Reviews

  • FANatic (2017)

    FANatic (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) Anyone who seriously claims that the latest multiplex movie is the worst thing they’ve seen all year either makes the claim on the first week of January or should spend more time looking at what’s being offered on Cable TV channels. Horrible movies, movies made for minuscule budgets, movies without discernible talent either in front or behind the camera. Terrible, terrible movies, and we Canadians often get it twice as hard given CanCon requirements for cable channel licences. That’s right: we get extra special servings of terrible movies as long as they’re made in Canada. This is important in setting expectations for FANatic, a made-for-Cable Lifetime TV movie that by all rights should have been terrible. Surprisingly enough, it merely turns out to be not very good. The distinction is important—some of those straight-to-Cable films are bad enough that you can’t even make it to the end. FANatic, on the other hand, has enough juice to last until the end, even though it doesn’t rise up to any decent standard. I suppose that I have a built-in fondness for its premise, in which the strange subculture of media SF fandom is mined for the usual Lifetime stalker plot template. Here we have Betsy Brandt as the lead actress in a Science Fiction TV show—she’s got enough problem with the silliness and sexism of the job, but it’s all about to get worse once her trusty assistant turns out to be not so trusty … and even homicidal. Hell hath no fury like a scorned fan, and seeing obsessive fandom portrayed in Lifetime fashion is good for a few giggles. Jean-François Rivard’s workmanlike direction is a bit better than usual for those kinds of films, but once again we’re grading on a curve. Katy Breier is cute when she’s not playing pure psycho. I’m not going to actually recommend FANatic—life’s too short to give two hours of it to a Lifetime movie—, but I will vaguely allude to a half-hearted recognition that it’s not as bad as it could have been, and through its sci-fi hook will appeal to viewers who normally would not even be watching a Lifetime movie.

  • Cuban Fury (2014)

    Cuban Fury (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) Let’s be clear: There’s nothing in Cuban Fury that’s all that original, but it’s still a nicely handled romantic comedy with a substantial dancing component. Nick Frost stars in a role that’ generally less comic and more romantic than many in his filmography, and it generally works. Rashida Jones is fine as the object of his affection (with a deliciously slimy Chris O’Dowd completing the triangle), although Ian McShane and Kayvan Novak are highlights as (respectively) a cranky dance instructor and a flamboyantly gay dancer. The plot is as by-the-number as they come, what with past trauma, romantic interest, training montages and to-thine-self-be-true message complete with a triumphant ending. Still, the protagonist is endearing, the entire film is fun and it fits squarely in the kind of gentle British comedy that we’ve grown accustomed to. Cuban Fury may not be challenging, innovative or meaningful, but it doesn’t have to be.

  • Guarding Tess (1994)

    Guarding Tess (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2018) There’s a whole slew of apolitical politics-adjacent American movies out there, and Guarding Tess has one of the strangest hooks of them all—Nicolas Cage as a Secret Service agent assigned to an exasperating detail as he’s in charge of protecting a widowed First Lady living in a small town. She (played by Shirley MacLaine) often considers her security detail undistinguishable from her serving staff. You can imagine the rest, including a third-act thriller that runs at odds with the generally comic tone of the film up to that point. Of course the secret agent and former first lady will make up and learn lessons about each other—that’s not the point of the film. What Guarding Tess has in abundance is Cage playing off MacLaine, pokes at the reality of a Secret Service team assigned to what they consider to be a dead-end posting, and the minutia of such an arrangement. There’s a real genre twist thirty minutes before the end of the movie as the former first lady is kidnapped, buried underground and then Nicolas Cage has to shoot a toe off a suspect for him to confess the crime. Somehow this ended up in a comedy, but it feels a bit more natural in the movie than described like this. (After all, what would be the point of a security detail if there wasn’t a threat to their client at some point?) I still liked it, but Guarding Tess is almost the very definition of a movie that you shouldn’t watch if there’s anything more pressing to do.

  • Love, Simon (2018)

    Love, Simon (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) As much as I hate to admit it, I live in a comfortable bubble and movies are one of the ways in which I can understand that. A teenage romantic comedy whose Big Idea was to feature a gay protagonist coming out at first struck me as, well, unnecessary — but given that I live in Canada (and the progressive, French-speaking part of Canada at that), work in an environment that embraces diversity and carry my cis straight white male privilege around, I clearly didn’t fully appreciate what it meant to others. On its own, I quite liked Love, Simon: despite an annoying tendency to portray its characters at the edge of hipness with the perfect musical choices and coolest pop-culture references, it’s a warm, engaging, funny and dynamic teenage romantic comedy. It’s also inclusive in the sense that by the big triumphant romantic finish, I was aaaw-ing for the protagonist just as I would have for a straight protagonist (in fact, perhaps more so, because Love, Simon is a superior example of the form that leaves many blander hetero rom-coms behind). The dialogue is filled with good moments, the cast is performing up to the demands of the script and the atmosphere created by director Greg Berlanti approaches some of the earlier teenage movie classics. Comparisons with John Hughes films may have to sit a while, but don’t seem unwarranted at a first glance: I’m seriously considering it for my own year-end Top-10. Nick Robinson is quite good in the lead role, but the entire cast is fantastic — I particularly liked Alexandra Shipp, Natasha Rothwell and Clark Moore even in short supporting roles. Small funny script details about — I was particularly amused by the notion of a high-school performance of Cabaret, but sobered up when I realized that this was actually A Thing. And it’s in that vein that I’m willing to cut a lot of slack to Love, Simon — It’s a great movie, and it’s a great movie not necessarily designed for someone like me. There’s a wide difference of experience between this middle-aged movie reviewer and its target audience, and the notion of a gay teenage romantic comedy is important to its target audience — it’s not overdone, not obvious, not unnecessary. We all need to tell our own stories, and we will find unity in what they have in common.

  • Beginners (2010)

    Beginners (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2018) I’m not sure what I expected from Beginners, but I got a lot more than I thought. The story of a man dealing with the death of his father as he’s trying to decide whether to pursue a romantic relationship of his own, Beginners is considerably funnier than you’d think considering the subject matter. As our protagonist pieces together his life, the life of his father, and what happened since his father came out as a gay man, the film is remarkably free-form and entertaining in taking us inside the character’s head. This is not a big film, but director Mike Mills’s execution is almost maximalist at times—non-chronological, expressionistic, surprisingly humorous and able to wrap up this slice-of-life narrative with a satisfying finish. Mélanie Laurent is quirky and cute as a free-spirited love interest but this is not her film: Ewan McGregor gets a strong dramatic role here, although he’s sometimes overshadowed by Christopher Plummer’s sheer presence. Beginners wraps up nicely as a film that sits between genres—not a comedy, not a drama, but something that clearly understands what it’s trying to do.

  • Hearts and Minds (1974)

    Hearts and Minds (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) I probably wouldn’t have seen Hearts and Minds if it hadn’t been for its 2018 inclusion in the American Film Registry and consequent broadcast on Turner Classic Movies. I ended up giving it a shot out of curiosity, and was surprised at its blistering quasi-contemporary criticism of the Vietnam War. It really holds nothing back in its indictment of the American war effort over there, using nearly all available tools at its disposal to make its points. (There is a clear acknowledged line from Hearts and Minds’s director Peter Davis to Michael Moore’s work.) Scenes of intense Vietnamese grief are accompanied by a coolly analytical voiceover from a high American official explaining in racist terms how Vietnamese doesn’t care as much about human life—the hypocrisy and detachment is staggering. Much of the film runs along those lines, giving voice to Vietnam opponents and unearthing some amazing footage of people trying to defend it with shocking admissions. It has aged amazingly well at a time where American interventionism is still an ongoing concern—Hearts and Minds was made close enough to the events it describes to be raw about it, but with enough accumulated evidence to back up its claims that the war was a mistake. It really isn’t aiming for cool analysis, and it’s this obvious anger that makes the documentary feel so relevant today.

  • Monterey Pop (1968)

    Monterey Pop (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) I wasn’t really planning on watching Monterey Pop all the way through. TCM was having a special 8-hour broadcast of movies selected for the 2018 American Film Registry, and it was easier to record the entire block to get all of the short films and commentary than to try to pick the movies I really wanted to see. The idea of a Sixties concert film wasn’t high on my list of essentials, but I let the movie play while I was doing something else … and the music ended up imposing itself. Featuring an A-list of late-1960s performers, Monterey Pop is often hailed as a pivotal concert film, one that captured the energy of the Monterey festival, and led to more concert movies and more concerts as well. Director D. A. Pennebaker’s style does feel surprisingly modern, and yet evokes the Sixties without much of the false overblown nostalgia that creeps into more contemporary looks at the time period. In between The Mamas and the Papas, Simon & Garfunkel, Jefferson Airplane, The Who, Jimi Hendrix and many others, there’s a lot of great music in a single film, and Monterey Pop is likely to keep you listening from beginning to end.

  • The Informer (1935)

    The Informer (1935)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) An early Oscar favourite, The Informer is director John Ford’s look at 1922 Dublin, gripped in the fractious Irish War of Independence. Our protagonist is a flawed character who sees, in informing about a friend, a way to get tickets to America for him and his girlfriend. Things don’t turn out as planned. As befits such a sombre tale, the atmosphere of the film is fog-shrouded, bridging the transition between German expressionism and American film noir. Victor McLaglen plays our flawed hero, someone whose imperfections prevent him from doing the right or the best thing—he was given an Academy Award for the role. While some of the material feels overly blunt, there is still something very confident in the use of split-screen optical effect for storytelling purposes, giving us a glimpse in the characters’ inner thoughts. You can seek The Informer because it’s a John Ford movie, or because it’s an Academy Award Best Picture nominee, but it’s surprisingly engaging at time, and a counterpoint to the belief that early Hollywood played nicely with its characters and film endings.

  • Tomb Raider (2018)

    Tomb Raider (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) In rebooting the Tomb Raider film franchise, the 2018 version of the film sets itself against two perhaps overwhelming references—not only the series of adventure videogames that made such a splash over the past two decades, but also the Angelina Jolie double-feature that, for many and for all of their faults, defined the way it should be approached on-screen. But everything reboots, even videogame heroines, and so the recent Tomb Raider games have featured a younger, untested heroine, and that’s the approach also taken with the 2018 film featuring Alicia Vikander. The result is not especially impressive. Petite Vikander isn’t much of a presence even as the not-yet-formidable Croft, and director Roar Uthaugturnins merely manages to deliver serviceable sequences along the way to yet another dull origin story. (Seriously, the decision to “re-introduce” Lara Croft is dumbfounding: here we have one of the few videogame household names, and you’re going to waste everyone’s time reintroducing a beginner’s version of her? Why bother?) Much of the film is boring digital mayhem, not shot with any wit or expertise—the lone exception being a sequence featuring an old aircraft fuselage and a cliffside waterfall. It’s all not quite terrible, but it’s definitely laborious—there’s a sense that this is the film we have to struggle through so that they can be bothered to make a real Lara Croft movie. The film chuckles to itself as it ends with a reveal of Croft dual-wielding guns, but it’s only the final nail in the exasperation felt by the movie not delivering what it should. I’m solidly whelmed by the perfunctory adventure movie that is this wholly useless Tomb Raider. Now let’s hurry up to the inevitable sequel to see whether they’ll manage to make something out of this redundant throat clearing.

  • The Mechanic (1972)

    The Mechanic (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, December 2018) It’s a tale as old as Hollywood: The remake comes out and everybody bemoans that it’s not the original. When the Jason Statham-headlined The Mechanic remake came out in 2011, I made a mental note to check the original. It took me a while, but I finally got it done years later as one French-Canadian channel had itself a nice little Charles Bronson marathon. Having seen the result, I don’t think I wasted all of these years not knowing. The Mechanic is very obviously a product of the early 1970s, with a whiff of drug-fuelled existentialism making a fairly simple action thriller get weirder than it should have been. It follows and deconstructs the lifestyle of a renowned assassin as he goes through his contracts and slowly seduces a younger man into his own way of seeing things. By necessity, our protagonist (played by Bronson) is an absolute loner—paying for call girls and quietly appreciating the expensive entertainment that his job pays for. His life gets more complicated when he’s asked to take on a younger partner, and both men’s styles clash. It’s not headed to a happy ending, but then again neither does the film have a happy middle or a happy beginning. Typically dark, grimy and off-putting for a film of its era, The Mechanic seems content to offer a counter-programming alternative to the better-known action movies of the era. Any hint of a homosexual relationship between the two lead characters is not accidental: the original script reportedly had it explicitly detailed and we can only regret the adulteration of that choice—it would have made the movie quite a bit more interesting than the one that made it to screen. In the end, what we have is a dourer Bronson vehicle that fails to impress except, perhaps, for its accidental period patina. Even though the remake wasn’t particularly remarkable, it still feels like an improvement over the original.

  • No Way Out (1987)

    No Way Out (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2018) I saw the very end of No Way Out two decades ago, and you would be forgiven for thinking that remembering only the final revelatory scene of a thriller would have been a problem in seeing it again. But there’s a lot more to a movie that its narrative conclusion, and I was remarkably pleased to find out that it’s a solid thriller from start to finish, and that what could have been a twist is half-telegraphed much earlier in the film—and that much of the film’s dramatic tension works equally well knowing about it. As a man investigating himself, Kevin Costner gets a great occasion to play off his stoic persona, and director Roger Donaldson cranks up the tension through a few remarkable scenes. The labyrinthine complexities of 1980s official Washington, D.C. can be fascinating at times, including the limited computing capabilities that fuel one of the film’s best sequences set deep within the Pentagon. There’s even a dash of (much parodied) eroticism to make things even spicier, as if Soviet spying, underhanded government secrets, plotting between organizations and a ticking-clock plot weren’t enough. It doesn’t really matter if the plotting is outlandish, or if the characters are well beyond unbelievable—sometimes, a thriller works because it’s ludicrous and this is one such case. I had a surprisingly good time watching No Way Out, and it still works largely because it doesn’t even attempt to be realistic.

  • The 15:17 to Paris (2018)

    The 15:17 to Paris (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) As a director, Clint Eastwood is well-known for a quick and efficient shooting style: He goes fast, doesn’t overthink the details and is often satisfied with one or two takes. This works well when dealing with good actors (including Eastwood himself), but the limits of his approach clearly show when dealing with non-professional actors such as in The 15:17 to Paris. It must have been a good idea at the time: Since the point was to make a movie about the three American who thwarted a terrorist attack on a European train in 2015, and the three young heroes of the story were still very much alive and willing, why not cast them in their own roles? As it turns out, there is a reason why we have professional actors, and the limits of their experience in portraying themselves quickly become apparent throughout the course of the film. Not that this is the biggest issue. The 15:17 to Paris, having to fill 90 minutes out of a relatively short incident involving a trio of wholesome young Americans, has to fill its running time somehow, and it’s not going to do that by, say, exploring the perspective of the terrorist. No, The 15:17 to Paris prefers to pad its running time with an awkward denunciation of secularism and then a travelogue as it follows our intrepid heroes throughout the sightseeing trip that precedes the dramatic events at the end of the movie. That’s right: Eastwood “directing” three young guys as they backpack through Europe, and a wasted Judy Greer as a mother who puts school officials in their place. The best part of the film, fortunately, comes at the end, when it’s time to deliver what audiences have come to see: a few tense minutes facing a terrorist and saving a victim. That final act of The 15:17 to Paris is much better … but it’s too bad we have to struggle through the hour that comes before. Eastwood gets terribly sloppy here, and it severely harms the point of the film.

  • Spielberg (2017)

    Spielberg (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) There’s a plethora of documentaries about famous directors these days, and it seemed strange not to have one about Steven Spielberg’s career. Spielberg’s two-and-a-half-hour running time certainly reflects the amount of material available for discussion: Not only does Spielberg have a forty-year career at this point, there is also a fascinating dramatic arc to a filmography in which, as he himself will admit, he grew up and matured behind the camera as audiences were watching. Spielberg went from pure pop entertainment to some of the most acclaimed dramatic movies in recent Hollywood history, and this progression does end up forming much of the native backbone to this HBO documentary. Numerous interviews with well-chosen subject help flesh out commentary from Spielberg himself. This being an authorized biography, do expect a sympathetic overview of his wok—while some reviewers ding a few obvious items in the Spielberg filmography, much of it reflects the consensus opinion with a few illustrative details. Not every Spielberg film gets equal treatment—there’s deservedly a lot to say about Schindler’s List, and almost no mention of Always. Alas, the film is already a reflection of its time—the material coming from the end of 2016, it talks about Lincoln but not about the Ready Player One/The Post early-2018 one-two punch echoing Spielberg’s 1993 annus mirabilis. Still, there are a few revelations here for casual Spielberg fans—I knew the broad outlines of what led to the character-defining divorce of his parents, for instance, but did not know that they had reconciled in the past few years. Because of carefully chosen details such as those, Spielberg remains an entertaining and well-structured overview of a big and important career.

  • Deep Blue Sea 2 (2018)

    Deep Blue Sea 2 (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) I gave it a shot. I was not expecting anything special from a Direct-to-Digital sequel to the shark-thriller classic Deep Blue Sea, but I gave it a shot. I was not rewarded by the attempt. Despite a kernel of a good idea—boosting shark intelligence in order to understand how to boost human intelligence as a protection against strong AI—, this is the wrong film for a sustained exploration of smart ideas. Far too often, Deep Blue Sea 2 is content with the lowest common denominator of DTD filmmaking: terrible acting, rote premise, even duller execution. It quickly grows undistinguished, then wearying, then exasperating. You could probably have fun trying to predict the average amount of time until an entire watching party switches their allegiances from the dumb humans to the smarter sharks. I won’t make this review any longer than required to act as a warning: even if you’re expecting something anywhere near the level of the original film … you will be disappointed.

  • Unsane (2018)

    Unsane (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) The really nice thing about writer/director Steven Soderbergh announcing and then renouncing his retirement from moviemaking is the growing conviction that he’s now doing movies for the fun of it—that as a formal experimenter, he’s now free to take on projects because they sound cool, or because they push the envelope of what he wants to do. For instance, shooting a movie using an iPhone. In that context, Unsane is far more interesting than if you’d see it completely cold: At the surface, it feels amateurish, off-setting, simplistic, even far-fetched. In-context, however, it’s a Research and Development effort in greatly simplifying filmmaking—moving fast and using cheap equipment, but informing it with a strong filmmaking artistic intention. Soderbergh isn’t the first filmmaker to shoot a studio-level feature using a cell phone—that would be Sean Baker’s Tangerine—but Unsane is meant to be a relatively accessible thriller for multiplex distribution rather than an arthouse favourite. I can’t say that the experiment is completely successful—the paranoia is cranked up beyond believability, and the nature of the iPhone cameras means that the image does look quite a bit different from what we’re used to—the field of depth alone is a bit disorienting. As a very technical director with considerable cinematography experience, Soderbergh is obviously aware of those issues: the film is mean to make audiences uneasy with a form that follows function. The warped off-kilter perspective reflects the warped worldview of the lead character as she is trapped in an asylum, convinced that she’s being hounded by an obsessive stalker. Unsane doesn’t have a complicated story, but it’s well told thanks to Soderbergh verve behind the camera—or in this case, the phone.