Reviews

  • Merry Swissmas (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2022) If you feel that I’m spending a lot of time justifying why I choose to watch some Christmas films, you’re not wrong—it doesn’t take a lot of perfunctory made-for-TV holiday movies to figure out that they’re made to be alike. Plotting is irrelevant, casting is usually a non-factor, production values are low and everything has the awkward, barely cinematic atmosphere of something done quick and cheap. So: what is it that distinguishes Merry Swissmas from others of the same ilk? Well, Jodie Sweetin stars in it, and she was one of the facets of Fuller House I liked best. So why not? It’s not as if those films are meant to be demanding after all. But star power only takes you so far, and Merry Swissmas’s clunky attempts to iterate on the usual formula aren’t any better. The big difference in plotting, as much as I can tell, is that our usual big-city career professional heroine goes back “home” not to a small American town, but to the inn that her mother manages in the Swiss Alps. But this international fillip aside (complete with “Swiss Christmas traditions” that may or may not be wildly exaggerated), there’s not a lot of difference here. Of course, she’ll meet an eligible bachelor and it’s not a minute’s worth of contemplation about whether she wants to slow down her jet-setting lifestyle that changes much. The “Swiss” atmosphere is made of stock footage and French-Canadian Laurentians locations dressed up in pseudo-European style. The rest of it isn’t much better—there’s a kid to cheer up, past wrongs to right, miscommunications to clarify and everything leads to a Christmas climax. Sweetin isn’t particularly good and neither is co-star Tim Rozon, but their performances barely matter in a film that would rather give you an overdose of Christmas clichés than build anything that could stand on its own. Fortunately, Christmas movies life Merry Swissmas fail gracefully: they may not be good, but they’re hard to hate. On the other hand, they do lead viewers to become selective about the ones they choose to watch.

  • Fatman (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, December 2022) You probably don’t know this because you probably don’t live in the Ottawa area, but much local press was written and said about Mel Gibson being in town to shoot Fatman. Taking advantage of a robust TV-movie filmmaking industry, the producers of the film ended up in (and around) Ottawa to portray the cold snowy landscapes required by the script, and many people went nuts over the possibility of seeing the once-disgraced veteran actor walking around. Breathless celebrity sightings clearly showed Ottawa’s lack of detachment when it comes to real celebrities—politicians barely count unless it’s an American president. All of this to say that Fatman’s production got a lot of local chatter. Few bothered to follow up on the finished film, and it’s just as well, because Fatman is an ill-conceived clunker that doesn’t exactly cover mercifully unidentified Ottawa in any glory. The premise feels like a rejected sketch idea: What if Santa was real and a dissatisfied boy hired a hitman to kill him? What maybe could have been spun into something entertaining is here executed with a lack of budget, grace, wit or tonal unity. Going for a gritty dark gory atmosphere feels like a juvenile re-thread of fairly common ground when it comes to Christmas horror, but brother-filmmakers Eshom and Ian Nelmsare are clearly hampered by a few things. Portraying Santa’s Alaskan workshop as an Eastern Ontario farm but trying to create a world in which elves toil on manufacturing lines to serve the US Army is irreconcilable, and that’s after the gory plot (featuring Walter Goggins as an ace assassin) gets going. A tremendously loathsome 12-year-old character drives much of the film, but the film itself often feels like a sociopathic fantasy badly executed. The suspension of disbelief never happens, and we’re left to gawk at the many ways the film fumbles. By the time Gibson and Goggins’ characters are blowing holes into each other with firearms in freezing temperatures, it’s not much of an action climax—it’s a relief that things are going to be over soon. It’s not a complete disaster: Goggins is up to his usual standards, while Marianne Jean-Baptiste is the most likable character here. (Gibson may have turned heads when he was in town, but I much would have rather run into Goggins or Jean-Baptiste.)  Some of the action beats almost work when taken in isolation from their larger context. The rest, though? It’s a film that doesn’t have a consistent tone, relishes in pointless violence, doesn’t have the budget of its ambitions, and repeatedly mishandles its material. There’s very little satirical material here, for instance, and the film doesn’t put in the work required to make us believe in Santa Claus. Perhaps it’s for the best that the film’s Ottawan fame stayed limited to its production.

  • A Perfect Christmas List (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2022) Sigh… another December, another TV schedule filled with generic Christmas movies, most of them made-for-TV according to a low budget, formulaic screenplay and non-existent cinematic ambitions. I’ll give a shot to a few of them just to recalibrate my expectations and make sure they’re gone from my DVR by the time December 26 is done. A Perfect Christmas List certainly doesn’t reinvent the wheel, as a woman staying with her parents for the holidays ends up the victim of a scheme to re-create the Christmases of her childhood (by following the titular list), and finds a hunky piece of Christmas candy cane along the way. What brought me to the film was seeing writer-director Fred Olen Ray in the credits—someone who used to be infamous for terrible low-budget horror movies but has, over the past decade, largely transitioned to a steady four-films-a-year career as a TV movie director. Not enough attention is given to those workhorses of TV, although that can be justified by the lack of authorial voice in the results. A Perfect Christmas List, which dates from early in his transition to TV-movie-land, is remarkable in being unremarkable. The script hinges on the kind of miscommunication that could be resolved in ten seconds (or less: “Are you dying?” “No, I’m not dying!”) but propels characters to act out of their comfort zone for however long it takes to deliver the manufactured Christmas cheer. It’s hardly worth getting annoyed about the numerous issues with the script, the direction, the directing or the actor—the film is meant to be innocuous, and it’s hard to get worked up about something like that. But as a representative of how even a shock-horror filmmaker can be completely captured and neutered by the demands of a TV film formula, A Perfect Christmas List is near-exemplary: the pay cheque depends on slavish adherence to what is expected, and there’s nothing in here to suggest a director with loftier (or subversive) ambitions.

  • Ivan Groznyy. Skaz vtoroy: Boyarskiy zagovor [Ivan Groznyy: Part II] (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, December 2022) You can go and take a look at my review of Ivan Groznyy Part I to largely know how I feel about this Part II. Although I did like this one a bit better—it moves more, it’s not stuck in a dark room with people blathering endlessly, and it’s a bit less adoring of its subject Ivan IV. On the other hand, those are the qualities that led to the film being locked up for ten years, Stalin not being happy with the result. (Completed in 1946, the film was finally released in 1958, ten years after writer-director Sergei Eisenstein’s death.)  A few colour sequences appear toward the end of the film, breaking some of its monotony. I’m really just logging this as “seen”—with no intention of revisiting it.

  • Ivan Groznyy [Ivan Groznyy: Part I] (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, December 2022) Uuuugh. Trying to complete a list of best foreign movies of the cold war era often lands us behind the iron curtain, where some seriously dull films were unexplainably hailed and praised by the Western critical establishment. Seen from a twenty-first century perspective, there’s got to be something we don’t understand anymore about that praise—often an attempt to stick it to Red Ivan, sometimes an attempt at détente, sometimes… I don’t know, maybe an honestly good movie. Too bad I’ll never have the patience to find out for myself, because Ivan Groznyy, a few days after viewing, has settled in my mind in an interminable series of tableaux surrounding the coronation of Ivan IV, an endless series of conversations between people with funny hats. Am I being near-sacrilegious? Well, yes: The reverence with which this film is regarded remains considerable. This is the first part of writer-director Sergei Eisenstein’s last movie, after all, and it regularly pops up on extended best-movies-of-all-time lists. But there’s a gulf between its importance and its watchability and I fall right in it.

  • The Bitch Who Stole Christmas (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2022) Ugh. It’s barely mid-December and I’m already sick of Christmas movies, with their formulaic premises, too-nice characters and bland execution. Which probably explains why I like The Bitch Who Stole Christmas a lot more right now than I would at any other time of the year. Hastily put together by Ru Paul’s Drag Race creative team, this is a film that applies maximum drag camp to the usual Christmas movie clichés. There’s something like only one cisgendered woman in the cast and it doesn’t matter, because the result is a direct takedown to all of those Hallmark Christmas romantic comedies that all look and feel alike. Obviously, the story has to do with a big-city girl returning to her Christmas-obsessed small-town roots and falling in love again with an old flame. But it’s all in the details, and despite a miserable production budget, The Bitch Who Stole Christmas goes all-in on sight gags, quippy dialogue (some of it right at the edge of its TV-14 rating), inane plotting and ridiculous set-pieces. On purely objective grounds, this is not a good movie: the acting is obvious, the story makes little sense, the directing is indifferent, the sets are built with hope and baling twine, and the entire thing is so self-indulgent as to defy audiences unfamiliar with RuPaul’s growing media empire. But if, like me, you have little interest in drag but a huge score to settle with bland Xmas romcoms, there’s still a good chance that The Bitch Who Stole Christmas will make you chuckle a little. It’s fun, and it’s clearly very aware of what it’s trying to do. I may even watch it next year—if dull Christmas movies are the poison, this is the antidote.

  • Zemlya [Earth] (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, December 2022) I should know better than to watch two Soviet-era films on successive days, because my reservoir of goodwill was exhausted by Strike, and all I have left for Earth is vague sarcasm. (Or, alternately, Strike is so good that Earth doesn’t measure up.)  It’s not, strictly speaking, a bad movie. But it does drop us in a singularly forlorn era in history—rural Ukraine after the formation of the Soviet Union, and the collectivization process that had such an impact on everyone. Much of the film thus turns around a tractor. Yes, a tractor. This is a tractor-centric film. A film that falls apart if you take away the tractor. Look, I probably logged more tractor-driving hours than anyone else reading these lines, but a tractor is a tractor and there’s not a whole lot you can do with that. Sure, the tractor is a metaphor, symbol and distillation of the autobiographical material that writer-director Oleksandr Dovzhenko wants to present here. And it’s important to note at this point in history that the pro-Ukranian viewpoint espoused by the film led to a decidedly chilly reception of the film back in Soviet Russia. But you’ll have to steel yourself for a whole lot of tractors to make it to the end.

  • Kurutta ippêji [A Page of Madness] (1926)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, December 2022) If you want to go way, way back in Japanese horror movies, it’s hard to do better than 1926’s A Page of Madness—so far back, in fact, that the film was lost for 45 years and only resurfaced in 1971. But no matter how old the film is, writer-director Teinosuke Kinugasa (working with creators such as the later Nobel laureate for Literature Yasunari Kawabata) delivers something eerie and effective. This is far less about plot (indeed, there aren’t that many title cards—make sure you’ve got Wikipedia open to make sense of it) as much as it’s about surreal images, fractured chronology, and themes of mental illness. It’s quite a thing, even though admiration may not translate into simple liking. Still—A Page of Madness is an early work of cinema that, despite obvious technical limitations, anticipates far more complex filmmaking that would only become more common decades later.

  • Paradise Highway (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2022) How can such an interesting premise lead to something so dull? In Paradise Highway, Juliette Binoche plays a world-weary veteran trucker who gets mixed up in a sordid human trafficking ring. Much of the film takes place in dimly lit truck stops, open highways and run-down remnants of American infrastructure. Morgan Freeman plays a weary FBI agent without much energy, while Frank Grillo briefly shows up as well. It’s all shot in gritty, dirty, near-incidental style (except for the glamour shots reserved for the trucks driving down the highway). There are a few things that work, or at least deliver more than the strict minimum—the insider’s look at the life of a professional trucker, for instance, or the underbelly of criminality taking minors across state lines. But while writer-director Anna Gutto may have started with the best of intentions, the result at the end of the process feels like a dull underpowered uninteresting third-rate thriller. There’s little energy to Paradise Highway, almost no action whatsoever and (predictably) little humour to make it interesting. Some effort to build character and sympathy for the victim is admirable but ultimately wasted in a film that doesn’t have what it takes, either for a serious drama or for an exploitation thrill ride.

  • Stachka [Strike] (1925)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Criterion Streaming, December 2022) Despite the rougher technical qualities of his films, I usually find Sergei Eisenstein more interesting than Tarkovsky in the grand pantheon of Russian filmmakers. Tarkovsky is incredibly dull even when he plays with interesting ideas, while Eisenstein feels like a giddy kid just trying stuff in the new cinema toolbox and does all of that in the service of a vigorous moral/political agenda. In Strike, we go deep into the making of a labour action in pre-Revolutionary Russia, from the initial spark to the way the strike is violently put down. This being Eisenstein’s first feature-length film, it’s rough. But you can already see the fundamentals of his “montage of attractions,” the overt use of cinematic metaphors (intercutting animal footage to heighten emotional reactions, for instance) and an aggressive approach to its ideological intentions. As you can expect, the film is deeply sympathetic to the strikers and not at all toward management—but don’t necessarily expect a happy ending. Few movies of the 1920s are as visually interesting as Strike, and few as engaged either. It all makes for a piece of essential early cinema—interesting even today, even without sound, even with the limited means at its disposal.

  • Marlowe (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2022) Oh my. There are many things in Marlowe that I like a lot. There’s the hard-boiled fiction/film noir angle that inspired it. There’s the dependable James Garner, Rita Moreno and even Bruce Lee in two short scenes. There’s the permissiveness of the late 1960s, finally able to mention what dared not be mentioned during the Production Code years. With those things in place, it’s fine to wonder—how can this fail? Well, I’ll tell you how: By taking the material unseriously, then very seriously. By not understanding what made noir so much fun. By miscasting, misdirecting, and mishandling material in a flippant fashion. I really do like Garner a lot, and I see how casting him in a contemporary update to Philip Marlowe made sense at the time: he could be smooth, he could (to a lesser extent) be tough, and he could be likable or sexy, depending on the audience. I can also see how updating Marlowe to a semi-comic contemporary attitude could have worked for late-1960s audiences rejecting the classic Hollywood mould. Updating the setting beyond the post-WW2 years gives opportunities for the story to take advantage of the permissiveness of the time, and blending Garner, comedy and the late-1960s feels like an entirely valid choice. But you have to commit to the bit, and Marlowe doesn’t. From a light-hearted beginning and middle, it flounders in excessive darkness toward the end and thus betrays a lack of understanding of its ideal nature. Much of the blame goes to legendary screenwriter Sterling Silliphant, then a social-issues master who apparently found himself defeated by the demands of a genre potboiler. It’s not that the script is bad on fundamentals (not in the way it spins a few subplots and a labyrinthine plot in the hard-boiled tradition), it’s that it can’t make up its mind as to whether the texture of its moments should be funny or tragic. After the first two acts that are essentially comic, it goes tragic toward the end and creates a tonal problem the film can’t recover from—especially for those viewers already put off balance by seeing Marlowe charmingly quip his way past situations where its literary namesake would have shot a few people. I don’t quite dislike Marlowe—it’s got too many good things for that—but I find it clumsy, disappointing and wasteful of incredible opportunities.

  • The Black Phone (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, December 2022) One of the most bizarre things about being a jaded movie reviewer is watching a film, recognizing the elements that would justify a good review, but remaining unaffected by it all. While I can appreciate the craft in which The Black Phone is put together, or the richness of its individual elements, it still leaves me indifferent. Good movie; didn’t enjoy it all that much. I suppose that some of it has to do with the familiarity of the story. While it would be tempting to call the film Stephen-Kingesque and point to the original short story as having been written by King’s son Joe Hill (a perfectly good writer in his own right), the truth is that King has built the template for such stories: 1970s-set suburban serial-killer thrillers with a slightly supernatural angle and teenage protagonists. Or maybe Stranger Things, or Halloween, or The Lovely Bones—whatever the source, these films are popular and while The Black Phone is not too bad in execution, it’s still drawing from the same well. Writer-director Scott Derrickson is in his element here, working with horror-light material and a dark atmosphere. He structures the film with some restraint, saves a few shocks for the end (although I found one twist a bit useless) and tries to keep a balance between the spiciness of the supernatural element and the need to provide real tangible actions and victories for his human characters. It all comes together tidily, with Ethan Hawke apparently having some fun playing the villain. But I’m not overly impressed: quality film, but not for me.

  • Robin Hood (1922)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (archive.org streaming, December 2022) I won’t even try to convince you that the 1922 version of Robin Hood is worth seeing by itself. There have been several better and more accessible takes on the familiar character, and even the 1938 Erroll Flynn version is a lot more fun than this one. But if you dig into the film’s production history, you quickly come to appreciate why it’s a 1920s Hollywood landmark. For one thing, it clearly marked the early days of Hollywood as we know it—throwing an immense budget at a project designed to draw in crowds of viewers, but also mythologizing itself as this magical dream factory. Hence the construction of a castle and village set; hence a near-million dollar budget (in 1922!); hence the focus on making Douglas Fairbanks a movie idol; hence the first-even Hollywood premiere meant to highlight the glitz of the business. You can, if you want, compare and contrast how the plot is handled in a two-hour silent fashion when measured against later versions of the story. But the main appeal of Robin Hood is seeing how, even a hundred years ago, Hollywood was still behaving in the same way it does (or attempts to do) today.

  • Paint Your Wagon (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, December 2022) There’s no shame in admitting that my inner conception of a western musical comedy called Paint Your Wagon was influenced by The Simpsons imagining a film in which Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin indeed spent their time painting wagons. While singing. The real film, however, is even stranger. After meeting in strange circumstances, two men team up when a gold rush city springs up. Not even a woman (Jean Seberg) comes between them—this being budding 1969 New Hollywood, the three end up in a menage-a-trois household and the city grows larger and larger. Before long, Eastwood is walking through the wood while crooning a ballad (he’s understandably not much of a singer) and a plan is hatched to provide the male miners with “companionship” even if it means diverting a stagecoach. But the best plan is yet to come, as a subterranean caper is planned to reach and siphon off the gold dust that disappears between the planks of the local saloon. It all culminates in one of the largest comic set-pieces in film history—the destruction of an entire boom town when the tunnels start collapsing, bringing the buildings down. There are a lot of very wrong things about this film as shown—the length, the lack of comic verve, the miscasting of Eastwood, the slack rhythm, the mismatch between large-scale mayhem and character beats—and even more wrongness in the film’s production history (so much so that the already-high budget of the film doubled between approval and completion). But they will never take away the wild widescreen finale in which the entire town collapses around our main characters. In the end, “painting your wagon” means “getting things done,” and not seeing Marvin and Eastwood literally painting wagons doesn’t negate that the film is one wild ride that could only have been produced in 1969. Marvin is terrific; some of the musical numbers are pretty good; and that finale is wonderful. Slickly assembled from bits that should not be together, Paint Your Wagon is all kinds of misshapen… but it’s a great deal of fun.

  • Brilliantovaya ruka [The Diamond Arm] (1969)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, December 2022) A side effect of praise is a halo effect that comes to affect the perception of things that aren’t similar. If, like me, you’re running down the classics of world cinema, the highlighted Russian output tends to be very specific to Eisenstein and Tarkovsky and a little bit of Kalatozov. While Eisenstein can be interesting (especially in looking at the Russian editing style of early cinema) and we’re going to take Tarkovsky’s talent as undeniable, the truth is that the most celebrated Russian filmmakers are glum. They make deathly serious films with seemingly infinite running time. And while newer Russian filmmakers are just as fun and entertaining as anything Hollywood produces, I’m not sure I could have named, not sure I could have conceived, of a Russian comedy film prior to the mid 2000s. But now there’s The Diamond Arm to prove me wrong and open up that area of filmmaking. Not only is it a comedy, it’s a slapstick crime comedy, dating from the depths of the cold war. Not that you’re likely to care, because the entire thing is filmed in the kind of poppy bright colourful style that was popular in early 1960s Hollywood, and looks as if it could have been made at any time between 1960 and 1980. Our characters go on holiday in friendly countries and get embroiled in all sorts of complications when diamonds are involved. The standout performer here is Andrei Mironov, who combines movie-star good looks with some great comic timing to be the funniest actor in the film. I was very impressed by the opening minute’s frantic speed, but you may want to temper your expectations somewhat—it’s not sustained. It’s also a good idea not to expect to understand too much: a lot of the humour appears to be locked behind an insider’s knowledge of how things worked in late-1960s Russia, so we westerners may have a while to catch up. Still, the film is a bit of a ray of sunshine, illuminating a very different kind of classic Russian filmmaking. I’m told that writer-director Leonid Gaidai went on to make even better films later on, and it’s going to be interesting to track down some of them. In the meantime, if you’re curious, the film’s Mosfilm studio has officially made the film available for free on YouTube, complete with English subtitles.