Reviews

  • The Lucky One (2012)

    The Lucky One (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) Here are the facts: The Lucky One is a romantic drama based on a Nicholas Sparks novel. I should just stop the review right here, because you already have all of what’s required to make up your mind about the movie and whether you’re likely to enjoy it. Most Sparks novels are built according to a similar melodramatic template, and this similarity is not helped at all by bland casting and unremarkable direction. The story has to do with a soldier making his way back from Iraq to a woman whose picture he found during combat, but really that’s just an extra-melodramatic setup for a “stranger comes into town” plot à la Safe Haven. It ends pretty much how you’d expect, which is tautologically the only way it could end up given the expectations of its audience. If it sounds as if I’m exasperated by the result, that’s true only up to a certain point. Past that, the film delivers exactly what it intends, and there is some atmospheric attractiveness in small-town romance stories with added dramatic flair. (Plus Zac Efron and/or Taylor Schilling. Although I’m getting old enough now that Blythe Danner is starting to look like the cute one in the film.) The Lucky One is the kind of movie that it wants to be, and you’d don’t have to see it if you don’t want to.

  • Cocktail (1988)

    Cocktail (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2018) I’m not sure when “peak Tom Cruise” actually was, but there’s no denying that his late-1980s popularity following Top Gun was off-the-chart. Most of his projects back then (and still now) banked on his charisma. Cocktail certainly makes a lot of mileage with Cruise’s boyish charm: Here he plays an ambitious young man initially taking up bartending to make ends meet while working toward a business degree. But when his showy bartending earns him more attention than he knows what to do with, it leads to a break-up with his mentor, romantic entanglements and many more money-related complications. It gets very melodramatic very quickly, and the result is a mess that doesn’t quite know what tone to aim for. To be fair, there are a few great moments of the film, especially in the first half as the 1980s atmosphere is most visibly deployed and as the flair bartending style gets a lot of attention. But those moments of greatness probably work against Cocktail as a whole, especially once we’re off to increasingly unlikely and grandiose plot development that suck whatever energy the film was able to create in those moments. I suspect that Cruise’s presence in the film ended up creating part of the atonality problems: Cruise being Cruise, any film producer would want to give him a flashy part, a big smile and a happy ending, whereas a smaller-scale movie with a lesser-known lead actor probably could have delivered a rougher, more authentic drama about the ups and downs in the life of a bartender. Who knows? What’s obvious, though, is that the film doesn’t quite work as a seamless whole. The plot gets more arbitrary, and it feels stuck between down-and-dirty intentions and its star’s megawatt personality. Cocktail doesn’t mix well, and the result can be dumbfounding when seen thirty years later.

  • Rampage (2018)

    Rampage (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) Hey wow—I recall playing Rampage-the-videogame on personal computers in the late 1980s, wowed by a 16-colour palette (EGA forever!) and having rather a lot of fun with it. (I just had a spin through the online abandonware browser emulator and it’s pretty much what I remembered.) Rampage the movie, of course, is something else: A thin excuse to have monsters destroying good chunks of a city, finally proving that seventeen years after 9/11, we’re once again ready to rumble through devastated downtown areas. Dwayne Johnson (who else?) leads the film, playing the kind of superheroes that is de rigueur for that kind of movie. The scientific blablabla is nonsense, but it quickly gets us to the super-monsters destroying cities, albeit with a slightly harder edge than I expected from a big PG-13 movies: there’s some faintly upsetting almost-R violence in the film that I did not necessarily enjoy. Still, Rampage is meant to be dumb fun and it knows it: one of the best non-CGI parts of the film is Jeffrey Dean Morgan as a mysterious scenery-chewing Southern man-in-black kind of special operative stealing every scene he’s in. Johnson is up to his usual leading-man standard (but is he getting overexposed?) while Naomie Harris is always enjoyable to look at—this film not being an exception. Of course, the point of Rampage is seeing Downtown Chicago landmarks being destroyed as thoroughly as possible—surely I can’t be the only one thinking about a Rampage/Transformers 3 mash-up? The film is both better and worse than expected: better in that it delivers the goods and keeps moving, with some great special-effects sequences along the way. Worse, because of the too-high level of violence, and overall impression that we’ve seen urban destruction so often lately (even in director Brad Peyton’s oeuvre, as per the somewhat more ludicrously enjoyable San Andreas) that Rampage is going to sink back into anonymity within months.

  • The Freshman (1990)

    The Freshman (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) Well huh. Turns out that Marlon Brando was a trend setter on his way up, playing characters with raw honesty in the 1950s, and also on his way down, anticipating the whole self-parody of people such as Robert de Niro with 1990’s The Freshman. The references are not accidental—The Freshman features Brando as a mob boss in a film that has characters (including a film teacher) obsessing over The Godfather. It’s intentional, and it does work relatively well at times: Brando doesn’t look as if he’s having any fun whatsoever, but the characters grimacing around him look as if they do. Matthew Broderick stars as a hapless Midwesterner going to NYC to study film, and is immediately robbed upon arrival. We later discover it’s all a big scheme, but never mind the details. The Freshman is merely fine as a comedy: It doesn’t have big laughs, it does’nt build to an amazing climax, but it does the job of entertaining and that’s that. Director Andrew Bergman keeps things moving in the same direction, Penelope Ann Miller makes for a cute love interest and the focus on animals means some visual comedy as well. I don’t think that The Freshman has any staying power beyond seeing Brando poking fun at himself, even in a very restrained way. But it’ll do if you haven’t seen it yet.

  • Lance et Compte (2010)

    Lance et Compte (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, December 2018) For French-Canadians of the past two generations, Lance et Compte is a TV classic. It began in the late 1980s as one of the first French-Canadian TV shows to adopt a more cinematic style and subject matter, à l’américaine as it moved away from dinner-table conversations and into the fast-paced, high-stakes world of hockey that has become Québec’s secular religion. I still remember schoolyard conversations about the first season of the TV show, the dead-on parody “Snappe pis bourdonne” by comic group Rock et Belles Oreilles and the national media attention given to the show. I stopped following it a few seasons later, but the show has been revived a few times in the thirty years since then, with TV movies and miniseries always extending the lives of the characters without a single reboot. The movie Lance et Compte fits into this long-running continuity by taking place between two seasons of the latest revival, featuring some characters first introduced during the TV show’s first season in the late eighties. I did not know that when I first saw the film—I presumed that it was going to be a reboot. So imagine my surprise in discovering both familiar and unfamiliar characters, trying to piece together nearly twenty years of accumulated backstory through quick conversations and passing references to past events in the show. This being said, the film does tell a specific story: How a bus accident decimates a professional hockey team, and how the team manages to get past this traumatic incident. It actually works decently well once you straighten out the character relationships, with a few surprising twists and turns as the film tries to bring back some characters (Yvan Ponton, for one) and finds out that it can’t. Series stalwart Marc Messier, Carl Marotte, Marina Orsini and Michel Forget all have good roles to play (Marotte, in particular, stages a great comeback), and even some of the most dubious plotting ideas—such as rescuing a Québec-based shoe brand—eventually work their way back into the main plot. Then there’s the paean to hockey, which always works for French-Canadians—even those who, like me, have lapsed a bit in their attendance. Slickly directed by Frédéric D’Amours, Lance et Compte plays into a fantasy-based version of professional hockey where city and team loyalties are nearly as thick as family ties—don’t try to make any comparison with the mercenary world of real-life hockey where allegiances are thin and money makes decisions. Still, it’s comforting to imagine people still being there twenty-five years later. Much of the movie rests on that kind of reassurance.

  • Lady Chatterly’s Lover (1981)

    Lady Chatterly’s Lover (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, December 2018) When D. H. Lawrence sat down to write Lady Chatterly’s Lover, I’m not sure that he envisioned it being turned into an exploitative soft-core erotic thriller. Or maybe he did—the novel is celebrated for having struck down all sorts of obscenity laws during the 1950s–1960s and the author clearly intended it to push back the limits of free speech. Still, that doesn’t excuse boring movie adaptations. On a commercial basis, this 1981 version of Lady Chatterly’s Lover exists on solid ground: It was a reunion between director Just Jaeckin and star Sylvia Kristel for the first time since the soft-core-classic Emmanuelle. Alas, the white-gauze cinematography, languorous close-ups of Kristel’s body and lengthy lovemaking sequences mean that the film is aimed at voyeurs more than audiences interested in narrative substance. The result is incredibly dull, although I suppose that it remains notable for featuring a generous amount of female-gaze eroticism and not solely male titillation. (The introduction of the titular lover, for instance, is through a very long sequence in which the heroine stares at him taking a shower outdoors.) I can imagine circumstances where Lady Chatterly’s Lover would be a fun movie to watch as a couple, but it’s a very different kind of movie-watching experience than this movie critic taking notes and measuring it against the overall, um, thrust of 1980s cinema.

  • The Candidate (1972)

    The Candidate (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, December 2018) Over a sufficiently long timeline, one of the problems with the world is its tendency to evolve toward a parody of itself, becoming the thing that earlier generations tried to satirize. So it is that I finished watching The Candidate having found it a reasonably tame description of an American political campaign, only to read up on the film and find out that it had been conceived as a satirical comedy. Of course, satire is dead under the current American presidency, and so The Candidate does appear a bit staid today, dealing with a far gentler and more rational era in US politics. This, mind you, is not necessarily a problem—I’m a political junkie and I’m more receptive than most to a movie taking us through an entire senatorial campaign without resorting to huge melodramatic twists à la Primary Colors or The Ides of March. (Which is for the better, given that most post-Clinton US political thrillers seemed to have the same resolution in mind.) Robert Redford is quite good in the film, playing an idealistic candidate who progressively waters down his message in an effort to be elected. The film seems to regard this as a soul-destroying process, but I may be showing my progressivist centric technocrat inner nature when I say that this feels perfectly reasonable and perhaps even admirable. The film isn’t without its funny moments, although some minor plot threads (such as the candidate’s affair with a staffer) get lost in the mix, and I don’t quite think that the protagonist gets a good chance to show his late-campaign desire to win taking over his idealistic convictions. It’s also dated in terms of references and technology but come on: It’s a forty-six-year-old movie. As such, The Candidate has aged nicely enough. I’ll add it to my growing list of essential movies about American politics.

  • Finian’s Rainbow (1968)

    Finian’s Rainbow (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2018) Being right doesn’t mean much when you’re late, and unfortunately that’s the first conclusion I get from watching Finian’s Rainbow, an old-fashioned musical that has the right moral values about racism but the rotten luck of making it to theatres one year after movies such as In the Heat of the Night and Guess who’s Coming to Dinner completely changed the Hollywood conversation about racial injustice in the United States. As New Hollywood was remaking the film industry in a far different image, Finian’s Rainbow was torn between new issues and old-fashioned style, featuring no less than Fred Astaire singing and dancing about racial injustice while dealing with a meddlesome leprechaun trying to get its gold back. Yeah… I’m not making this up. It’s a musical in the purest tradition of the form, but it would have been so much better had it been made ten years earlier. Astaire isn’t bad, but he looks truly old here—I mean: he never looked young even when he was, but here age has visibly caught up to him, and his great dance routines look almost dangerous. Petunia Clark is fine as his daughter, but much of the comedy and remarkable performances come from other players (including Tommy Steele as a hyper-caffeinated leprechaun) in this bizarre southern state/Irish-mythology mash-up. The film’s message against racial discrimination goes through an incredibly racist character being magically transformed into a black person (hello blackface) in time to travel with a small group of singers—the song is great (“The Begat”), but everything leading to it has issues of some sort. Plus, it’s directed by none other than Francis Ford Coppola. Finian’s Rainbow, as you can guess, is a strange blend—sometimes great, sometimes endearing, sometimes dumbfounding and sometimes uncomfortable. It’s certainly interesting, but I’m going to stop myself from calling it a must-watch.

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, March 2021) In retrospect, I’ve been too harsh on Finian’s Rainbow. Most of what struck me on a first viewing is still applicable to a second, but they don’t bother me nearly as much. Astaire looks old, but he does what he can and even the accumulating wrinkles can’t quite stop him from being an entertainer – and the film doesn’t focus nearly as much on him as it would have in earlier years. After all, he actually plays a father here. I’m also not quite as bothered by the film’s comic treatment of racism – it’s meant to be ridiculous, and the film does have its heart in the right place in mocking racists even when it’s recreating clichés along the way. I still don’t care all that much about the leprechaun and his gold, but some of the musical sequence staging (helmed by a young Francis Ford Coppola, once again worth highlighting) is vigorous and eye-catching. I still think Finian’s Rainbow has plenty of flaws, but they don’t annoy me as badly this second time around.

  • Jeremiah Johnson (1972)

    Jeremiah Johnson (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2018) The 1970s were an interesting time for the western genre. Its heydays were clearly over, and the New Hollywood atmosphere was pushing filmmakers toward a revisionist approach to the genre, especially when it came to its portrayal of Native Americans, or newfound environmental attitudes toward the wilderness. All of this can be found in Jeremiah Johnson, arguably less of a western and more of a survival film in which a white protagonist learns to live in nature and fight enemies both natural and human. (It does feel a lot like The Revenant at times.) Native Americans here are portrayed anywhere from helpful to bloodthirsty, but with understandable motives. The on-location footage (nearly the entire film was shot outside studios) is fantastic and does drive home the loneliness of the protagonist against the elements—not to mention the famously slow pacing of the film. Robert Redford stars in nearly every scene as the title character, but frankly the natural landscapes steal the show. The result may not be for everyone, but it’s certainly striking in its own way. Hilariously enough, Jeremiah Johnson remains more noteworthy today as the source of an animated GIF showing Redford (somehow mistakable as Zach Galifianakis) nodding in approval in the wilderness. I’m OK with that if it leads even one person to have a look at the original film.

  • Frenzy (1972)

    Frenzy (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, November 2018) The early 1970s were a grim and depressing time for American cinema as filmmakers over-embraced the new freedoms of the post-Hays Code era and tried to reach younger audiences with what would have been unthinkable even a few years earlier. The Old Hollywood was gone and the New Hollywood featured grime, gore and nudity. Even old veteran Alfred Hitchcock got in the game in Frenzy, which remains the bloodiest and grimmest of his films. The story takes place in London, where a serial killer is stalking victims through a matchmaking service and framing our protagonist for the murders. As a premise, it’s standard Hitchcock fare. In execution, however, Frenzy plays harder and darker: There are two murders in the movie and while the first one is graphic and grisly and upsetting, the second one is far more muted and far more disturbing as the camera moves away from the crime and into a busy street with passersby unaware that something terrible is taking place right next to them. There is also nudity (rare in the Hitchcock oeuvre) and an overall grittiness that clearly marks this film as being from the 1970s. Frenzy is often described as Hitchcock’s last great movie and while I’ll be able to confirm this only once I see his last film (1976’s Family Plot), it does strike me as an above-average entry for him, and an intriguing glimpse at what kinds of movies he would have kept making had he had lived longer. But make no mistake: Frenzy is grim, and even its humour is more macabre than a relief.

  • Play It Again, Sam (1972)

    Play It Again, Sam (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, November 2018) I’m not sure I even want to get romantic advice from Woody Allen, but if you can park that thought for 90 minutes and rationalize that the age difference between then-almost-fortysomething Allen and Diane Keaton was a mere ten years, then you may start to like what Play It Again, Sam has for you. Riffing from Casablanca so thoroughly that a viewing of the 1941 film is almost required before tackling this one, this romantic comedy takes us in the neuroses-fuelled inner life of one recently divorced San Francisco writer as he obsesses about his singlehood and Humphrey Bogart. While technically this isn’t a “Woody Allen movie” as he merely wrote and acted in it, but did not direct, Play It Again, Sam does count as one of Allen’s earlier, funnier movies, especially when “Bogart” pops up to provide advice to the protagonist, or when the protagonist’s equally-imaginary ex-wife starts interacting with him. It leads, quite predictably, to an airport tarmac climax, but it’s a good ending. In-between the premise and the conclusion, we have enough of Allen’s usual neurotic pattern to last us for a while, along with his interactions with Keaton. Play It Again, Sam may not be a deep or transcendent film, but it does work, and it will work best for those who do know and love Casablanca. (Who doesn’t?)

  • The Big Sick (2017)

    The Big Sick (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Google Play Streaming, November 2018) As a genre, the romantic comedy will never die as long as it adapts to the times, keeps finding intriguing hooks and invests in its characters. The Big Sick is a surprisingly engaging example of the form, showing us contemporary romance, likable characters and an irresistible hook: What if a recently-formed couple faced the impending death of one of them? That may not be a funny premise in itself, but don’t worry: everybody gets better in the end. Kumail Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan are well cast as the lead couple—Nanjiani even playing his own role given that the story is loosely adapted from his own life. The cross-cultural courtship themes abruptly shift gear into more dramatic material once one of the romantic leads goes into a coma, although the appearance of their parents (great performances by a high-energy Holly Hunter—who gets the film’s best scene—and an unusually likable Ray Romano) add more complications to the proceedings. Since the film revolves around a stand-up comedian, expect a few one-liners and glimpses at the tough life of these performers. The good script is backed by strong execution that manages to find a balance between very tricky material. It manages to combine modern cynicism with earned sincerity, and wraps things up with a belated but no less effective bow. There’s been a lot of hype about The Big Sick as an independent film darling, and it admirably sustains it during viewing.

  • First Knight (1995)

    First Knight (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, November 2018) I’m not sure I completely accept Richard Gere as dashing young knight Lancelot trying to win over the queen (Julia Ormond) from King Arthur (Sean Connery). But that’s First Knight for you. The film makes a big deal out of the 35-year age difference between Ormond and Connery, but not so much of the 16-year difference between Gere and Ormond. (But that’s been Hollywood’s idea of an acceptable age range ever since the first movie moguls hit their mid-thirties.) More significant is the film’s overall lack of energy or reason to care: It’s, by design, an unsatisfying premise—who dares have Richard Gere best Sean Connery!?—and the limp execution from Jerry Zucker (better known for comedies) doesn’t do much to help. Even the high points, such as a ridiculously convoluted obstacle course, don’t quite manage to make the film come alive. The treatment of the Arthurian myth is realistic, but for a hollywoodian ideal of realism that seems like an uncomfortable compromise. I probably would have liked the film if I actually cared more about reinterpreting the Arthurian myth … but I don’t. First Knight is also severely harmed by the mid-1990s wave of far better historical movies set around the British Isles, along the lines of Braveheart or (better yet) Rob Roy. The result is not terrible, but neither is it particularly good. Maybe worth a watch for fans of Connery, Ormond or Gere even if their casting is sometimes dubious.

  • Let’s Make Love (1960)

    Let’s Make Love (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, November 2018) I’m on a quest to watch pretty much everything that George Cukor has directed, and for Let’s Make Love to feature Marilyn Monroe is just extra incentive. Coming at this film with expectations raised too high may be a problem, though: despite a few cameos and occasional flashes of wit, the result is decidedly average and not quite what we’d expect from the cast or the opening moments. The first few minutes of the film do set up a far funnier film than what we get, through narration explaining the family history of the lead character (played by Yves Montand), a Franco-American billionaire who ends up playing himself in a satirical play in order to get close to Monroe’s character. The difficulties in having a businessman attempting to become a stage sensation soon lead him to the film’s most inspired sequences, namely hiring Milton Berle for comedy tips, Gene Kelly for dancing lessons and Bing Crosby to learn how to sing. The three men play themselves, leading to a few cool moments if you’re already a fan of these entertainment legends. Otherwise, though, the film is surprisingly underwhelming. The traditional romantic comedy hijinks aren’t executed particularly well when Montand looks lost (thanks to language difficulties), Monroe is fine but doesn’t have much of a character besides looking pretty (this was at a point in her career when she was gathering a reputation for being unreliable), and the casting definitely seems off. High expectations make this film a disappointment, so do try to keep them under check: it’s not as good as you think it will be from reading the cast list, and the behind-the-scenes drama of making the film (what with an affair between the two leads even as they were married to other high-profile celebrities) is arguably more interesting than what shows up on-screen. [December 2018: My opinion of Let’s Make Love went up a small notch after catching an English-language broadcast of the film: The French version not only has some very awkward transitions between English-language songs and interstitial French dialogue, but has the gall to cut off some of the Berle/Kelly/Crosby material that is the highlight of the film. French dubs are usually much better than this.]

  • Salinui chueok [Memories of Murder] (2003)

    Salinui chueok [Memories of Murder] (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Google Play Streaming, November 2018) If you’re watching a police procedural, there’s a presumption that the criminal will be caught at the end of the movie. Filmmakers can mess with that convention, as they can end a romantic movie with the leads not getting together, but those who do this usually want to make a point and deliberately expose themselves to grumblings from the audience. Memories of Murder is a South Korean crime thriller film intentionally designed to leave audiences unsettled—the 131 minutes-long film is a careful recreation of a 1980s police investigation, but even the investigative breakthroughs don’t lead to a satisfactory conclusion, with an ending that keeps the murders unresolved. It’s adapted from real events, so there’s some veracity here—but it doesn’t make it any less enraging as a movie. [October 2019: In a rare case of reality being more satisfactory than fiction, it turns out that forensic evidence decades after the murders has led to the identification, and later confession of the serial murderer who inspired the film.] Ending aside, writer/director Bong Joon-ho does manage to turn in a competent police procedural—the details are well chosen, there is some character development, various police methods are shown, the sense of time and place is convincing and the film does manage to attain its objectives, even if those objectives aren’t necessarily the satisfaction of the audience. Memories of Murder is one more piece of evidence regarding the vitality of South Korean cinema in the twenty-first century, and a memorable crime thriller in its own right.