyone else, but Infinite is nothing short of contemptuous in the way it treats its audience as ready to accept anything. That’s not fatal by itself, but it’s loathsome when it’s combined with a script that just tosses off new things every ten minutes without bothering to check if it’s consistent with everything else at that point. The film seems structured around a few action sequences that have potential (considering that they were stolen from other better movies) but end up being botched at the execution stage, with minimal bits of a plot to get from one sequence to another but never coherently from beginning to end. It’s apparently based on a self-published book, although it’s not said to be a faithful adaptation. What’s more dispiriting is that this wasn’t meant to be a low-budget straight-to-streaming piece of tossed-off garbage (although it became exactly that): it’s a studio film with well-known director Antoine Fuqua at the helm, with a large budget (yet cut-rate special effect) and known names in the cast such as Chiwetel Ejiofor, Toby Jones and Jason Mantzoukas in a rare clunky performance. Unlike other action spectacles that play fine in the moment but make less and less sense the more you think about it, Infinite is inane as it plays, and becomes even worse if you try to piece it back together. I constantly note that the “worst movies of the year” are seldom studio productions but more often found in low-budget bottom-of-the-barrel streaming sites… but Infinite is a special case of its own. Some of the action shots are mildly fun taken in isolation, but don’t try to see how they fit in context, because nothing really makes sense here and the film doesn’t have the moment-by-moment charm or panache to compensate for any of its glaring shortcomings.

  • The Perfect Holiday (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2022) In the very special realm of Christmas movies, The Perfect Holiday is better than most, and yet a substandard film in general. It does boast of an order-of-magnitude bigger budget than most of the straight-to-Hallmark stuff, and that shows in the calibre of the actors featured here—Queen Latifah and Terrence Howard as sort-of-narrators of a framing device, plus Gabrielle Union and Morris Chestnut as the film’s true leads, as well as notables such as Faizon Love, Katt Williams and Rachel True in smaller roles. The script is slightly more ambitious as well, with a tangled web of relationships and professional ambitions (in music, alas—a field where luck reigns supreme except in movie depictions of the music industry). It was even a theatrical release, although it flopped upon release and that explains why you probably never heard of it. If you, by mid-December, are burnt out by the slew of repetitive Christmas movies that seem to take over TV channels, then The Perfect Holiday will feel like a slight breath of fresh air. It tries to do a little bit more, it reuses a formula but not the same formula, and while Lance Rivera’s direction isn’t particularly notable, he’s working with much better crew than most Christmas films. I enjoyed watching the film for the wrong reasons: I’ve been a fan of Gabrielle Union for the past twenty years, and it had been a while since I last saw her in a substantial role, so this was a small treat even if I’ll be the first to say that her role could have been much, much better. On the larger scale for Christmas films, The Perfect Holiday ranks as “slightly better than innocuous,” which is not terrible but shouldn’t mean a must-see either… especially if it’s anytime from December 27 to December 7.

  • Attack of the Sabretooth (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2022) Ergh. Look, I don’t really regret watching any film—writing these reviews is part of it: logging my impression means I can choose to never watch it again, so that’s one less movie to worry about. On the other hand—well, I’m now stuck having to review a film about which there’s very little to say. I gave a shot to Attack of the Sabretooth thinking, “How bad can a sabretooth tiger film can actually be?” and the result both exceeded and fell short of my modest expectations. For one thing, this is a 2005-era made-for-DVD sabretooth film rather than a 2015-era made-for-SyFy one—meaning that the production values are slightly higher (the film did shoot on location in a tropical setting) and the special effects are somewhat worse than the post-Sharknado-era movies. The tiger is ridiculously presented with weightless CGI and flashes of puppetry. The plot is a vague Jurassic Park ripoff in which an amusement park for extinct creatures suffers fatal mishaps when the star attraction escapes and starts lunching on the visitors. Attack of the Sabretooth, directed by George Miller but not that George Miller, maintains a veneer of competency, but can’t quite spark anything memorable thanks to its dour and featureless script. Maybe I don’t regret my film choice, but I can certainly warn you against this one.

  • Farewell, My Lovely (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2022) Now that’s more like it. After being seriously disappointed by Marlowe, a 1969 neo-noir attempt to update tough-guy private eye Philip Marlowe to a post-Production Code era, here is Farewell, My Lovely to show us how it’s done. The first good decision taken by the film is to take place in the 1940s, allowing the dour 1970 outlook to reflect directly on the classic noir era. The second-best decision is having Robert Mitchum play the role of Philip Marlowe—an ideal tough-guy pick matching what the fictional private detective should look like. As for the rest, a suitably twisty script and evocative direction from Dick Richards wrap up the film in a nice sheen of pure noir ambiance (technically neo-noir, but few films of the neo-noir era feel as close to the source material as this one). More than anything else, Farewell, My Lovely commits to the material and the right way to play it—compared to Marlowe, it’s not just an improvement but a relief. Mitchum is near-perfect as the protagonist, but many striking supporting performances also help populate the seedy run-down world that Marlowe works in—Jack O’Halloran as a brick wall of a man, Kate Murtagh as an imposing madam—and then Sylvester Stallone briefly popping up in a near-tertiary role. If you’re anything near a film noir fan, Farewell, My Lovely is pure deliciousness—a celebration of the earlier genre, but a good example of it in its own right.