Reviews

  • Noah (2014)

    Noah (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, July 2015)  When Noah was announced as heralding the return of the biblical epic, I’m not sure anyone quite expected… this.  Both faithful to the letter of the Flood and almost crazily unhinged as a fantasy film, Noah is certainly a bold bet by writer/director Darren Aronofsky.  He brings old-testament back thanks to a somewhat unique interpretation of angels fallen to Earth, introduces conflict among the Ark, meanders for two minutes in presenting a single-shot take on evolution, supposes a pre-Flood industrial society… it’s ambitious and scattered and impressive and exasperating at once, the film never quite jumping where one expect it to go.  Questions of humanity’s survival are bandied about, Russell Crowe goes brilliantly crazy at times, the building (and stuffing) of the Ark is handled in a semi-plausible fashion (given the existence of giant rock-monsters and sleeping potions).  As far away from blockbuster film as a reported 150 million dollar budget can allow, Noah is a definitive oddity coming from a major studio and the kind of flawed movie that makes a better impression than more successful, but more restrained ones.  It suggests (especially when juxtaposed with 2014’s Exodus) that in adapting classic bible stories it’s best to go as wild as possible.  Yet for all of its deviations of reality and borrowings from fantasy epic film, Noah does feel relatively respectful to at least the ideas of the Old Testaments… while delivering a big dose of wonder along the way.  Not bad at all, even though you may struggle to explain why, exactly, Noah feels so interesting.

  • Get Hard (2015)

    Get Hard (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, July 2015) There is something almost irresistibly promising about the premise at the core of Get Hard: What if a privileged naïf, framed for white-collar crime, had to ask for help in facing being locked-up?  What if the tough-black-guy asked for help was just as innocent as the convicted man?  Give the two main roles to Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart and you can almost imagine the film itself.  There’s even some room for social commentary, populist rage and racial-divide commentary.  But what do we actually get in Get Hard?  Alas: Racist, homophobic and just plain mean humor.  While a little bit can go a long way, the film is wearying in is near-constant carpet-bombing of the same jokes, repeated without much variation.  Rape isn’t funny, and neither is specifically homosexual prison rape, so it’s distressing to see the film reach for the same joke every five minutes or so, even in watered-down forms that look a lot like plain homophobia.  Much of the same can be said about the film’s lazy approach to racial stereotyping –setting a sequence inside a white supremacist headquarters can’t hid the fact the Get Hard doesn’t allow for much racial nuance in how it portrays its non-leading characters, and that the seemingly unconscious racism is used as a crutch instead of wittier material.  While Ferrell and Hart are adequate in their roles, they’re not fed very interesting material and the result feels like a waste of two talented comedians; at best, they rescue a script that would have led to a disaster in the hands of less likable performers.  While not entirely unfunny (thrown enough jokes at the screen and a few are bound to stick), Get Hard feels more juvenile than funny and while you may laugh once or twice, you may not necessarily like yourself for doing so.

  • Big Hero 6 (2014)

    Big Hero 6 (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2015) Disney Animation Studios have been on a roll ever since Bolt, and while Big Hero 6 is closer to Wreck-It Ralph than Frozen (in target demographics and to-the-moment hipness), it’s still a definite success.  Fit to make most kids dream of becoming an engineer, Big Hero 6 is about a teenager who goes on to have fun adventures with a team of genius-level friends and his own huggable robot called Baymax.  A fizzy mixture of science-fiction imagery, superhero theatrics and young-teen movie conventions (down to the hero being an orphan, aw c’mon Disney!), it’s both fun and heartfelt, colorful and grounded in emotional reality.  The connection with Marvel’s original comic book is kept low-key until the final mid-credit cameo, so there’s no need to feel excluded if you’re not familiar with the source material.  One of the best thing about the film is its San Fransokyo setting, the vivid east/west mash-up city in which everything looks possible.  The animation if state-of-the-art, with eye-popping detail and the layering of textures that distinguishes top-notch efforts from cheaper ones.  Big Hero 6 is, in other words, a pretty good time at the movies, with an inspirational message (go and develop robots!) and enough emotional depth to make things interesting.

  • Doctor Dolittle (1998)

    Doctor Dolittle (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, July 2015) “Eddie Murphy as a doctor who can talk to animals; the animals talk back” is the kind of comedy high-concept that seems hard to mishandle, and yet Doctor Dolittle comes remarkably close to it.  The biggest problem of the script seems to be that it can’t figure out whether it’s meant to be a harmless family comedy, or appeal squarely to the dirty-minded 12 years old boys in the audience.  So it is that aside from a wholesome message about taking care of animals, being unafraid of being oneself and being nice to each other, there’s a plot about hospital corporate takeovers, a substantial number of flatulence jokes and one distressing dog-at-the-veterinarian sequence with more anal penetration references than I’m comfortable with in a family movie.  Fortunately, the film stops far short of meanness; still, inappropriate and tasteless is a good way to describe much of its content.  These flaws would have been forgivable if the film had been witty or amusing … alas, it’s predictable almost from the first few minutes, not overly inventive and so broadly executed as to make caricatures out of everyone.  There are a few moments that actually work just fine, and much of the special effects still impress nearly twenty years later.  Murphy himself comes across well, although this roles clearly shows the road to the increasingly insufferable comic performances he would come to deliver in even worse movies.  Doctor Dolittle should have been quite a bit better; more tasteful, more focused, more interesting and certainly more inventive.  As it stands, it’s a mediocre film with tons of wilfully wasted potential.

  • The Holiday (2006)

    The Holiday (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, July 2015)  Routine romantic comedies are usually best appreciated for their details rather than their familiar plot structure, and so it is that while you can read a synopsis of The Holiday (“two lovelorn women exchange houses for the holidays, finding love in the most unexpected places”) and have a pretty good idea of where the film is headed, but you may not suspect to which extent the film is filled with references to the world of movies.  Cameron Diaz play a movie-trailer editor (the fake for fake movie Deception, with Lindsay Lohan and James Franco, gets the film’s biggest laughs.) and thinks about her life via voice-over narration; Kate Winslet plays a British book editor on holidays in Hollywood, befriending an Oscar-winning screenwriter and getting movies at the video store (a sequence that actually reminded me that I do, on some level, miss video stores)  Some romantic comedy terms are explained, played with and sometimes even adopted wholesale.  Still, there’s a little bit more to The Holiday than movie stuff: The performances are pretty good (with Eli Wallach getting one last great role), the sentiments are heartfelt, the expected scenes happen roughly in the expected order.  In short (or rather; in long, since the film does run a bit too long), it’s a perfectly serviceable romantic comedy, fit to make the holidays feel even more like the holidays. 

  • Seven Years in Tibet (1997)

    Seven Years in Tibet (1997)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2015) It seems amazing that an adventure film spanning several years, multiple countries, splendid mountain vistas and political upheavals would turn out to be so… boring.  A noticeably younger-looking Brad Pitt stars as a mountain adventurer stuck in Nepal during and after World War Two, eventually becoming an advisor to a young Dalai Llama.  Given the Himalayan setting, the scenery is spectacular, with a few mountaineering sequences to making this slightly less dull.  The problems with Seven Years in Tibet are common to a surprising number of adventure movies: It just feels interminable.  While doesn’t fall into the trap of loosely-structured episodes (even resorting to an artificial father-son bit of drama not found in the original book to provide increasing tension), this is a seriously long film that doesn’t go anywhere for a long while.  To the film’s credit, director Jean-Jacques Annaud does present a sympathetic representation of Nepal at a crucial time, and Lhakpa Tsamchoe is a rare example of a Tibetan actress being featured in a big movie.  In-between Pitt and the mountain scenery, Seven Years in Tibet does have a few things going for it.  But it could and should have been just a bit more interesting considering its subject matter.

  • Knife Fight (2012)

    Knife Fight (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2015) As a political junkie, campaign strategist is high on the list of dream jobs I’ll never have –but Knife Fight is good enough to make me live the experience vicariously.  Starring Rob Lowe as an expect fixer working for political campaigns, Knife Fight delves deep into the dirty tricks deployed to make sure that “the right guy” wins.  Interestingly, this does comes with a bit of soul-searching about what “the right guy” means and whether there’s a correlation between being a good leader and a fallible human being.  Knife Fight certainly isn’t a perfect film (its chronology is a bit strange, it doesn’t delve quite long enough in the dark side of the dirty tricks, practically repeats itself at times, and gives short thrift to a few characters), but it’s unusual in that it’s co-written by an actual campaign consultant and so has more than a whiff of authenticity to it.  Other than Lowe, who’s clearly having fun, the film does have a few likable performances by Jamie Chung as a budding strategist and Carrie-Anne Moss as an improbable gubernatorial candidate.  Knife Fight will most directly appear to left-leaning political junkies with its mixture of behind-the-scenes manipulation, wry humor and satire.  It’s an enjoyable comedy in a very specific mold, and all the better for it.

  • Good People (2014)

    Good People (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2015) Everyone’s got to pay their bills, which is how I explain seeing James Franco, Kate Hudson and the omnipresent Tom Wilkinson in this fairly standard thriller in which money is the root of all problems.  Good People gets going when a cash-strapped couple finds a bag of money in their dead tenant’s apartment –such an amount is seldom legal, and before long the true owners of the money come calling back.  Stuck between an overly-interested policeman and warring criminal gangs, our sympathetic expatriate couple gets the chance to run, fight and set up traps in a dilapidated house.  The building blocks of the story are simple, but executed fairly and the result is the kind of thriller that can be watched without too much involvement.  There isn’t much for Franco and Hudson to play with: they’re meant to be a likable couple stuck in a nightmare, and their restrained performance reflects exactly that.  It doesn’t help that the film is shot in a dark and blue-tinted mode, rain never being far away even when it’s sunny.  Predictable and by-the-numbers, this is a straight-to-video 80-minutes entertainment for those who have seen just about everything else playing.  Good People is not bad, although it could have been a lot more fun.

  • La Vénus à la fourrure [Venus in Fur] (2013)

    La Vénus à la fourrure [Venus in Fur] (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2015) There’s a remarkable purity of intention in La Vénus à la fourrure, a psychological thriller adapted from a stage play that almost entirely takes place on a darkened theater stage, featuring only two characters that spend much of their time reciting snippets of a stage play based on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs.  You really wouldn’t expect any sustained tension out of this premise, and yet the film builds upon fairly dry foundations until it becomes an unsettling display of psychosexual combat, lead actor and lead actress locked in a duel of wills and kinks.  I’m going to ignore the question of whether you really want infamous fugitive director Roman Polanski to be the one to teach you about perversion, but there is some serious directorial skills on display here as the film does the most it can achieve with very limited elements.  Mathieu Amalric is good as a playwright who finds himself captured by his own creation, but Emmanuelle Seigner (Polanski’s wife) is simply astonishing in the lead role –she seems to be playing five or six parts one after the other, simple changes in costume or posture bringing out entirely new sides to her character.  It certainly helps that the script is so densely constructed, referring back and forth between actor, character and character-as-actor, with at least three levels of interpretation constantly feeding off each other.  (A hint for bilingual francophones watching the film: turn on the English subtitles to catch more references.) I wouldn’t call La Vénus à la fourrure an enjoyable film, but it’s certainly a fascinating one that builds and builds until it seems unbearably intense. 

  • Detention of the Dead (2012)

    Detention of the Dead (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2015)  “The Breakfast Club for the zombie generation” is a fair way to describe Detention of the Dead, as it features half a dozen mismatched students stuck in detention, suddenly dealing with a zombie epidemic ravaging their school (and, presumably, the world).  A fair warning, though: this is a very low-budget film adapted from a stage play, so don’t expect much more than adequate production values, acting or staging.  Much of the zombie material is strictly standard fare, with a few odd moments that don’t necessarily contribute much to the film other than to boost its running time into feature-film territory.  Of course, this isn’t a film to be taken seriously: the references to previous horror films abound, the tropes are completely familiar and it’s definitely meant to be a comedy first rather than a pure horror film.  While Detention of the Dead should work based on the strength of its characters, dialogue and situations, the best it can do is a bit of amusement.  The actors aren’t all strong enough to carry their roles, the staging isn’t always convincing, some of the references seem forced, the love triangle doesn’t really work, the order in which the characters die is almost entirely predictable and for all of the slight attempts at playing with the tropes of the genres it melts together, Detention of the Dead remains far too beholden to the core concepts of zombie films to bring anything new.  Shaun of the Dead it isn’t.  Still, comparing this film to the best examples of the sub-genre ignores the fact that at a time where terrible zombie movies rise up faster than reviewers can shoot them in the head, writer/director Alex Craig Mann has managed to craft a mildly entertaining film on a threadbare budget.  It could have been far, far worse.

  • Annabelle (2014)

    Annabelle (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2015)  What a strikingly dull horror film.  It wasn’t a good idea to spin off The Conjuring’s acclaim, but every profitable horror film inevitably ends up producing inferior sequels and so here we are.  Tracking the back-story of the Annabelle doll introduced in The Conjuring, (but otherwise independent of the previous film to the point of being stronger if you haven’t seen it), Annabelle doesn’t reach too deep in the bag of usual horror movie tricks, what with its blend of babies-in-peril, catholic mythology, jump scares and demons out to suck innocent souls.  It’s all very familiar, utterly by-the-numbers and it doesn’t take much to let our attention wander as the film laboriously works its way through plot point best established in other better movies.  The doll has more personality that the human characters, and while the conclusion has about thirty seconds of intensity, it’s a bit too little too late to redeem the film.  Created on an assembly line and put together without too much craftsmanship (which is a bit surprising, given director John R. Leonetti’s experience as a cinematographer on films such as The Conjuring), Annabelle is another in a long string of proofs that horror franchise can’t usually sustain Hollywood success: they invariably become corrupted at the slightest touch of financial greediness.

  • Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)

    Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, July 2015)  For all the flack that 2000-2010 Matthew McConaughey has received for his lengthy string of undemanding roles in romantic comedies, it’s easy enough to forget that he was really, really good at it.  Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is as good a showcase for him in that mode as any of the other films in that sub-genre.  Here, A Christmas Carol crashes into rom-com conventions as McConaughey plays an unrepentant womanizer taught the error of his ways via three helpful ghosts on the eve of a wedding.  As with many films trying to mix familiar genre premises with high-concept premises, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past works best as its wildest (the scene where the protagonist meets his past girlfriends “in bulk” is the highlight), and worst when it’s saddled with obligatory emotional beats, or realise it actually has to deliver a romantic payoff beyond the jokes.  So it is that the film is an inventive delight when McConaughey acts as a bad-boy or when the ghosts take him through a tour of his romantic life.  It’s not so enjoyable when it has to go through the motions of the typical foreordained romance, or the dramatic scaffolding required to get to the triumphant ending.  But the film does make an impression: Emma Stone is nothing short of hilarious in a pre-stardom role, while Michael Douglas is slick-smooth as the kind of mentor every mother warns her son about.  Noureen DeWulf, Anne Archer, Lacey Chabert and Robert Forster also make good impressions in smaller roles.  Still, the script is a bit hit-and-miss as its better moments are saddled with more obvious ones.  In other words, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past should have been a bit better with the elements at its disposal, and occasional signs that it’s capable of much better.  But even as it is, it’s an impressive showcase for the kind of persona that Matthew McConaughey enjoyed in his rom-com heyday.

  • Saw III (2006)

    Saw III (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, June 2015)  How fitting that one of the thematic threads in Saw III be the tension between sadism and redemption.  In the universe of the film, we get an argument between the lead villain (who does allow for extreme redemption) and his apprentice (who would rather kill in gruesome ways), which finds an echo in the tribulations of a putative protagonist offered the chance to take revenge upon the killer of his son and the enablers that let him walk free.  But in a wider context, redemption and forgiveness make for lousy horror franchises: The Saw series is built upon grimy traps, gruesome deaths, gross-outs and twisted revenge.  While I would personally like the series to err more frequently on the side of the compassion it professes to embrace, we know that this wouldn’t sustain a fan base big enough to allow for seven installments.  Part of the proof is in the way Saw III casually kills its recurring characters, forbids the rescue of its imperilled victims (all the way to a hilariously contrived shotgun blast) and embraces humanity’s infuriating penchant for self-harm.  Having seen bits and pieces of the next two films in the series a while ago, I found myself intrigued by the appearance of various plot hooks (and throwaway characters) used by latter installments in the series, and a bit captivated by the decaying atmosphere of the film and its dynamic direction.  I’m not as amused by the gore, the meanness or the nihilism of the series’ attitude, but then again I’m not really part of the horror audience courted by the series.  And while I’m curious about the three other installments in the series that I haven’t yet seen, I have a feeling that waiting a while between films is the best approach.

  • Hard Candy (2005)

    Hard Candy (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, June 2015)  It’s an unconventional compliment to say that a film is intensely uncomfortable to watch, but then again Hard Candy is the kind of unconventional film that covets this reaction.  A thriller almost taking place in a single location between two characters, Hard Candy pairs off a creepy photographer who may or may not have something to do with the death of a young girl, and a teenage vigilante with psychological terror on her mind.  Castration is involved, so male viewers will spend much of the film with their legs crossed.  A curious (and frustrating) lack of wide shots reinforces the hermetic claustrophobia of the film, which often feels like an intense ping-pong match between skilled players.  Patrick Wilson makes a mark as the creepy photographer (fortunately, he has since had enough roles to avoid typecasting), but it’s Ellen Paige who earns almost all of the attention (despite a few too-showy moments) as a driven teenage avenger.  Hard Candy is very effective and successful at meeting its goals, but viewers may be forgiven for thinking that the film is a bit too long, and finding out that there’s not really any character to feel sympathy for.  Combined with the unsettling cinematography, Hard Candy thus remains a bit distant –which may not be a bad thing given the intensity of its thrills. 

  • Tusk (2014)

    Tusk (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2015) The good thing about today’s movie universe is that it has never been easier for just about any determined filmmaker to grab decent-quality filmmaking equipment and shoot their own movies.  This also works for experienced filmmakers, who can indulge their creative urges with smaller projects for specific audiences.  Sadly, this is also making it harder to stop projects that maybe shouldn’t have been completed.  So it is that Kevin Smith can riff off a ridiculous premise in a podcast and, months later, complete a project based on that rant, about a hapless podcaster being tortured into becoming a walrus for a madman’s own purposes.  The wonders of modern filmmaking!  Of course, the problem for end-result Tusk is that even though it tries hard to be a comedy/horror hybrid, it’s neither funny nor scary.  Just gross and pitiful, with a big side-order of boring.  Justin Long is neither good nor bad as the protagonist: while Long-the-actor is naturally likable, his character is obnoxious enough to shut down any nascent sympathy for his fate.  Tusk is self-aware enough to have joke casting (such as having Johnny Depp in a supporting role without crediting him, or featuring Depp’s and Smith’s daughters in small roles), but as with most of the film’s characteristics, the final result is slight enough as to make everything seem pointless.  If Tusk had been a better film, I would have a few nice things to say about the dialogue, the fractured chronology, some directorial choices or Michael Parks’ performance.  But it’s pointless, grotesque and interminable even at 90 minutes.  Even the Canadian content left me less than enthusiastic (the badly-translated French doesn’t help).  I’m not opposed to dumb midnight-movies, but Tusk is not a good example of the form.  And if Kevin Smith’s career is headed in the direction of increasingly-hermetic fan-service goofs, then I’m happy to let him go there and never look again; after all there are plenty of other filmmakers doing far more interesting things with the means at their disposal.