Reviews

  • Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

    Johnny Mnemonic (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On Cable TV, November 2017) I first saw Johnny Mnemonic in theatres, on opening week, fully aware of what it meant for the cyberpunk subgenre to have none other than William Gibson scripting a big Hollywood movie. The mid-nineties were a heck of a time for a nerd like me diving deep in the Science Fiction pool, studying computer science and finally meeting like-minded persons. Johnny Mnemonic was a bit silly back then, but it felt like the future. Twenty-two years later … it has aged considerably, to the point that its silliness has been transformed in a patina of endearing retro-futurism. The unquestioned assumptions of cyberpunk are now vastly more entertaining as a fever dream of a future that will never be, than the harbinger of something to come. The movie’s special effects are exceptionally dated, the sets look cheap, the all-dark cinematography is annoying, the story is dull but the pile-up of clichés is now more spectacular than annoying. Then there’s Keanu Reeves, far too wooden to be effective—while I still like his “I want room service!” speech that more reluctant heroes should have, there’s something cruelly accurate in the 1996 jape that the film was unbelievable because it asked viewers to think that Reeves’s brain could hold too much information. Still, despite its faults, the film has now become almost an artistic statement in itself. Mid-nineties hair-down Dina Meyer is terrific (despite playing a watered-down version of Molly Millions), Toronto’s Union Station lobby and Montreal’s Jacques Cartier bridge both show up as settings, and there are short roles for no less than luminaries Henry Rollins and Ice-T. I’d be curious to know what Gibson thinks of it as a retro-futurist piece, especially given that one of his first stories (“The Gernsback Continuum”) tackled that very topic at a different time. But then again, there’s my personal connection to the film and how it touched upon what I was thinking about in the nineties, how I was anticipating the future and who I hung with (down to one of the minor characters looking a lot like a friend of mine.) No matter why, I enjoyed watching Johnny Mnemonic again … even though I still wouldn’t call it a good film.

  • Cry-Baby (1990)

    Cry-Baby (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2017) Iconoclast writer/director John Waters takes on the 1950s teenage musical comedy with Cry-Baby, and the result is just as proudly weird as anything else from his filmography. The satirical intent is obvious, but so is the affectionate attempt at recreating a lineage that goes from Rebel Without a Cause to Grease, perhaps beginning with Romeo and Juliette. High on camp, Cry-Baby endures today partially because it’s a send-up that doesn’t betray its inspirations, and because it features Johnny Depp in intentional teenage-idol mode. It’s not always interesting: the opening half does push far too much in the freak-and-geeks-are-the-true-cool-people direction, and there’s strong feeling of déjà vu throughout it all. The affection for the grotesque can be off-putting even to the most iconoclast audiences—Kim McGuire’s bravura performance as “Hatchet-face” is the kind of thing liable to make everyone uncomfortable even as the discomfort is the joke. (On a related note: Do read up on Kim McGuire for an amazing life.) Still, the film does pick up a bit of steam toward the end, with a spirited “Please, Mr. Jailer” number leading to a good court scene and a classic teen-movie climax. It’s definitely not for everyone, but it’s not a bad time at all. Cry-Baby’s French dubbed version combines the best of both worlds by thankfully not translating the songs, and adding a delightful layer of French slang over fictional Fifties teen-speak—I recommend the result to everyone who understands even a bit of French.

  • Black Mirror, Season 3 (2016)

    Black Mirror, Season 3 (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, November 2017) If this third season of Black Mirror has a subtitle, it would be something along the lines of “bigger budget, growing up, branching out.”  After two seasons of almost unrelenting bleakness, Black Mirror uses this third season not just to keep doing what it’s done so far (i.e.: bleak near-future scenarios with horrifying twists) with better production values, but also branches out in dark comedy (“Nosedive,” scathing in its extrapolation of social media culture) and even a honest-to-goodness uplifting romance (“San Junipero”). Once again, the premises may be familiar to seasoned SF fans, but their execution is usually competent, and the final twists usually go far beyond expectations. Once again, the anthology format works well—there are a few Easter eggs that reference other episodes, but nothing to link them in cumbersome ways. The bigger budgets of this third season mean bigger talent names (including Joe Wright and Dan Trachtenberg as directors, plus actors such as Dallas Bryce Howard, Michael Kelly and Gugu Mbatha-Raw), longer running times (“Hated in the Nation,” at 89 minutes, is easily feature-film length) and more ambitious production values. Not all of the episodes work (“Playtest” and “Men Against Fire” are fairly standard, although their closing moments are very effective), but the series does reach a few high notes with “Nosedive” and the exceptional “San Junipero.”  Once again, the strength of the series is in its pure science-fictional approach in exploring the human failings exposed by high technology. Some episodes are relatively mundane (“Shut up and Dance” is barely five minutes in the future), while others really dig into a futuristic but plausible premise. Considering that these six episodes are merely the first half of what Netflix commissioned from series creator Charlie Booker, let’s keep our hope up that the fourth season will be just as good. One recommendation: switch the episode order so that you end up with “Nosedive” and “San Junipero” as a way to keep your spirits up and gain a better appreciation of what Brooker is trying to do now that he’s established Black Mirror’s reputation as nightmarish SF.

  • Before Sunrise (1995)

    Before Sunrise (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, November 2017) I came to Before Sunrise unusually, having first watched the middle (Before Sunset), then the end (Before Midnight) only to finish at the beginning of the Jesse and Celeste trilogy-so-far. This time, however, I knew what to expect: A time-compressed romance featuring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy at their most charming selves, having an extended conversation spanning relationships, philosophy and clever ideas. It worked well in the two latter movies and it works just as well here. This being said, I’m not sure I like Before Sunrise better than the others—it lacks the almost-real-time pacing of Before Sunset (with its masterful long shots) or the verbal pyrotechnics of Before Midnight’s most harrowing sequence. It also feels as if there are far more intrusions by third-party characters than in the other movies that focus intensely on the lead couple. But, as a first entry in the trilogy, it’s still special. Knowing how the story has unfolded afterwards, there is a profoundly ironic quality to Before Sunrise’s first scenes and dialogues, in which an old married couple argues in front of our protagonists and one of their first conversations is about jumping ahead “ten, twenty years” and being stuck in a marriage that “doesn’t have that same energy that it used to have.”  But Jesse and Celeste do have the same energy here than in later movies, and it’s a delight to just sit back and hear them exchange ideas and experiences just for the sake of it. Vienna is a good backdrop for that kind of not-so-aimless wandering (one of the final sequences of the movie shows us Vienna without Jesse and Celeste, to surprisingly poignant effect) and the entire film is quietly triumphant. I passed on Before Sunrise for more than twenty years, but it’s far better than it sounds on paper. But then again, I’m far more interested in writer/director Richard Linklater’s movies than I was before as well.

  • Dead Poets Society (1989)

    Dead Poets Society (1989)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On DVD, November 2017) I must have seen Dead Poets Society on TV back in the nineties, and revisiting it today makes for a complex mixture of remembrance, rediscovery and mild mourning that Robin Williams is gone. There is a small but definite dramatic subgenre out there that could be called “inspirational teacher” movies (and once you lump mentors, coaches and grumpy old guys teaching young men a lesson in there, it becomes a rather large subgenre) and Dead Poets Society seems to be its flagship title. A throwback at the boarding academies of the late fifties, this is a film that glorifies English classes to an admirable degree. Poetry has seldom been so cool (well, maybe in 8 Mile) and the link between English literature and taking ownership of one’s life is unusual enough to be interesting. It helps that, having been conceived as a period piece from the start, Dead Poets Society hasn’t aged much in nearly thirty years. The only thing that makes the movie wistful is Robin Williams—at times, it seems as if half of the film’s appeal is “wouldn’t it have been cool to have Robin Williams as your teacher?” and the circumstances of Williams’ death since then do make the film even more poignant. (Alas, I suspect that it also gives his character a free pass on a few disputable choices … as the film says, “free-thinking at seventeen”?)  The atmosphere of the boarding school comes with a heavy dose of nostalgia that isn’t as unpleasant as you’d think. It all amounts to a decent film, even a powerful one for those who find that it has resonance over their own experiences. 

  • Heat (1995)

    Heat (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On DVD, November 2017) I distinctly recall seeing Heat on video in the late nineties, but couldn’t find any review of it anywhere in my archives. Oh well—it’s a good excuse to revisit one of the best crime movies of its decade. As it turns out, I had forgotten a lot about the film and had the pleasure of rediscovering it again. Sure, I remembered the dinner conversation between de Niro and Pacino. Of course, I remembered the downtown LA shootout. But it turns out I didn’t remember half of it, and nearly nothing of the rest of the movie. Long but impressively dense, Heat compares well to the best of Hong Kong crime cinema in showing policemen and criminals as two sides of a similar coin, and finding humanity in stock characters. It’s a sprawling story with roughly a dozen subplots, and I have a feeling that it would best be presented today as a Netflix miniseries rather than a movie. Still, what we see on-screen in slightly less than three hours is mesmerizing enough: A convincing take on mid-nineties Los Angeles, featuring a variety of characters with rich lives. The script has moments of street poetry, and the action sequences hit hard. It surely helps that the casting of the film is amazing. Beyond having Robert de Niro and Al Pacino as co-leads, the cast is rich down to small roles played by then-obscure Danny Trejo and Natalie Portman. Take a look at the cast list and see Val Kilmer, Jon Voigt, Tom Sizemore, Amy Brenneman, Ashley Judd, Wes Studi, Dennis Haysbert, William Fichner, Tom Noonan, Hank Azaria, Henry Rollins, Jeremy Piven … it just doesn’t stop. Still, Pacino and de Niro get most of the glory here, with roles seemingly tailor-made for them—their dinner face-off is crackling good, and still exceeds the entirety of their movie-long reunion in Righteous Kill. Pacino is particularly in his element here, and his verbal excesses match the script. (Fans of TMZ will recognize that the “GREAT ASS!!!” meme/clip comes from here.)  Otherwise, it’s Michael Mann’s show. While I’ve found many of his more recent movies to be pretentious, overlong and underwhelming, Heat is where nearly everything he’s got is used at its best advantage. Los Angeles looks brilliant, the direction is weighty in a way that matches the film and the actors all do their utmost best. I can quibble about a few lengths (especially late in the film, with a drawn-out final face-off), but I find that my first-viewing appreciation of the film has been replaced by a much more positive assessment after this re-watch.

  • A Cure for Wellness (2016)

    A Cure for Wellness (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2017) There are at least two movies in A Cure for Wellness: The first is terrific, and it shows an impressive blending of modern concerns and gothic horror, as a young corporate executive goes to a secluded health retreat in Switzerland where old secrets accumulate in a deliciously over-the-top fashion. It’s the set-up half of the film and it gets increasingly engaging, what with writer/director Gore Verbinski delivering top-notch atmosphere. It’s a frequently beautiful film to gawk at, and there is a precision to the images that confirms his intent to crank up the tension. Seasoned viewers are liable to love it all, especially as known horror signifiers are used to good extent. Sadly, jaded viewers also suspect what comes next: a far less interesting second half in which some mysteries are explained, many are ignored (or dismissed as good-old hallucinations) and the film keeps going well past the two-hour mark. While A Cure for Wellness is narratively conventional, the third act is stuck trying to make sense of the entire film, and doesn’t quite rise up to the challenge. The coda is particularly disappointing, leaving far too many things up in the air. Other inconsistencies annoy. Dane DeHaan is perfectly suited for the unlikable anti-hero of the first half of the film, but he can’t quite make himself or his character sympathetic enough in the second half. Jason Isaacs is fine as the antagonist, but Mia Goth is generally dull as the heroine. Bojan Bazelli’s cinematography remains exceptional throughout, but Justin Haythe’s screenplay is simply a framework. It’s a shame that the film isn’t edited more tightly—there are not reasons why it should be as long as it is, especially given the straightforward script. Still, there’s a lot to like in the film’s best moments, whether it’s an announced nightmarish visit to the dentist, a claustrophobic visit in a water tank, or various bits of body horror and hallucinations. I was reminded of Crimson Peak in that this is a simple gothic horror story told lavishly—except that Guillermo del Toro knows how to layer depths and ensure that the details are consistent, neither of which are particularly solid in this case. A Cure for Wellness does get a marginal recommendation, but mostly for its first half and mostly for horror fans—it doesn’t quite manage to go farther than that for other audiences.

  • Äkta människor, Season 1 [Real Humans] (2012)

    Äkta människor, Season 1 [Real Humans] (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On DVD, November 2017) I’m five years late in watching Swedish TV series Real Humans, and yet taking a look at it today, after 2014’s rush of AI-themed movies and 2016’s similarly themed Westworld, reveals a ten-hour story that still works as a complement to what’s been done since then. Typically Swedish down to the IKEA furniture in the protagonists’ living room, Real Humans takes a refreshingly domestic approach to the perennial issues facing the introduction of humanoids in society. There’s a real sympathy for the robots here, especially as human characters fail to come to grip to their own imperfections in comparison to always-optimal machines. Interestingly enough, this season does spend a lot of time in its first half in making us care for its androids, whereas the second half of the season offers a far more nuanced portrait of everyone involved. Some characters have the luxury of changing their minds a few times, becoming more complex along the way. The domestic approach (in which a substantial portion of important conversations take place around the proverbial dining room table) helps the show remain grounded in its more fanciful second half. Still, this being a Swedish show, don’t mistake “domestic” with “boring”: the series has its share of violent deaths (especially in the last-episode bloodbath), copious nudity and mature themes featuring robosexual characters. While none of the ideas developed here are startlingly original for seasoned SF fans, they are executed well enough, and following characters for ten hours does allow for an impressive amount of character development that may be missing from shorter movies. While there is quite a bit of narrative sleight-of-hand required to keep so many things happening to such a small number of characters, Real Humans does work well, and justifies its running time thanks to deeper engagement with its characters and ongoing ideas. Despite a second series and a two-season English remake, there’s a fair chance that the series will have flown under the radar of most north-American SF fans—get the DVD box sets and rectify this whenever possible!

  • Black Mirror, Season 2 (2013)

    Black Mirror, Season 2 (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, November 2017) Well, if you’re feeling too optimistic about your life, the world or what humans are capable of doing to each other with a little bit of technological help, have fun with this second season of Black Mirror (including the unusually bleak “White Christmas” special). If the first season left you with nightmares, this one won’t be any easier to stomach, with “White Bear” and “White Christmas,” in particular, being particularly able to give you fits of guilt at being part of the human species. “White Bear” talks about our capacity for righteous indignation and how rage can become an entertainment experience (hilariously enough, the credit sequence plays like a hideous making-of), while “White Christmas” simply points out how eager we are to enslave even ourselves. But I summarize too much: part of the pleasure of Black Mirror’s twisted effectiveness is finding out that what we think we see on-screen isn’t what’s really happening. Better production values and bigger names (such as Jon Hamm and Oona Chaplin in “White Christmas”) help make the show even better. Still, there’s more to Black Mirror than simple bleakness. Episodes such as “Be Right Back” show that series creator Charlie Brooker is also able to touch upon more complex emotions than simple revulsion. But then, of course, you have “The Waldo Moment” which, in its critique of cheap populism, rather depressingly anticipates that a buffoon could in fact be elected in a position of power. After the way the first season’s “The National Anthem” proved stomach-churningly prescient, maybe someone should keep tabs on what Charlie Brooker has in store for Black Mirror’s third season…

  • Kate & Leopold (2001)

    Kate & Leopold (2001)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2017) I’m usually a good audience for romantic comedies and science-fiction movies, but Kate & Leopold falls flat in ways that have to do with an incompetent blending of genres. Even as a time-travel romance (a surprisingly robust category), it falls short. It really doesn’t help that Hugh Jackman signed up to play an essentially perfect character, plucked from history to serve as a romantic partner for an incredibly bland heroine played by Meg Ryan back when Meg Ryan was the it-girl for any romantic comedy. While I can understand Jackman’s enthusiasm for a role in which he is flawless, it doesn’t make for good cinema. Kate & Leopold’s romantic aspect seems rote and featureless, while the time-travel elements scarcely make sense. Not only does it have to do with falling through temporal anomalies by jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge (!), there is something deeply dumb about elevators not running properly because their inventor has travelled to the present. By the time hero and heroine travel back in time for good, we can barely muster up enough energy to formulate a perfunctory “I give them six months … or really I give her a year before she’s dead.”  To be fair, little of the film’s flaws have to do with its lead actors: Jackman is charming no matter the situation, while Liev Schreiber gets an oddball role as a nerd matchmaker far removed from the tough-guy persona he has since developed. (Amusingly enough, look closely and you’ll see Kristen Schaal, Viola Davis and Natasha Lyonne in very small roles.) While it’s worth remembering that romantic comedies aren’t really watched for plotting or even logical consistency, Kate & Leopold does very little in more crucial matters of characters, dialogue, comedy or struggles to outweigh its serious narrative issues. As a result, it feels both flat and insubstantial—with very little to make it worthwhile except for Jackman coasting with a flawless character performance.

  • The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

    The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On Cable TV, November 2017) I thought I remembered The Manchurian Candidate from seeing it (on TV, in French) more than two decades ago, but it turns out that I had forgotten quite a bit in the meantime. Which is a good thing, given that I got to re-experience it all over again. A product of the paranoid early sixties (it was famously released shortly before the Cuba Crisis), The Manchurian Candidate delves into far-reaching Russian plots to destabilize the United States through intervention in its politics—but stop me if this is too familiar circa 2017. What I really did not remember from my first viewing is how early we know of the Russian brainwashing, and the delightfully crazy way in which this is explained, through a dream sequence that switches between real and imagined environments. After that, it’s up to Frank Sinatra as the protagonist to get Laurence Harvey (as the tragic anti-hero) to reject his condition. There are complications. While The Manchurian Candidate remains a clear product of its time, director John Frankenheimer keeps things moving, and the fascinating glimpse at early-sixties contemporary reality is now fascinating and proof that the film has aged well. It even takes potshots at McCarthyism. Sinatra is quite good in a relatively straightforward role, while Angela Lansbury is surprisingly evil as a scheming mother. Better yet, the film itself is a crackling good thriller with interweaving subplots and good character performances. While much of The Manchurian Candidate will feel stiff by today’s standard (and occasionally silly or misleading, such as Sinatra’s character love interest), it remains compelling today and well worth another look.

  • Haute Tension [High Tension aka Switchblade Romance] (2003)

    Haute Tension [High Tension aka Switchblade Romance] (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, November 2017) Curiosity may or may not kill the cat, but it certainly leads movie reviewers to questionable choices, such as watching Haute Tension despite not liking extreme horror and knowing all about the film’s certifiably insane Big Twist. A core movie in the “New French Extremity” curriculum of extremely violent and intentionally transgressive horror movies, Haute Tension is also an early calling card for writer/director Alexandre Aja, who has since gone on to a Hollywood career. Since I don’t really like gory horror, I put Haute Tension on as background noise while I was doing something else and dared the movie to catch my attention. It only did so in small moments: there is a lot of screaming and crying in the film as it seems to show a woman trying to rescue her friend from a psycho killer. Québec-based French-language horror movie channel “FrissonTV” doesn’t provide closed captioning yet, but that doesn’t matter much given that most of the film’s soundtrack is composed of crying, screaming or disquieting musical cues in-between bouncy pop songs used ironically. Perhaps the most surprising thing about Haute Tension is that it does provide a lot of foreshadowing for the Big Twist (starting with one of the film’s first lines, “I dreamt I was chasing myself”) but also more grist for calling it completely bonkers. Even shrugging off the film as having an unreliable narrator really doesn’t explain much of the film’s first half (including an entire truck). Is it important, though? The point of Haute Tension isn’t the plot or the heroine-as-psycho-killer twist: it’s about the various violent deaths graphically portrayed, the relentless tension of the film and the writer/director impressing horror-loving audiences with whatever horror-loving audiences love to see. I’m not part of that audience, so even noting that the film’s big twist makes partial sense and pointing out that the tension is often effective doesn’t really mean that I liked the result. But I was curious about Haute Tension and now I’m not curious any more, which means that I can scratch the film from my to-see list and move on to something else.

  • The Strangers (2008)

    The Strangers (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Crackle Streaming, October 2017) Ho, boy. Another home-invasion horror movie. Another group of psychopaths. Another couple of innocent victims. Another unnecessary attempt at “evil can strike at any time!” messaging, submerged under the cheap thrills of psychopaths running amok. No, there really isn’t anything to The Strangers worth noticing when there’s an entire sub-genre of home invasion horror movies out there. I don’t like the genre, and I don’t like The Strangers, even more so given my girl-next-door liking for Liv Tyler. It’s a really dull movie, and the best thing that can happen for anyone who wants to see it is to goof up on similar titles and see 2008’s The Visitor instead.

  • The Wizard of Lies (2017)

    The Wizard of Lies (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2017) Of all the things I didn’t really want to see, a sensitive, almost exculpatory look at celebrity fraudster Bernie Madoff is way up there. (If there was any justice in the world, Madoff should have fuelled a few more years of Occupy Wall Street.)  It does take a while for The Wizard of Lies to overcome this prejudice, especially at it seems to spend its first hour explaining how, aw shucks, Madoff kind of, you know, stumbled into massive pyramid schemes as a business model. But, slowly, the movie does get better. It helps that Madoff is played by Robert de Niro (finally acting, for a change) and that capable actors such as Michelle Pfeiffer and Hank Azaria (under the watchful eye of director Barry Levinson) are there to keep up their halves of dialogues. The script struggles under the weight of the accepted biopic standards, allowing itself a few fanciful moments to break the monotony. But The Wizard of Lies hits its strides during its last act, as the weight of Madoff’s criminal acts finally catch up with him well after incarceration. His name now synonymous with fraud, his wife leaves him to rot in jail and his son commits suicide. At more than two hours, this made-for HBO film is a modest success but it may not be as good as it could have been. Madoff’s warm portrayal can be infuriating, but the film does lack a bit of extra energy, especially at first, to make it compulsively watchable. Still, it’s a fairly worthwhile entry in HBO Films’ long list of biopics … and it deserved its Emmy nominations.

  • Dracula 2000 (2000)

    Dracula 2000 (2000)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2017) I really didn’t expect much from Dracula 2000: Vampire movies are a hit-and-miss proposition even at the best of times, and this one had slipped under my radar back in 2000 even as I was seeing nearly everything else in theatres. More than a decade and a half later, the only thing that looks noteworthy about the movie is a cast that includes Johnny Lee Miller, pre-300 Gerard Butler and Christopher Plummer. The plot is a half-hearted contemporary update to Bram Stoker’s Dracula featuring professional thieves and an unexplainable New Orleans setting. Even looking at bits and pieces of the film are grounds for disappointment, as the film features very dated directing and editing. Still, I had more fun than I expected from this low-profile horror movie: It’s not Blade II, but it’s more enjoyable than Blade III. The contemporary update is almost interesting, the Dracula-as-Judas thing may not be fresh but it’s clever and I think that Dracula 2000 was one of the first movies to popularize it. Justine Waddell (looking a lot like Ashley Judd) isn’t particularly remarkable as the heroine, but Colleen Ann Fitzpatrick, Jennifer Esposito and Jeri Ryan as Dracula’s three brides are a very good choice. Jonny Lee Miller plays close to his Elementary persona (minus the whole genius thing), while Gerard Butler is almost unrecognizable as Dracula. There is, in other words, just enough in Dracula 2000 to surprise, even though the execution of those things may not be good enough to fully satisfy. Nonetheless, the film endures just a bit better than many B-grade movies of the time, and seventeen years later that’s not a bad claim at all.