Reviews

  • Nine to Five (1980)

    Nine to Five (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2017) I recall seeing Nine to Five as a kid, but given that I only remembered the iconic theme song, I will pretend that this was like watching a new film. It certainly feels like a time capsule from the late seventies, with its broad statements about feminism, contemporary fashions and work culture at a pre-computer, barely-photocopier era. Jane Fonda is a bit dull as the intentionally blank heroine, but Lily Tomlin is very good as a cynical office manager, and it’s a treat to see Dolly Parton in her prime as a smarter-than-she-looks secretary. Their story of female empowerment and revenge against a no-good boss (sorry, “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot”) is good for a few chuckles, especially when the film goes off the reality rails and features three outlandish dream sequences. As for the rest, the film has aged depressingly well: it’s discouraging to realize that much of the feminist content remains effective thirty-five-years later—there’s been progress, but not that much of it, especially in the United States. The theme song hasn’t gone out of style either: “Working nine-to-five/What a way to make a living…”

  • Lego: A Love Story, Jonathan Bender

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Wiley, 2010, 296 pages, C$34.00 hc, ISBN 978–0470407028

    As an adult who has rediscovered the joys of Lego bricks over the past six months, I’m better placed than most in appreciating Jonathan Bender’s journey as described in Lego: A Love Story. Not that rediscovering Lego as an adult is an unusual phenomenon. Adult Fans of Lego (AFOLs) even have a term, “The Dark Ages”, to describe the period between the time we stop playing with Lego as children/teenagers, and the time we pick them up again as an adult.

    In my case, I abandoned Lego bricks as an early teenager after being a big Space set fan (partially motivated, if I recall correctly, by my younger brother taking up my bricks) and then kind of … didn’t care for more than two decades even though my feelings toward Lego were never less than entirely positive. It took my daughter reaching her brick-playing years for me to rediscover Lego, first through Disney Princess sets (for her), then Creator sets (for me). We’re now pleasantly expanding our respective collections via the Friends (for her) and City (for me) lines, and we’re both trying our hands at original creations. Reading about Lego is an associated side effect of this rekindled passion.

    So when Bender describes the end of his own Dark Ages in Lego: A Love Story, I’m right there along with him. As he picks up the bricks, we get to see him think about his childhood Lego passion, discover the world of adult fans, gradually join the world of Lego conventions and collectors, and wrap it all up with his feelings as he becomes an expectant father.

    There are other, more strictly informational books about Lego out there. If you want the official history, grab The Lego Book, a lavish Dorling Kindersley production that can be supplemented by separate tomes on sets and minifigurines. If you want a more detailed history of Lego and a factually exhausting description of nearly every line ever launched by Lego, Sarah Herman’s A Million Little Bricks will be enough. But if you want to get into the head of an AFOL, then Lego: A Love Story is for you. It’s informative, fascinating, partially heartfelt and truly says more about Lego than a dry history of the toy could ever do.

    It’s not perfect, mind you. At times, it feels very deliberate—the kind of artificial experience that is motivated by a book contract along the lines of “I will spend a year immersing myself in the world of Lego, make heartwarming parallels with my own life and deliver an emotional conclusion.”  The book even has a Chekhov’s Lego set ready to be assembled at a thematically appropriate moment that we can see coming far in advance. This is a documentary with an archetypical plot and at times we can see the bare planks of the structure. (It doesn’t help that, looking at Bender’s online presence, he focused a lot on Lego from 2009 to 2010, and then went very quiet on the topic—I can certainly understand that raising a young child as a writer requires focus, but it doesn’t help the feeling that part of the book is hobby-for-hire.)  Many smaller flaws do stem from this framework. Some of Bender’s early experiences in getting back to Lego feel faux-naïve (wow, they invented a brick separator!), as would befit someone wrapping a too-neat structure over a chaotic process. Later on, some promising plot threads are also abandoned midway through (such as the author wondering if he fell in with the bad boys of adult Lego fandom), which is perhaps inevitable for a book focusing on such a short duration. There’s a delicate balance between being new enough to the hobby to talk about it as a discovery, and being seasoned enough to talk about it with the authority of experience—but Bender does get most of it right despite a few slips along the way.

    On the other hand, there is a lot to simply love about Lego: A Love Story. Bender’s thought processes as he gets in deeper Lego fandom are near-universal, and his ability to clearly describe some of the more subtle pleasures of Lego fandom (assembling an original creation that matches the initial vision, for instance) is eloquent. As a journalist working on a book, he gets to go places that other AFOLs would envy: Legoland in Denmark; behind the scenes at Legoland San Diego; a visit at Lego’s corporate U.S. headquarters in Connecticut; peering inside a Bricklink store, helping organize a Lego festival with other AFOLs; and so on. He packs a lot of stuff in the year covered by this book (see above for: writing to fulfill a contract) and we readers get to read along voraciously. Bender’s background as an improv comedian makes for good prose and amusing moments, enlivening a decent journalistic overview of Lego (the company, the toy, the phenomenon) with enough personal moments that he almost comes across as an old friend by the end of the book. Bender is not a Lego employee, so a few darker passages do hint at the less wholesome side of Lego (like all hobbies, it requires time and money that can always be spent on other things) even though they are not explored in depth—like most AFOLs, Bender see Lego building as a wholesome pursuit, and isn’t particularly interested in presenting another side to the Lego story. (Seriously; who hates Lego?)

    What I can’t tell you is whether someone without any interest in Lego will enjoy the book. I suspect that it may help illuminate what goes on in an AFOL’s mind (hence a marginal recommendation for spouses, family and friends of committed AFOLs). I’m certainly convinced that AFOLs will like it, but I’m not entirely sure that this is the kind of book to make Dark-Agers rush to the store to pick up new sets again. On the other hand, I did enjoy quite a bit of it … so why worry about others’ reactions? Much of the same can be said about Lego enthusiasts.

  • Hable con Ella [Talk to Her] (2002)

    Hable con Ella [Talk to Her] (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2017) If ever you wake up one morning and feel that cinema is too boring, to rote, too safe for you, then have a look at Pedro Almodóvar’s Hable con Ella. Strange and off-beat and surreal in ways that can’t even be described in a capsule review, it’s a film about death, life, obsession, accusations, two women in coma, the men who care for them and an outrageous dream sequence. Good performances by the lead actors complement Almodóvar’s unusual script and direction. It doesn’t deal with the usual topics, and certainly doesn’t deal with them in the usual way. Good, great, bad, boring—I’m still not too sure how best to describe Hable con Ella, but it’s certainly memorable.

  • National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985)

    National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, February 2017) Lazy, repetitive and occasionally offensive, National Lampoon’s European Vacation is both the follow-up that the first Vacation deserved, and an irritating attempt to replicate the previous film without quite understanding why it worked. Gone is the classic road trip; hello to the stereotypes of ugly Americans offending a trail of European bystanders as they rampage across the continent. It almost goes without saying that the film immediately goes for national stereotypes: unflappable Brits, haughty Frenchmen, aggressive Germans … and clueless Americans. The episodic nature of the film is annoying, but never more so when the movie lands in its final Roman destination and then realizes it should have some kind of plot to wrap things up. Moments later, we have a jewelry heist and a kidnapping. It’s not particularly interesting, and so the film ends with a whimper even as it goes through the motions of a big car chase. In some ways, it’s natural that the producers would want to take the first film’s formula and make it better-bigger-louder by sending it to Europe. On the other hand, it sort of misses the point that the first film (and the third one) would take its strength from universal childhood experiences. Incidents during road trips or holiday gatherings are near-universal—angering Europeans far less so. The result is recognizably a comedy, but it’s a significant step down from the previous film.

  • Staying Alive (1983)

    Staying Alive (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2017) Some movies are burdened with a bad reputation well before we can see a single frame of it, and so Staying Alive remains widely vilified as a terrible sequel to the quasi-classic Saturday Night Fever. But an appraisal nearly thirty-five years later may be more forgiving: While it’s nowhere near the dramatic intensity and off-beat maturity of its predecessor, Staying Alive has become a strangely interesting follow-up, steeped into eighties atmosphere like few others. Our hero has become a struggling Broadway dancer, and much of the movie avoids disco entirely to focus on nothing much more than a story of love and ambition set against the New York music theatre scene. John Travolta is, once again, very good from a purely physical performance point of view: he dances well even though the spotlight is seldom just on him. Finola Hughes is also remarkable as the film’s enigmatic temptress figure. Otherwise, though—it’s your standard romantic triangle, climbing-the-rungs-of-success kind of film. Under writer/director Sylvester Stallone, it plays like an underdog drama set on Broadway, with a finale that has the merit of not being purely triumphant. It’s, in other words, an average film that would be hazily remembered today if it wasn’t for its association with its predecessor. I can imagine the let-down in 1983 as fans of the first movie watched this follow-up and wondered what happened. Today, freed from some of those expectations, Staying Alive is merely ordinary, although the eighties atmosphere has now become an advantage for the film.

  • Wrong Turn (2003)

    Wrong Turn (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2017) It’s kind of amazing that Wrong Turn spawned five sequels (and counting), given how much of a generic hillbilly horror film it is. Featuring college-aged protagonists pitted against murderous cannibal hillbillies, Wrong Turn delights in macabre gags, makes no secret of its affection for its monsters rather than its human victims, and feels like a cynical attempt to churn out just another clichéd horror film. It’s a film that doesn’t have much of a reason for existing, even while we’re watching it for the first time—it’s obviously following conventional genre formula, and it’s not particularly well executed enough to rise above the muck. Eliza Dushku and Emmanuelle Chriqui have featured roles (poor them), but that’s nowhere near enough to justify seeing the film. Wrong Turn’s meanness will be repulsive to anyone who’s not a convinced gore hounds, while not offering anything more than straight-up genre thrills.

  • National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983)

    National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, On DVD, February 2017) Movies become semi-classics for a reason, and the appeal of National Lampoon’s Vacation can be found in nearly-universal nostalgic reminiscences of childhood road trips to visit some far-off destination. That’s the vein that John Hughes picked up in giving life to the episodic Vacation, featuring Chevy Chase as a bumbling dad trying to ensure happy holidays for his family. Nearly thirty-five years later, there’s a pleasant eighties patina over the film, but many of the gags remain just as funny today. (There are exceptions, of course—some scenes, such as the saloon fake-shootout, remain more mystifying than anything else.) It’s a great piece of Americana, a rather good showcase for Chevy Chase’ comic persona, and it remains a fairly solid touch-point for references even today. Plus you’ll get to hum “Holiday Road” for days. It’s not my favourite of the series (that honour goes to Christmas Vacation), but it’s solid enough to show why it remains popular even today.

  • These Final Hours (2013)

    These Final Hours (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, February 2017) If you’re looking for the proverbial “gem in the DVD bargain bin”, then stop looking as soon as you see These Final Hours, because it ends up being a surprisingly successful apocalyptic thriller despite being found at the local dollar store. A low-budget Australian production, this is a film that nonetheless deals with weighty issues, as the characters live out the last ten hours of life on Earth after a meteor collision. Our protagonist starts the film as a typical cad, eager to leave pregnant Girlfriend #1 to go to an end-of-the-world party with Girlfriend #2. When he comes across a young girl being assaulted by thugs, he reluctantly does the right thing … and finds himself inconvenienced into taking care of her. A road movie through suburban Perth as the end of the world makes everyone go crazy, These Final Hours grows more interesting as it goes. Writer/director Zak Hilditch is able to bring his story threads together in an impressive whole. By the end of the film, having done through a spectrum of intense emotions, we’re struck by the beauty of the apocalypse and characters finding inner peace through the people they choose to die with. It’s disarming in the way lowered expectations can lead to great movie-watching experiences. I suspect that the film will be far more efficient for viewers with families as it runs through possible scenarios on how to deal with an extraordinary scenario.

  • Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016)

    Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2017) Not everyone likes the kind of humour that comedy group The Lonely Island prefers, and movies like Hot Rod or Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (eleven years apart) clearly show it. The best feature of Popstar is, indeed, that it never stops never stopping: it throws so many jokes on-screen than some of them are bound to stick. Celebrity cameos help (including Ed Sheehan, in a third appearance in my single evening of viewing in-between this, pre-Grammy TV shows and A Lego Brickumentary), especially when they’re as ludicrous as telling Justin Timberlake to stop singing, having Seal maimed by wolves or Michael Bolton play an integral part of the conclusion. Andy Samberg makes for a rather good pop-icon hero, but the star here is the script and its willingness to go after today’s music scene in its full insanity. Some moments could be factual in a year from now, but it doesn’t make them any less funny. Some material doesn’t work, or goes on for far longer than necessary. Sometimes, it’s hard to say whether more or less restraints would have been better: The TMZ parody, for instance, is both overacted yet at its best at its most overdone moments. As I said: Humor is subjective, and Popstar’s aggressively absurd style is going to be more polarizing than most. I found it more controlled than Hot Rod, but that may be due to its grandiose subject matter more than anything else. Those with a good understanding of today’s music scene will get more out of Popstar than others, but there are laughs for everyone.

  • A Lego Brickumentary (2014)

    A Lego Brickumentary (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2017) As an Adult Fan of Lego, I watched A Lego Brickumentary more for affirmation than discovery: I don’t need to be convinced of why Lego bricks can be fun for all ages, nor being told once again about Lego’s history or various cool facts about how people are using Lego bricks to do art, filmmaking, therapy or architecture. This being said, give me interviews with Jamie Berard and Nathan Sawaya, take me to a Lego convention, or show me what’s necessary to build a life-size Lego X-Wing and I’ll be happy. (Plus, hey, there’s Ed Sheehan talking about his Lego obsession.) The CGI/stop-motion sequences, narrated by Jason Bateman as a minifig, do have the gentle humour that’s becoming the Lego house style. It’s not a dull documentary, and it treats Lego hobbyists with respect. The mixture of talking heads, documentary footage, humorous interludes and live interviews makes the film more animated than anyone would expect, and the production credentials are excellent. A Lego Brickumentary seldom stops being anything but a Lego cheerleader, and that’s a mixed blessing: For all of the film’s radiant positivism, there’s seldom any mention of the gender issues in Lego fandom, monetary costs of a Lego obsession or any of the less-pleasant aspects to the hobby. On the other hand, Lego (as a corporation) has always been so careful to portray itself as wholesome and act accordingly that it’s hard to find unpleasant aspects to the topic. It certainly helps that, a decade and a half after Lego’s 2003/near-death experience, the company has reformed itself to a better relationship with its fans, and continues to strive for progressive values. (No, seriously; read their Social Impact report for the details.) A Lego Brickumentary does works best as affirmation that Lego bricks are awesome, and that’s more than good enough.

  • My Sister’s Keeper (2009)

    My Sister’s Keeper (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2017) I expected much, much worse from My Sister’s Keeper. On paper, it reads as the kind of weepy manipulative Hollywood drama that got satirized out of existence decades ago: a mixture of cancer-afflicted kids, precocious protagonists and ineffectual adults manipulated into melodramatic actions. On-screen, though, it’s not quite as bad … even though its nature as a tearjerker remains intact. Part of it has to do with good actors and small moments where the script doesn’t quite go as expected. I quite liked Alec Baldwin’s lawyer character, for instance, and the ways in which an entire movie’s worth of motivations is suggested for Joan Cusack’s judge character. Professionally directed by Nick Cassavetes (no stranger to weepies) from Jodi Picoult’s eponymous novel (apparently changed to much better effect), My Sister’s Keeper also benefits from a great performance by Abigail Breslin in the lead role, and a borderline-unlikable Cameron Diaz as the mother antagonist. But perhaps less identifiably, the film does have a good moment-to-moment watchability that can often doom less well-executed attempts on similar material. It remains a straight character drama, but one put together with some skill. And that makes all the difference between something that sounds terrible, and something that’s engaging.

  • Snowden (2016)

    Snowden (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on-Demand, February 2017) I expect that we’ll continue to talk about Edward Snowden and whether he’s a hero or villain for a long while: Snowden is young, and currently being used as a pawn in geopolitical games … his place in history hasn’t been finalized yet. (I said the same three years ago about Julian Assange in the context of The Fifth Estate, and my opinion of Assange today is strikingly different than what it was back then—people’s lives aren’t limited to a single act.) Still, it takes someone like Oliver Stone to boldly delve into events barely more than three years old and try to come to some kind of a conclusion. As a look at Snowden-the-man, the film is definitely on its subject’s side: He’s shown as a disappointed idealist, a patriot whose opinions eventually diverge from the system he’s been asked to serve. Technical wizard, sympathetic boyfriend, fugitive of circumstances: Snowden is all of those and the film creates a clean dramatic arc for him as he’s invited at the centre of the American Intelligence Community and comes to dislike what he sees. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is very good as Snowden, incarnating a real-life subject to the point where the film can afford to feature the real Snowden showing up in the film’s coda. It’s also kind of amazing to see Zachary Quinto and Melissa Leo play real people that we can recognize (respectively: Glen Greenwald and Laura Poitras). Stone’s direction is assured, and his script manages to make a complex subject matter accessible even to non-specialists: As an exploration of IT security matters, Snowden is better than most similar films, with acceptable deviations from reality as we know it now. (It’s also, crucially, consistent with Citizenfour.) It’s relatively entertaining, although not without a few lengthier sections and some overly dramatic moments. Snowden is not quite as visually daring as The Fifth Estate (nor is Snowden as fascinating/infuriating as Assange), but it’s a more controlled film, and one that, I suspect, will stand the test of time quite a bit better. But that will depend quite a bit on what happens to Snowden next…

  • The Huntsman: Winter’s War (2016)

    The Huntsman: Winter’s War (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2016) The current crop of fantasy films seems hell-bent on proving that even wall-to-wall special effects can’t ensure a film that will be remembered once the end credits roll. I’ve had issues in the past with trying to write reviews of dull fantasy movies weeks after seeing the movie, but with The Huntsman: Winter’s War, I’m not taking any chances: I’m writing this the lunchtime after, because the longer I wait the less I’m going to remember any of it. It’s dull enough that I even have problems the day after. Once again, the fairy-tale inspiration has been squished through the Hollywood blockbuster screenwriting machine to produce extruded product clearly more inspired by past movies than by any kind of personal statement. This wholly unnecessary sequel to Snow White and the Huntsman completely evacuates Snow White (other than a few bogeyman-like references) to focus on the Huntsman as he’s thrown into another adventure involving the Evil Queen’s sister. Or something like that. As I said; it’s not a good movie, and it can’t even manage to be a memorable one. I think it’s slightly better than the original, but that’s by the sole virtue of not having Kirsten Stewart anywhere near the screen. Charlize Theron and Chris Hemsworth are back and they’re generally tolerable. Emily Blunt is (hilariously enough) being asked to play the more-evil-than-evil sister and the result is as unconvincing as it is disappointing. More hilariously, Jessica Chastain shows up in a skintight black leather suite to play an elite medieval assassin and that ends up being the most visually spectacular aspect of a film crammed with computer effects from beginning to end. While director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan tries his best to keep the film propped up, he can’t do much with the incoherent script that stumbles from a prequel to the sequel to the first film and never quite figures out whether it wants to be a follow-up, a Snow-Queen influenced sideshow or its own thing about love and other meaningless blather. It’s profoundly uninteresting despite the occasionally good visuals and it pretty much autodestructs upon viewing. It’s films like The Huntsman: Winter’s War that not give the fantasy genre a bad name—how about we drop the special effects and get back to an actual sense of wonder instead?

  • The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000)

    The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2016) I have never played golf and I’m sure it’s a nice excuse to go for a walk, but the lengths through which The Legend of Bagger Vance goes to add a layer of mysticism to hitting a gold ball would be impressive if they weren’t faintly ridiculous. A very young Matt Damon stars as a golf prodigy damaged by his WWI experiences and recapturing his groove during a crucial tournament. Will Smith shows up as the exemplar of the so-called “Magical Negro” trope but makes it an endearing role through folksy sayings and unaffected demeanour. Charlize Theron has a decent role as a woman trying to save her father’s gold club from closing down and at least looks the part of a southern aristocrat down to the garter belt and stockings. Other than that, and notwithstanding the magical titular character, The Legend of Bagger Vance is very much a standard underdog sports drama, ending with just enough success to feel like a victory. It does feature of lot of material in which golf becomes a proxy for genteel life philosophy. Director Robert Redford is going for a quiet period film and does manage to feature some lush scenery along the way. But the result, for some reason, seems aimed squarely at those middle-aged (and older) men trying to rationalize their love of the game to whoever will listen. No wonder I caught the movie as it was playing on the Golf Channel!

  • Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (2000)

    Nutty Professor II: The Klumps (2000)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2016) It’s movies like The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps that have me wondering whether I’m an unsuspecting alien having trouble understanding humanity. The story of the film has something to do about a scientist inventing a rejuvenating elixir, but never mind the plot: the point of the film is in showing Eddie Murphy plays half a dozen different roles in the same film, even often in the same frame. It doesn’t get more grotesque than seeing Murphy as an elderly woman sexually assaulting Murphy as himself. Oh, wait, it does get more grotesque when a character gets violated by an enlarged sex-crazed hamster. Bestiality and sodomy at once in a kid’s movie—just another day in Hollywood. I’m not saying that The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps is completely bereft of laughs. One or two jokes succeed, and seeing Janet Jackson struggle in such a terrible film almost earns her a sympathy chuckle. The anarchic plot is just a clothesline on which to hang unfunny sketches, and while Murphy occasionally hits a high note, the rest of the film feels too gross to be likable or even tolerable. Never mind my doubts about whether I’m human: The film sinks so low that I wouldn’t be surprised if the filmmakers behind the movie themselves were aliens with only a shaky understanding of human nature.