Reviews

  • Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card

    Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2009 revised reprint of 1986 original, 416 pages, $C9.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0812550757

    Having re-read Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game shortly after seeing its film adaptation, I was struck by an irresistible impulse to re-read the sequel as well: I would seldom have the original fresher in mind, and it would allow me to revisit Speaker for the Dead much as I revisited Ender’s Game, twenty years after first reading it.

    Looking at my 1994 notes about both novels, it’s clear that nineteen-year-old-me liked Ender’s Game a great deal better than Speaker for the Dead. Despite being directly linked, they are very different novels. In Ender’s Game, protagonist Andrew Wiggin is a teenager struggling to make it through a series of desperate battles. In Speaker for the Dead, he’s a mid-thirties man trying to atone for his early crimes by living a life of peace and civility. The age-gap between this older Wiggin and me now is almost the same as the one between Ender’s Game Wiggin and me twenty years ago. As a result, I’m not really surprised to find out that I liked Speaker for the Dead a lot more now than I did then.

    It’s also easier, in some ways, to figure out why Speaker for the Dead was such a hit back in the mid-eighties: It features a blend of far-future extrapolation, clean prose, exceptional characters, anthropologic mystery, a world-weary hero, galactic portents, as well as an exploration of colonialism, scientific ethics and the consequences of abuse. I’m not going to pretend that the mid-eighties were a particularly innocent and naïve era, but I will suggest that a number of those themes had not yet been explored then in the way Card dares tackle them, with heartfelt earnestness or blatant emotional manipulation. Looking at the field back then (which was reeling from the cyberpunk wave and perhaps looking for a bit more humanity in its flagship titles), it’s easier to understand why Speaker for the Dead would go on to sweep all awards and earn a place as one of the decade’s defining SF novels… even if it hasn’t aged particularly well.

    But before digging into the novel’s problems, let’s spend at least a paragraph praising what works. Because there’s a lot of stuff that’s actually quite good here: Card may have earned a disgraceful reputation as a right-wing homophobe since his eighties heydays, but he’s a skilled writer, and at its best Speaker for the Dead can indulge into easily-digestible exposition (such as when a AI’s inner workings are explained), emotionally resonant sequences (such as when our protagonist does speak for the dead), intricate science-fictional mysteries (such as the riddle behind the alien lifecycle that so baffles the characters) and the technical challenge of spinning a tale with multiple family members and twice as many other characters. Speaker of the Dead takes place in a future with hundreds of planets separated by slower-than-light travel but united by instant communications, and it doesn’t take much more than a few consequent extrapolations to make core-SF fans giddy. The prose is easily digestible, Ender is an exceptional character (and as much as teenager-me wanted to be Ender’s Game tactically brilliant Ender, thirty-something-me would like to have Speaker for the Dead Ender‘s gift for empathy and effortless soothing.) and you can recognize how the novel hits many of SF’s power chords.

    But one thing that thirtysomething-me does quite a bit better than teenage-me is question core assumptions of a novel. I don’t suspend my incredulity so easily, and I’m willing to suggest that contemporary Science Fiction is quite a bit better at building a more credible model of reality compared to eighties-era SF. Where I’m going with these caveats is how flawed Speaker for the Dead can feel once you apply more complex models of reality. So it does tackle colonialism –but in ways that seem incredibly manufactured, always from the oh-so-repentant perspective of the white colonial rather than the colonized (a crucial difference now far more common.) (And I’m not even going to talk about the ridiculous passage in which all aliens really do is aspire to starflight, and will flip over themselves if they don’t.) It does tackle victimization by domestic violence, but feels compelled to blame the victim a little bit for not caring enough about the aggressor. It does feature scientists at work… except that a quick look at what they do suggests that they have no understanding whatsoever of the way science truly works. (Or, perhaps more appropriately, not as much that they themselves aren’t very good scientists, but that the entire scientific establishment of the book’s universe is considerably dumber than one of today’s least-competent review boards.) And for all of the wizzy-bang flavor of its universe separated by distance and time, this society three thousand years in the future feels almost too comfortably contemporary –down to a number of planets settled by people speaking today’s languages apparently unchanged. And the inconsistencies… I’m somehow led to believe that Ender has never turned off his link with his AI super-friend Jane even as it’s suggested early during the novel that she’s got to sit around and wait decades every time he takes an STL star-ship trip. The instant he does turn off the link in real-time –blammo, instant unfriending. And how about the ableism late in the novel…? Or, heck, the very strange aside about Calvinism?

    Oh, I’m not going to thoroughly tackle the novel’s flaws in order (If you want to, I would rather suggest Wil Wildman’s incisive and hilarious series of posts.) But once you start poking and prodding at Speaker for the Dead‘s assumptions, a lot falls apart. And if something hasn’t really aged well in thirty years, it may be primarily Speaker for the Dead‘s almost smarmy self-assurance that it knows best. Since then, we’ve seen far better examples, writing from better-informed perspectives and achieving far more nuanced goals.

    (It’s also worth mentioning as a flaw that, for all of the historical acclaim that Speaker for the Dead got, it leads straight to third volume Xenocide, which earned far fewer friends either then or since. No, I won’t be pursuing my re-reading odyssey any further.)

    So it is that Speaker for the Dead nowadays feels far less formidable than it did upon publication. Distance isn’t everything: I believe that the novel contains a number of unforgiveable shortcuts that make it now far less palatable to better-informed, more world-aware audiences. It’s still worth a read for those who are interested in the historical evolution of SF, but I’m not sure that the novel is worth just an entertainment read today –too many flaws, too many vexing presumptions, too many annoyances to fix. But that’s what revisiting books is for –sometimes they improve, and sometimes they don’t.

  • A Good Day to Die Hard [Die Hard 5] (2013)

    A Good Day to Die Hard [Die Hard 5] (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2014) The Die Hard series has had its high and lows, but if everyone agrees that the first one was the best, then everyone will recognize that this fifth one is the worst. A joyless action film in which a bland action hero traipses through Russia while insulting the Russians and reminding everyone that he’s supposed to be on holidays, Die Hard 5 becomes the generic end-point of any distinctive series: a film that could have featured any other actors with any other character names. To be fair, Die Hard 5‘s problems are much bigger than simply ignoring the character of John McClane: Much of the blame should go to a dumb script, with the rest generously gift-wrapped by director John Moore’ incoherent action sequences. There are few words to describe how stupid a screenplay this is, marred with coincidences, generic situations, implausible choices and tortured plans far too complicated to be viable. Die Hard 5 seems to be stuck with only one helicopter as an action device, and seems to milk its presence well past the point of diminishing return. The action sequences can’t be bothered to spatially orient viewers, instead relying on copious shaking, dishwater-gray cinematography and blatant disregard for plausibility. The car chase around Moscow, which should have been a standout sequence in any other movie, is here shot in such an incomprehensible fashion that it becomes irritating less than midway through. While Die Hard 5 would have us believe into some good-old father/son rivalry, the result on-screen is more annoying than rewarding, and the CIA plot thread is never believable enough. What a waste, what a sad footnote to a good film franchise and what a disappointment for everyone involved. Bruce Willis, surely you knew better?

  • Death Race: Inferno (2013)

    Death Race: Inferno (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2014) The narrative pedigree of this film is prodigiously confusing (it’s the sequel to a prequel to a remake), but the results are surprisingly entertaining, especially considering the production values of this direct-to-video effort. Helmed by the cost-effective and visually audacious Roel Reiné, Death Race 3: Inferno squeezes every dollar out of its limited budget for maximum impact. This is a B-grade action film by every measure, so it’s almost surprising to see the cleverness of the script (which manages to find something interesting to say in-between the space left by a prequel and a sequel), the unexpected charm of the actors, the impressive production values and the engaging pacing of the whole. Death Race 3 makes maximum use of its South African shooting location by featuring fantastic local visuals, and relying on captivating local talent for pivotal roles (most notably Hlubi Mboya as game-master “Satana” or Roxane Hayward as a mousy assistant). There are plenty of contrivances and outrageous use of exploitation devices –the nadir being the sadistic “navigator wars” segment. But the backbone of those films, the stunts and visuals, are as accomplished as one could expect from this kind of production, and Death Race 3: Inferno becomes decent entertainment no matter its budget class. You’ll know from the Death Race title whether you’re likely to enjoy it or not.

  • 12 Rounds 2: Reloaded (2013)

    12 Rounds 2: Reloaded (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2014) Movie thrillers are built on contrivances almost as a matter of fact. But then there are thrillers like the 12 Rounds series, explicitly depending upon a tower of assumptions that only make sense at the movies. Can you believe in the existence of an ultra-competent vengeful psychopath who takes a year to set up an intricate series of challenges for our capable hero? Suuure. Much like the New Orleans-set 12 Rounds, this Direct-to-Video sequel (filmed in Vancouver but set in AnyBigCity, USA) is a pure genre exercise in implausible plotting, featuring a wrestler set up for an acting career and no real links with the first movie save for the similar premise. Once again, a protagonist is manipulated like a puppet through various games, all leading up to a twisted revenge scenario against imagined wrongs. There isn’t much more to the film, and director Roel Reiné, lately surprisingly good on limited budgets, here seems less interesting than usual in presenting a far more ordinary film than his previous few. Ex-wrestler Randy Orton isn’t too bad as the square-jawed hero –nearly everyone else in the cast quickly gets forgotten in average performances. The contrivances get annoying, but to its credit this sequel does something better than the original, and that’s to give the hero a sidekick so that he can interact with something more than a cell phone and booby-traps. Nevertheless, 12 Rounds 2 doesn’t take it to the next level. It remains a film that’s not too bad by the low standards of most DTV releases, but still quickly fades in memory once the end credit roll.

  • Red State (2011)

    Red State (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2014) With every new Kevin Smith movie, it becomes harder and harder to remember why I liked his first few movies. It may have been the sheer novelty of the sharp irreverent dialogue (at a time where this wasn’t as commonplace) coupled with the conspicuously lousy directing. But Red State is so far from the example set by his earlier better movies that Smith’s name as a director is now more cause for a double-take than anything else. A dull and unpleasant departure in C-grade thriller-land, Red State doesn’t quite know what to do with itself, and becomes less and less pleasant the longer it goes on. What looks at first like a cautionary tale about the dangers of Internet hook-ups quickly turns into an interminable sermon about right-wing conservatism, followed by yet another siege film in which the government agents play the trigger-happy just-as-bad guys. This Westboro-meets-Waco setup is pointless enough, but what makes it even less interesting is the sadism through which the characters are mowed down, the violent one-note caricature of the cult and the pointless resolution cloaked in anti-government clichés. Some actors manage to do good work: Michael Angarano could have been the protagonist of the film had it been better-conceived, John Goodman almost manages to acquit himself honorably and for all of the interminable duration of his monologues, Michael Parks is curiously compelling at the bloodthirsty cult leader. Smith’s direction has gotten better over the years but not that much better, and Red State‘s naturalistic atmosphere feels uglier than anything else, not exceeding the standards set by most Direct-to-Video thrillers. You can see the gleeful iconoclasm behind some of the film’s initial intentions, but the execution is simply too dull to be effective, and the film spares no time turning its audience against itself. As unpleasant as it is, rumors about an alternate rapturous ending as originally scripted would have made the film even worse, so I suppose we have that to be thankful about. Still, there is no excuse for the lengthy sermon scene or the trigger-happy violence. Where has Smith’s gift for witty dialogue, sympathetic characters or comic set-pieces gone? He keeps threatening retirement, and after Red State it’s easy to look forward to him keeping his promises.

  • Girl Walks Into a Bar (2011)

    Girl Walks Into a Bar (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2014) One of the benefits of being an omnivorous cinephile is that you never know when an oddball piece of cinematic knowledge is going to come in handy. In this case, Girl Walks Into a Bar‘s quirks makes far more sense when considered against writer/director Sebastián Gutiérrez previous films such as Elektra Luxx: the lead role of Carla Gugino (Gutiérrez’s girlfriend), fragmented script, interlocking subplots, varying tonal shifts, generally clever dialogue and presence of several good actors. It’s all meant to be a series of related stories set in various Los Angeles bars during one busy night, but it’s just as well-considered as a vignette film, with segments that don’t necessarily need to co-exist harmoniously in a coherent whole. There are highlights: Emmanuelle Chriqui’s world-weary monologue about the life of a stripper, Zachary Quinto’s clueless dentist trying to get his wife assassinated; Rosario Dawson as an employee of a nudist ping-pong club and a captivating presence for Robert Forster. While the film was conceived to be freely distributed on Youtube (although just for Americans…), it’s now making its way to specialty cable channels and can be caught there as a pleasant diversion. While Girl Walks Into a Bar is not particularly memorable, it does have a good cast, better-than-average dialogue and its inherent quirkiness makes it more interesting that most of the average fare out there.

  • Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel (2009)

    Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2014) In theory, science-fiction doesn’t always require a big budget: you can set a pretty good science-fiction story in a mundane present-day location, just by evoking the impossible. Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel takes up the gauntlet of delivering a low-budget, high-concept SF comedy by trapping its characters in a localized time-loop centered on their neighborhood pub. Add a sympathetic lead character (played with modest charm by Chris O’Dowd), a fetching spatiotemporal agent (Anna Faris, in a role that asks for interesting scene transitions), impending apocalypse, self-aware genre commentary from a screenwriter who’s obviously up to his classic SF references and the film becomes a bit of a hidden gem. Not everything works: the opening takes a bit of time to rev up, some of the hidden temporal surprises can be seen coming well in advance and the means at the film’s disposal aren’t quite up to the task of portraying the latter-movie revelations. Still, for an obviously limited budget, Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel has a welcome charm to it, and does good things with what it has at its disposal. Don’t expect a classic, but do expect a decent time.

  • Jack the Giant Slayer (2013)

    Jack the Giant Slayer (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2014) The past ten years have seen a mini-boom of sort in fairy tales and fantasy books converted to the screen through the same screenwriting formula, all eventually leading to the climactic shock of two armies running into each other. Snow White, Alice in Wonderland, Narnia, Jack and the Beanstalk: nothing is safe from the Hollywood fantasy paradigm. In Jack the Giant Slayer, two fairytales become an action fantasy epic about kingdoms going at war, a peasant winning over a princess and assorted shenanigans to take over the throne. While the results can be interesting in bits and pieces (the depiction of a giant beanstalk has a can’t-be-missed patina of realism), it usually boils down to a familiar and ultimately boring template. While director Bryan Singer is a seasoned professional who knows what he’s doing, there simply isn’t much to the script. Nicholas Hoult does a bit better as the titular hero, although it’s easy to wonder what could have compelled Ewan McGregor and Stanley Tucci to take on such minor and thankless roles. It’s not an unpleasant film to watch… but the biggest problem with Jack the Giant Slayer is that it’s dull and almost instantly forgettable. Save for a highly pretentious final scene that somehow feels the need to link with the present, it’s a film that’s too middle-of-the-road to be noticeable. The perfect example of how quickly pop-culture can dispose of movies that have involved years of work by hundreds of talented craftsmen.

  • The Descendants (2011)

    The Descendants (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2014) I watch a curiously low number of straight-up dramas, usually out of an unfair suspicion that they are not as interesting as my usual genre movies. But then there are films such as The Descendants, absorbing from the get-go and witty enough to keep my attention until the end. Adapted from Kaui Hart Hemmings’s novel (a literary origin that can be felt in the complex back-stories for most characters) by veteran screenwriter/director Alexander Payne, The Descendants works partially because it never quite does the expected thing, and partly because it can count on an exceptional, world-weary performance by George Clooney. Expectations are quickly subverted, as the opening monologue discusses the disillusionment of day-to-day life in Hawaii and then moves on with a surprising lack of sentimentality in discussing the burden of a man dealing with the terminal coma of his wife. (It’s a measure of how unconventional The Descendants can be when the brain-dead wife gets verbally harangued on her deathbed by grieving family members no less than three times.) When the quasi-widower discovers the unfaithfulness of his nearly-ex-wife, it’s up to him and his daughters to deal with the situation. Blend in an extended subplot about land stewardship, and you’ve got the makings of an interesting script no matter the execution. But Payne’s touch suitably lets Clooney own the lead character, and display a wide range of emotions that more than reaffirm his abilities as an actor. Shailene Woodley has a career-launching role as a teenage girl who ends up far less rebellious than initially portrayed, while Robert Forster has a small but remarkable role as a punch-happy older man. (Judy Greer also makes a striking appearance as a cheated-upon wife who’s a great deal less forgiving than she initially appears.) Often unexpectedly funny, The Descendants offers a slice of life for characters thrown in a difficult situation, eventually reaching an accommodation with their new circumstances. By the time the film ends, we’re reasonably certain that they will be all right… which is for the best given how much we’ve learn to like those characters.

  • The Bag Man (2014)

    The Bag Man (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, April 2014) One of the strangest aspects of the shift from theaters of video on-demand for smaller movies is that from time to time, some films seem to punch well above their weight when it comes to actors. Here, for instance, we’ve got John Cusack as a remorseful hitman playing off Robert de Niro as a mob boss, with quick roles for Crispin Glover and Dominic Purcell (either of whom could and have carried smaller films on their own). And yet this is a restrained thriller, most of the action being concentrated in one night at an isolated motel. Even the casting may not work entirely at the film’s advantage: While Cusack is up to his usual good-guy role, he is getting a bit old for the young-guy-learns-better arc he usually gets. Meanwhile, de Niro seems once again to coast on a familiar performance (although one that may evoke more Dustin Hoffman than classic de Niro). Rebecca Da Costa seems lost in a role that requires too much of her at this stage in her career (the horrible costume/makeup that opens her performance does her no favours either) and seeing an eccentric performer such as Crispin Glover in such a small role seems like a bit of a waste. The rest of the film is just twisted enough to be interesting, but let’s not pretend that this anything more than a standard B-grade thriller voluntarily set upon a small scale. It’s reasonably enjoyable as such (call it perfect slow-evening fodder when you’ve seen everything else) but the too-big names on the marquee may suggest something more than it is.

  • Di Renjie: Tong tian di guo [Detective Dee: Mystery of the Phantom Flame] (2010)

    Di Renjie: Tong tian di guo [Detective Dee: Mystery of the Phantom Flame] (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2014) One of the best things about the globalization of mass entertainment is the opportunity to see Hollywood-style blockbuster epics coming from very different places. So that’s how we end up with Detective Dee: Mystery of the Phantom Flame, a reinterpretation of a brilliant historical Sherlock Holmes-like investigator with the trapping of a modern action/adventure tent-pole event. In this case, we find ourselves in seventh-century China, as a massive Budha statue is about to be unveiled to commemorate the coronation of an empress. When sudden combustion strikes important people, it’s up to disgraced detective Dee to track the clues leading all the way to an attempted coup. This being a made-in-China-for-Chinese-audiences affair, Mystery of the Phantom Flame has a welcome flavor for Western audiences, but the structure of the film will be familiar enough to transcend all barriers: Detective Dee, played by Any Lau, is pleasingly brilliant, his back-story makes for a complex figure, and the action sequences don’t need any translation. Sure, the mysticism-tinged plot doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense at times. But Hark Tsui’s direction is slick and polished, and the film does have the heft of a big-budget spectacular. Having a look at it portends a future in which not all blockbusters will be American.

  • Paranoia (2013)

    Paranoia (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2014) There is very little that new, inspiring or even interesting about Paranoia, a completely average thriller. One young man, stuck between warring superiors in a corporate espionage thriller: we’ve seen nearly all of the bits and pieces in other better movies before, and director Robert Luketic can’t do much to save the end result from terminal mediocrity. Liam Hemsworth is blander than bland as the pretty-face protagonist, but the surprise here is to see Gary Oldman being so… dull even as a shaved-head Harrison Ford gets to chew some scenery as one of the two villains. For a thriller, Paranoia is almost refreshingly devoid of violence: There’s some running around and one solid car-on-pedestrian hit, but the rest of the film plays out in very civilized threats of economic turmoil and career setbacks. What is mildly interesting about the film is the contemporary wrapping around the plot: The hero makes an inspiring opening speech about his generation being robbed of a future by the financial downturn (hey, what about the rest of the 99%, all ages included?), has money problems due to medical costs for his ailing father, and spends much of the movie blathering about smart-phone technology. All are signs of the time, often more fascinating in bad-to-average movies than in innovative ones. Still, that doesn’t’ necessarily make Paranoia any more than a passable, calmer-than-usual thriller fit to entertain only if there are no other more compelling alternatives.

  • Seeking Justice (2011)

    Seeking Justice (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2014) The usual trade-off when watching mediocre movies starring Nicolas Cage is that however dull the film can be, at least Cage will be there to indulge into one of his usual bout of theatrical overacting. Sadly, we get neither a good film nor a typically unhinged Cage in Seeking Justice, with results that feel far more disappointing that had it featured another lead actor. To be fair, the film offers an intriguing premise: A bookish husband is promised vengeance against the man who assaulted his wife in exchange for an unspecified favour sometime in the future. Six months later, the favour escalates all the way to murder, and our protagonist gets stuck between an eager police force and a mysterious conspiracy. So far so good: Seeking Justice is heavy on mysteries for its first half, and then just as heavy on chases in the second. But what’s missing is Cage’s usual persona: in his quest to play a different character, he seems to forget everything that makes Cage, well, Cage. In another context, it may have been forgivable (see his performance in The Frozen Ground, equally restrained as the thriller around him) but here it just feels like a waste as the rest of the film cries out for some wild acting to go along its preposterous premise. But it isn’t so, hence Seeking Justice ending up as nothing more than a middle-of-the-road thriller, the likes of which are quickly sent to the home video market these days. January Jones continues not to impress here as the protagonist’s wife –she doesn’t get asked for emotional range, and so doesn’t have to deliver. The power of wildness is more obvious with Guy Pearce, who gets to chew slightly more scenery as the shaved-head villain. (One starts to wonder if the fault isn’t to be addressed to director Roger Donaldson: was he screaming “more restraint!” on the set?) Thematically, there’s almost something interesting in the portrait of urban decay as pictured in New Orleans (Cage must feel like a honored guest given the number of films he has anchored there lately.) and four-decades-out-of-date criminal sociology. While Seeking Justice is competently-made enough to avoid most of the pitfalls of bad films, it doesn’t get to do much more than be a serviceable thriller, and that’s too bad.

  • V/H/S/2 (2013)

    V/H/S/2 (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2014) Once again, this anthology horror film defies the odds: I didn’t expect the first V/H/S to be any good (Found-footage anthology? Ugh!) but it was, and I didn’t expect the second one to be better, but it is. It sure sounds as if the directors of this sequel listened to the reviews of the first film, which identified two specific segments as being far more dynamic and interesting than the rest. As a result, a good chunk of V/H/S/2 is played at the same level of frantic manic energy as the best segments of the first film, and the result is a big thrill ride that overcomes the clichéd “And they all die at the end” trope of found-footage films. Even the framing story works a bit better this time around: “Tape 49” features two Private Investigators who get into a lot more trouble than they expected when they’re asked to retrieve a mysterious tape. The setup is identical to the first film, but the two characters are more sympathetic than the prequel’s sociopathic hoodlums, and the end horror fillip is quite a bit more successful. As a bonus, we get hints of a wider conspiracy, setting up future installments should the franchise want to move forward. The first segment, “Phase I Clinical Trials” features an ingenious rationale for the first-person perspective (a man gets an artificial eye, starts seeing ghosts) but the good setup and effective first scares eventually degenerate into big noisy nihilistic nonsense by the end of the segment (a weakness shared by most of the other pieces of the anthology), nullifying somewhat the first promising moments. What’s most to like about the VHS series so far is the way the short-film format allows stylistic explorations of one-note premises that would be impossible to sustain over longer films, and “A Ride in the Park” is a near-perfect example of such, featuring a first-person perspective of a zombie outbreak. While the film doesn’t put us inside the mind of a zombie, it puts us slightly above it, and shows that even stale subgenres can be explored from new perspectives. (Fittingly, it’s a segment co-directed by some of the same people who did The Blair Witch Project.) Compared to its predecessor, V/H/S/2 wisely chooses fewer longer segments (4 rather than 5) and “Safe Haven”, the strongest section of the film, cleverly uses up its time to set up an atmosphere of pure dread as journalists investigate a sinister cult, before unspooling everything in ten solid minutes of pure craziness. Again, the scares don’t cohere into a satisfying conclusion, but the apocalyptic succession of horrors is a high-energy race to the final disturbing images, and directors Timo Tjahjanto and Gareth Evans (the mad mastermind behind “The Raid” series) have much to be proud of. After that, “Slumber Party Alien Abduction” feels like a bit of a let-down, even if it uses the conceit of alien abduction for a frantic succession of hopeless chases, bright flashes and loud noises. (No, but seriously: the sound design is excellent in this segment.) Much of V/H/S/2 has the usual problems of found-footage films: poor image quality, headache-inducing direction and they-all-die endings. But the film does well within the confines of the form and manages to create a dreadful atmosphere that escapes slicker productions. It’s a step up from the first film (mostly by being as much fun as it is horrific, and having far more sympathetic protagonists), so much so that I’m definitely interested in seeing an eventual V/H/S/3.

  • Lady and the Tramp (1955)

    Lady and the Tramp (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (First-through-fiftieth viewings, Toddler-watching, On Blu-Ray, April 2014) We’ve run through The Aristocats so many times in my toddler-dominated house that a dog-centric alternative imposed itself. What better one than Lady and the Tramp? This first wide-screen Disney animated movie still proves timeless once the dogs are on-screen, and while a finger on the skip button proves essential in going past the scary sequence in which Lady gets lost, or much of the thunder-and-lightning final scene, the rest of the film is a smooth viewing experience for any dog-fascinated toddler. The Blu-Ray version has been restored to a contemporary level of visual clarity, and the feature itself has survived just as well. Plot-wise, it’s a bit meandering (the beaver sequence still stands apart as curiously disconnected), but there is a lot of charm and wit to it all. The background story (with a firstborn entering the world) has a charming sweetness to it, and the dog characters are just as likable. Musically, our household can’t help humming “La La Lu”, “Bella Notte” and oh-this-is-when-it’s-from! “The Siamese Cat Song” (It’s quite a bit racist, but it’s catchy and the French dub has the genius-level lyric “Ce qui est à toi est aussi à moi”, playing off on the similarity between “mine and Siamese” in French) The spaghetti sequence is a lead-in to the beautiful Bella Notte sequence. Technically, I was fascinated at the (early) use of wide-screen cinematography, especially keeping low to the ground, focusing on the dogs and not showing the humans more than necessary. It amounts to a film that has admirably weathered the ages, and can be watched by the entire family… over and over again.