Reviews

  • Friday (1995)

    Friday (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, April 2016) If Friday is a minor classic of its genre, it’s largely because it managed to ride the ’hood-movie trend of the mid-nineties and turn it into a stoner comedy without betraying its origins. Famously co-written by NWA-founder/Boyz n the Hood lead actor Ice Cube (who also stars in the film), Friday doesn’t mean to be anything more or less than a day in the life of the ’hood, celebrating the absurdity of its environment while looking at it fondly at the same time. Much of the film is surprisingly retrained to a single street, with the two protagonists of the story (Cube and Chris Tucker in an early role) sitting on their porch and watching the world coming to them. Soft drugs are consumed, with amusing consequences. Much of Friday, especially its first half, is laid-back, almost amorphous in the way it accumulates plot elements. Fortunately, it all leads to something in the end. There is some suspense in the film, but most of its violence (including a shootout) is handled with comedy in the form of intentionally awkward pauses and character quips. Friday remains most noteworthy for showcasing a young Ice Cube in a comic role, something that would occur again with some regularity in the course of his career, but also was the debut feature film for F. Gary Gray (who would later get a reputation as an action director, and direct Straight Outta Compton which portrays Ice Cube writing Friday). Meanwhile, John Witherspoon seems to be acting in his own kind of demented universe, to further comic effect. Despite its obviously low budget and slack pacing, Friday is still enjoyable today—see it alongside Boyz ’n the “hood for maximum contrast.

  • Sunflower Hour (2011)

    Sunflower Hour (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2016) There is an interesting premise at the periphery of Sunflower Hour, looking at the behind-the-scenes shenanigans at a children’s TV show. There are plenty of comic opportunities here to contrast public/private wholesome/naughty behaviour. Unfortunately, that’s not what writer/director Aaron Houston aims to do in presenting a mockumentary-for-adults about an audition process in which four people are asked to join a children’s TV show as puppeteers. The characters are insipid, oblivious and irritating: Disappointment sinks in fifteen minutes in the film as it becomes obvious that we’re going to spend the following hour with them. But what’s worse is Sunflower Hour’s chosen tone, vulgar and smarmy and often depressing. (There is a difference between bawdy and gross, and Sunflower Hour picks gross six times out of seven.) The end sequence of the movie had me saying ‘ew’ at least twice, and even appreciating the film as a black comedy does nothing to erase the revulsion of some of those moments. On the other hand, pretty much everyone gets what they deserve at the end, and half a dozen jokes land. Of the actors, Amitai Marmorstein and Kacey Rohl are easily the most sympathetic, but Patrick Gilmore steals the show with his reprehensible antagonist. Still, that’s not much of a result, and I confess that part of why I kept watching Sunflower Hour until the end is a quasi-horrified apprehension at how far the film was willing to go. There are some nasty things lurking at the bottom of Canadian movie channels to satisfy ‘Canadian content’ requirements and if Sunflower Hour is better than some of the literally unwatchable ones, it will stay still obscure for a reason.

  • Mousehunt (1997)

    Mousehunt (1997)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On DVD, April 2016) There’s been a glut of kids movies with CGI animal characters lately, but an early (and enjoyable) prototype of the form can be found in 1997’s Mousehunt, in which an exceptionally intelligent mouse goes to war against two brothers trying to renovate an old house. While the film does feature a handful of CGI creatures (usually easy to spot), most of the mouse scenes are shot using real trained mice, and the result, in all of its limitations, is surprisingly enjoyable. It helps that Mousehunt features some real good physical comedy, and earns a number of honest laughs along the way. Nathan Lane and Lee Evans are fine as the brothers battling against insolvency and a smarter-than-they-are mouse, but Christopher Walken has a very good small role as an exterminator who finds his match. Still, the star here is director Gore Verbinski’s efforts at orchestrating mayhem as the war between the mouse and the humans escalates to pure chaos. There’s quite a bit of wit to the way the film is put together, balancing entertainment with a darker-than-necessary tone. Much of the film can be seen coming in advance, but there are enough small surprises here and there to keep things interesting and funny. For some reason, Mousehunt doesn’t seem to have endured all that well twenty years later, which is a shame given how it combines humour, action and small furry creatures appealing to kids, while having just enough cleverness and suspense to appeal to adults. (One note, though: the opening cockroach scene is disturbing to young kids. Heed the PG rating, especially given the small much-darker hints in the dialogue.) It’s quite a bit better than you’d expect … or possibly remember.

  • Holes (2003)

    Holes (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, April 2016) For a film clearly aimed at kids, Holes does manage to keep up an engaging mixture of mystery, fantasy and comedy—not to mention weightier themes of destiny, racism and juvenile incarceration, delivered with a tone akin to magical realism. Shia Labeouf, in his feature-film debut, plays a young teenager sent to a desert detention camp after a freakish coincidence—except that his entire family is accustomed to those freakish coincidences given a long-running curse. Quirky characters inhabit an awe-inspiring mystery (why make kids dig thousands of pits in an old desiccated lakebed?) and by the time our teenage heroes are done unravelling the case, we’ve jumped into a few generations’ worth of conflict, prophecies and opportunities for redemption. There’s an admirable continuity in the way the film goes from specific tactile sensations such as digging under the sun to much-bigger themes such as predestination. Holes isn’t without flaws, but it works in different ways that most other movies aimed at its age cohort, and as such sustain a fair amount of scrutiny by older audiences.

  • Love & Mercy (2014)

    Love & Mercy (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2016) By now, fictionalized music biographies have settled into such a rote pattern that any deviation from the form is liable to make the result look better. Love & Mercy is certainly part of those exceptions to the norm: Chronicling the life of Beach Boys member Brian Wilson, it chooses to focus on Wilson’s life at two different eras, and to have Wilson played by two different actors in those eras. Sixties Wilson is played by Paul Dano, and chronicles not only how Wilson came up with the iconic Pet Sounds record, but also how, at the same time, his life was spinning out of control due to undiagnosed mental health issues. Twenty years later, John Cusack plays Wilson as a recluse, manipulated into social exile by a misguided (possibly malicious) psychiatrist and gradually finding a path back to good mental health via the intervention of a good woman. Both eras are shot differently, 16 mm cameras helping set the sixties era, while the eighties are portrayed as considerably bluer and flatter. The result is unequal, but there are a few good moments: Dano’s portrayal of Wilson is mesmerizing, never more so than when the movie dares to re-create his production of “Pet Sounds” in the recording studio. Meanwhile, Cusack gets to step away from his screen persona of late. The file goes back and forth between its two eras, and in doing so creates an interesting portrait of a tortured musical genius who ends up earning his way back to inner peace. Director Bill Pohlad skilfully balances a number of daring elements in Love & Mercy, and the result is more interesting than the usual musical docu-fiction.

  • Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015)

    Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Blu-ray, April 2016) It’s not that The Force Awakens is un-reviewable—it’s that there’s so much to say that a full review would take a few pages, encompass the recent business state of Hollywood, meander on commodified nostalgia, indulge in insufferably nerdy nitpicking, and yet deliver an assessment not that far removed from “wow, competence!” This is a capsule review, so let’s start cracking: My first and biggest takeaway from The Force Awakens is that I’m not 7 years old, watching Star Wars on French-language broadcast TV and being so amazed that I can’t say anything bad about it. The Force Awakens is far from being perfect, and it doesn’t take much digging to find it crammed with problems. Even on a first view, I’m not particularly happy that thirty years later, The Rebellion hasn’t managed to establish a workable government and seems stuck in an endless echoing battle against evil. (Heck, they still haven’t changed their name, apparently.) My mind boggles at the economic or political absurdities of what’s shown on-screen, and the moment I start asking questions about basic plot plausibility is the moment I start making a lengthy list of the amazing coincidences, contrivances and plain impossible conveniences that power the plot. The jaded will point out that director J.J. Abrams has never been overly bothered by plotting logic and The Force Awakens certainly bolsters this view. Worse, perhaps, is the pacing of the film, which often goofs off in underwhelming ways rather than go forward. Then there’s the way this return to the Star Wars universe seems unusually pleased in echoing the first film’s elements, all the way to another who-cares run through a Death Planetoid’s trench. On the other hand, echoing is forgivable when the point of this film is to reassure everyone that the soon-to-be-endless Star Wars franchise is safe now that Disney took it away from George Lucas. In that matter, The Force Awakens is a success: it feels like classic Star Wars, from the visuals to the music to the elusive atmosphere of the first three films. Sometimes, a bit too much so: The decision to shoot the movie on actual film introduces film grain issues that sometimes vary from shot to shot, which is enough to drive anyone crazy. (Witness the Rey/Finn shots in the cantina…) Star Wars clearly isn’t as much about story than characters and set pieces, and that’s also where The Force Awakens succeeds: Harrison Ford seems timelessly charming as Han Solo, while John Boyega, Daisy Williams and Oscar Isaac are also easily likable in their roles. (Boyega and Isaacs are effortlessly cool, but Daisy Williams has a more delicate role as a stealth superhero.) Adam Driver has a tougher job as the intriguing Kylo Ren, riffing but not copying the series’s iconic villains. Then there are the set pieces, which often work despite shaky logic, implausible premises and nonsensical engineering. Coring a new planet-killer out of a planet may not strike anyone as the best plan, but it’s good for some fantastic images and at some point, that’s what really counts. Especially when, in the end, we’re left satisfied that this seventh Star Wars film is better than the prequel trilogy, and are left looking for more. Mark these words: There will now be a Star Wars movie every year for at least a decade and probably more. This one’s special, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t age well once the sequels start piling up.

  • Unbroken (2014)

    Unbroken (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2016) There must be a temptation among certain filmmakers, tasked in presenting an arduous odyssey on-screen, to want to make viewers suffer as much as their protagonists did. At least that’s the conclusion I come to after making it to the end of Unbroken, an extraordinary tale of survival stretched over an equally extraordinary 140 minutes. Philip Zimbardo’s story is, indeed amazing: The son of a poor Italian immigrant, he made it to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, only to be shot down above the Pacific during World War II, survive weeks on a small raft, held in a Japanese POW camp … and live until 97. This is dramatic, compelling material: but why does it feel so dull on-screen? Part of it has to do with Unbroken’s self-important ponderousness: nearly every moment of the film screams “Academy Award contender!”, leaving little to breathe if it’s not supporting the character’s terrible story of survival. The tepid pacing, with numerous endless flashbacks, doesn’t help. Neither does, frankly, the outdated depiction of the Japanese as purely evil. Some elements fare better: Jack O’Connell is credible in the lead role, and some of the cinematography is impressive. There is a good movie waiting to emerge from the result, but it would have taken a few merciless cuts to the script and a willingness to abandon the prestige-film mould. You can understand why Angelina Jolie would be attracted to the project as a director: on paper, Unbroken feels like a front-line contender for the award season—alas, the result is a bit too mouldy to impress beyond its good-natured appeal as a true story.

  • Valentine’s Day (2010)

    Valentine’s Day (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, April 2016) I am an absurdly forgiving reviewer when it comes to romantic comedies, so when I report some amount of enjoyment from Valentine’s Day, don’t necessarily assume that I’m in my right mind. A large ensemble comedy set in Los Angeles on Valentine’s Day, this film crams a dozen 10-minute short stories together, with tenuous links between the various strands of the story. You can watch the film just for the pleasure of seeing two dozen name actors having fun in a frothy feel-good romantic film, spouting various bon mots about love and occasionally hamming it up. (Jamie Foxx gets a turn signing at the piano, for instance.) Or you can watch it for the thrill of seeing couples meeting up, breaking up and making up. Bargain-level symbolism abound, but there is something faintly clever in making much of the story revolve around a flower shop on February 14. There are a few cute touches for those who consider Hollywood actors part of their extended family (Anne Hathaway plays a phone-sex operator; Taylor Swift makes her big-screen debut; Shirley McClaine appears twice in the same frame in roles decades removed) and the film zips easily through the various areas of Los Angeles. Director Rob Marshall keeps every plate spinning with ease, and Valentine’s Day unspools easily as long as we’re ready to play along. In terms of ensemble romance, it’s nowhere near the much-superior Love Actually, but it’s sweet and sympathetic enough to be forgiven. Your opinion is likely to vary depending on your tolerance for such movies. Also see (or not) the similar New Year’s Eve and the upcoming Mother’s Day.

  • Jurassic World (2015)

    Jurassic World (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2016) I wasn’t exactly demanding a Jurassic Park sequel, but there’s still some kick to the idea of humans facing down unnatural predators and considering the progress in special effects technology since the 1993 original, I’d have to be almost willfully incurious not to see Jurassic World. The result is … middling. Nearly twenty-five years of CGI development means that this fourth film is crammed with action, sweeping camera moves and dinosaurs once it’s done teasing audiences during its third act. The climax comes complete with a long thrilling single-shot in which nearly everything gets destroyed around our running, ducking, dodging protagonists. Technically, it’s a super-polished production on par with nearly every big special-effect spectacle we’ve seen recently. Director Colin Tremorrow pole-vaults from indie feature Safety Not Guaranteed to blockbusters with this one, and Chris Pratt solidifies his unlikely rise to superstardom. However, as you may fear, the script (liberally reflecting the original Jurassic Park) is also on par with said special-effects spectacle: It moves the pieces across the board in time for the next action sequence, but it’s pure surface work with little underneath. The structure is intensely familiar, the plot beats are predictable and the overall dramatic arc holds few surprises. (There’s a nice acceleration in pure chaos as the film advances, though, at least until the suddenly more tepid third act.) As a result, Jurassic World feels a lot like its fictional theme park’s namesake: a carefully predetermined ride with obvious commercial sponsors, bereft of heart when going for simple entertainment and far more predictable. At times, the script almost becomes playful, but then retreats in comfortable mediocrity. (There are exceptions, such as an unwarranted lengthy death scene that seems taken from a different film.) Is Jurassic World entertaining? It sure is. Could it have been much better? Almost certainly: It’s light on thematic content (“learn that we’re not in control”) is bluntly stated, and that’s almost it), exceptionally predictable when it comes to drama, and even mentioning its own absurdities (see; high-heels) isn’t enough to make them forgivable. But, as we know and as the characters of the movies know (because a lot of stuff was packed in boxes in anticipation of the sequel), there will be another Jurassic movie, and another, and another…

  • Life as we Know it (2010)

    Life as we Know it (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, March 2016) I’m constantly surprised at the number of romantic comedies that revolve around tragic material. In this case, Life as We Know It is a film founded on the brutal accidental death of a one-year-old girl’s parents—the laughs are supposed to come when two mismatched friends are designated as guardians. Will they overcome their initial disgust toward one another to bond with the baby and for a family? Of course they will—and part of Life as We Know It’s appeal is not only in the way the expected moments will come, but also in how it somehow manages to get laughs from a situation that’s more tragic than comic. Let’s not pretend that the result is an unqualified success: Life as We Know It is largely a routine film, with few surprises on its way through a familiar arc. The stakes are a bit too high for comfort (although the film does get a bit of emotional depth by taking the tensions experienced by new parents and cranking them up to 11) but the plot points are well-known. Katherine Heigl does herself no favours by taking on a very familiar character, work-driven and uptight to an almost unpleasant degree, while Josh Duhamel isn’t much more than a usual overgrown bro in a somewhat stereotypical take on a new father. Some of the supporting performance shines, though, whether it’s a pre-stardom Melissa McCarthy, Christina Hendricks (very briefly) or Sarah Burns as a quirky CPS case worker. While Life as We Know It emotionally zigs and zags a bit too much to be completely satisfying, it actually manages to build something halfway decent out of very strange elements. If nothing else, it may be of comfort to new harried parents looking for any affirmation that things could be worse.

  • The Battery (2012)

    The Battery (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2016) It takes a while to appreciate the no-budget aesthetics of The Battery, with its static camera, long takes, limited characters and meandering plot, but it works relatively well for a film reportedly shot for $6000 with a skeleton crew. The setup isn’t much more than the usual zombie movie setup, as our two protagonists travel through the empty rural areas of New England and figure out what to do after the apocalypse. The zombie menace is never far away, and finding other human survivors isn’t necessarily good news. While the first half-hour seemingly goes nowhere, The Battery eventually snaps into focus, leading to a tense and (occasionally) hilarious siege scenario that consumes much of the last minutes of the film. Writer/Director Jeremy Gardner also stars and turns in an impressive first feature: while the result doesn’t have the polish of bigger-budgeted productions, The Battery understands its limitations and works with them.

  • Terminator Genisys (2015)

    Terminator Genisys (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, March 2016) Where to begin? Terminator Genisys is a big mess of a movie. Not that I care all that much: After all, I’m on record as saying that the first two movies of the Terminator series are bona fide classics, and that the third and fourth ones are nothing more than ascended fan fiction. This fifth instalment has the saving grace of being more ambitious than it could have been, but at this point the Terminator mythos has been trampled so thoroughly that we’re well into the degenerate phase of the franchise: everything gets remixed endlessly and the result is best appreciated as postmodern mush for the fans. Enough is enough: let the whole thing go! But that will never happen and given this certitude, the only thing left to do is to appreciate the good bits and moan about the bad ones. What works is Schwarzenegger being cast age-appropriately and the various contortions the plot has to go through in order to make it happen. The re-creation of the 1984 original is interesting, and so is the craziness of seeing so many temporal loops crashing into each other. On the other hand… Emilia Clarke and Jai Courteney are terrible lifeless choices for the iconic roles they’re meant to reprise. Jason Clarke does better—but while I like the manic episode he gets to play, it severely undermines that character he’s supposed to be. The dumbness of the film can’t be overstated, and its self-conscious status as the first in a new trilogy means that it can’t be relied upon to answer some basic plot questions, leaving them to a sequel that looks as if it will never exist as of this writing given Genisys’s tepid commercial success. (Forget Terminator 6: I want a movie about how the Terminator franchise is being sabotaged by time-travellers who fear that the next film will succeed and bring untold devastation to the world.) At charitable times, I’d call Genisys “interesting”—but at others, I’d call it overstuffed, under-thought, meandering and frustrating. The ruthless simplicity of the first film’s ongoing nightmare has been replaced by a tangled web of fan-service, while the themes and pulse-pounding action of the sequel have been muddled in generic action sequences and puddle-deep snark about modern technology. I would at the very least expect any new Terminator to have something to say about our relationship to machines. Otherwise, well, we’re back to ascended fan fiction.

  • San Andreas (2015)

    San Andreas (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2016) The disaster movie will never die. Indeed, buoyed by advances in special-effects technology, it will rise again and again, more overblown and chaotic than ever before. If you thought that 2012’s earthquake sequences were as good that they were likely to get, prepare to be amazed by San Andreas’s wide-screen mayhem as Los Angeles and then San Francisco gets thoroughly trashed by a number of unimaginably powerful earthquakes. Dwayne Johnson anchors the film as its muscular protagonist, equally able to commandeer a helicopter for personal gain as he is to fly a small plane and provide first-aid. All of which turn out to be helpful when comes the time to go rescue his daughter from the elements. San Andreas is, to put it bluntly, a fairly dumb movie: The laws of physics are ignored, logic is downplayed, characters a mere plot puppets and nothing is as important as the CGI destruction shown on-screen. Even for a blunt disaster movie, it sometimes overplays its hand: Paul Giamatti does his best as the voice of exposition, while Alexandra Daddario is overexposed in centre-frame as a curvaceous object of desire. (I wouldn’t normally complain, except that in this case, there’s something extra-blatant in the way the movie shows her off and her character is supposed to be a teenager. Also, I’m getting old.) On the other hand, San Andreas is a cunning movie: Everything is engineered for the wow-factor, from some spectacular moments in which major California cities are torn apart to showcase sequences in which a character runs (in a single long shot) to escape to a building’s roof while skyscrapers are toppling all around downtown LA. It takes more than a little ingenuity to cram that much spectacle in a single film, and both the screenwriter Carlton Cuse and director Brad Peyton have to be congratulated (if that’s the right word) for delivering a film so committed to the base ideals of a disaster film. While the result may not be respectable, it springs to mind as a demo disc to show off any new home theatre improvement.

  • The English Patient (1996)

    The English Patient (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2016) Revisiting Oscar-winning movies twenty years after the fact screams for reassessment: What is truly the best movie of that year? Has it aged well? Does it still warrant attention? At times, The English Patient seems like a kind of prestige middle-budget movie that has disappeared in the squeeze between low-budget independent films and tent-pole studio blockbusters: A film with the budget to credibly re-create an era of history, and comfortably deliver a story that plays heavily on emotional nuances. Here, we hear from an adventurer as he tells the story of his love affair with the wife of another man, set against the troubled backdrop of World War II in northern Africa. Ralph Fiennes excels in the title role, first as the “English patient”, burnt beyond recognition after a plane accident, but also, in flashbacks, as a dashing explorer who gets involved with a woman despite the dangers of such an affair. The English Patient is a long film, made even longer by an oft-maddening framing story that never feels as interesting as the other one. It’s competently presented on screen, showing the romance of the time as well as its dangers. It’s tragic, of course, doing its best to feel even more important thanks to this tragedy. And twenty years later, it has survived relatively well. As a historical drama, it doesn’t suffer too much from less-than-cutting-edge special effects, and the star-studded casting is even remarkable today for showing a number of respected thespians as their younger selves. It had sweep, scope, dramatic irony and tragic heartbreak. Twenty years ago, that was enough to get you two handfuls of Oscars. Today, The English Patient remains a film worth seeing.

  • The Peanuts Movie (2015)

    The Peanuts Movie (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, Video on Demand, March 2016) Part of me was dreading the idea of a CGI adaptation of Peanuts. There is such an iconic charm to Shultz’s penmanship that anything looking like the glossy plastic perfection of CGI felt sacrilegious. But it looks as if everyone involved in the film shared the same concerns, because The Peanuts Movie turns out to be warm, respectful and even innovative in the way it combines volumetric 3D animation with 2D comics-inspired overlays to produce something that looks and feels like the comic strip, but brought in a modern context. The story is simple but fit to hang a number of classic Peanuts vignettes, from Snoopy’s flights of fancy to a number of humiliations for Charlie Brown. The humour is often laugh out loud funny, and the charm of the source material shines through all the way to the classic music. While The Peanuts Movie may not have done blockbuster business, there’s a sense that it will endure as a family classic by sheer mastery of execution. This is one that both the kids and the adults will enjoy.