Reviews

  • The Longest Week (2014)

    The Longest Week (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, December 2014)  It’s easy to see why The Longest Week would annoy many of its viewers.  It has, after all, a pampered trust-fund protagonist (played by Jason Bateman, in a bit of a stretch from his usual everyman persona) who ends up learning about life during a week in which he’s cut off from his allowance.  Bereft of useful skills, housing, emergency money or lasting friendships, he ends up pursuing a woman despite his friend’s obvious attraction for her.  “What a cad!” seems to be the refrain, and it’s easy to be exasperated by this affluent-first-world-problems film.  It’s tough to sympathise with such a protagonist, and even tougher to actually care when he behaves so badly.  This being said, the movie isn’t as exasperating as the preceding may suggest: Droll narration bolsters the movie almost as much as the raw charm of Bateman and Olivia Wilde as the love interest.  The slight dialogue and scattered laughs mean that even if this romantic comedy fails, it fails to the generally amiable level of average romantic comedies –which is to say that you don’t have too bad of a time watching it.  The Longest Week is a bit smug and precious and pretentious, but it’s charming in its own one-percenter-narcissistic-Manhattanite way, which is quite a bit more than you’d think.

  • Serbuan maut 2: Berandal [The Raid 2: Berandal] (2014)

    Serbuan maut 2: Berandal [The Raid 2: Berandal] (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2014)  I really thought I’d like this movie more.  After all, I’m a big fan of the original The Raid, which managed to bring back the best in action moviemaking (long shots, focused premise, physical stunts from the actors) in a tight and intense package.  I love the Asian tradition of action filmmaking, and The Raid 2 got rave reviews ever since its festival debut.  Alas, and this may be more of a reflection of the way I have to watch movies these days, it quickly became obvious that The Raid 2 was going to be interminable.  Clocking at a hefty 150 minutes, The Raid 2 seems lost in subplots, too-similar in its execution and diffuse when it should have been as tightly plotted as its predecessor.  There are two or three prologues, far too many fights that look the same, and an overall blandness to it all.  I was unexplainably bored through much of it, my patience (and available time) sorely tested by the results.  Fortunately, there are highlights.  In a film that’s too long, the car chase feels too short.  Director Gareth Evans shows that he’s one of the best action directors of the moment by letting his trained actors show what they can do in a series of long shots.  The cinematography is occasionally impressive, and it I had been in a mood to better appreciate the twists and turns of the sprawling plot, I’m sure I would have been a bit more upbeat about the result.  While I reserve the right to change my mind after a more relaxed viewing, I reluctantly concede that The Raid 2 is a bit of a dud as far as I’m concerned: too long, to meandering and too unfocused to best serve the incredible action sequences that it contains.

  • (500) Days of Summer (2009)

    (500) Days of Summer (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2014)  Romantic comedies are too-often considered from the point of view of the woman that it’s still a bit of a novelty when one is told from the point of view of the man.  It’s even rarer to tell a very funny film about a relationship that doesn’t end well.  I’m not spoiling much about the film given its definitive title and non-linear narration, in which we jump back and forth between the seasons of a romance, and know that it’s not going to end with the union of the protagonists.  How we get there, however, it more than part of the charm.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt (offering an interesting counterpoint to his latter role in Don Jon) plays the protagonist, a young man infatuated with the idea of romantic love and having the misfortune of loving someone who definitely doesn’t.  The film is told from his perspective so closely that the female lead character isn’t much more than a superficial façade behind which he stuffs his hopes and dreams.  (Ironic points for casting Zooey Deschannel, often better liked for her persona than her specific characters)  That it doesn’t quite work like that is part of the film’s ironies.  Fortunately, the writing of the film is crisp and hip (musical number?  Sure!), blending modern cynicism with very real heartbreak.  That it works, and ends on a relatively high note (not only punning on the film’s title, but appropriately – for a budding architect- climaxing within Los Angeles’ Bradbury building) is an eloquent testimony to the film’s peppiness, from two likable lead actors to a style that throws everything on-screen in a dizzying montage of narration, pop music, flights of fancy and plain old good moviemaking –it’s an impressive debut for director Marc Webb, who should take a break from the meaningless Spider-Man films and get back to these kind of films.  Occasionally hipsterish, (500) Days of Summer nonetheless feels like an original take on an overdone genre, and more than worth a look even for those who think they are tired of romantic comedies.

  • Gran Torino (2008)

    Gran Torino (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2014)  The advantage of being director/actor Clint Eastwood is being famous enough to indulge into a bit of self-deconstruction with wider archetypical implications.  At least that’s the message I’m getting from Gran Torino, which seems delighted to mess around with ideas of masculinity as often set in stone by Eastwood.  The dramatic possibilities are obvious once the basic premise is established: an isolated widower, displeased at the immigrant family moving next door, forced to coach an aimless teenager about the finer points of what it means to be a man.  Squinting, grunting and cursing like a self-parody of himself, Eastwood eventually punches through his caricature to reveal a different kind of steely resolve, one that shows self-sacrifice as being the ultimate expression of service.  As with most of Eastwood’s films, Gran Torino doesn’t play well with details: The actors (all chosen from within a select ethnic group, causing controversies best described on Wikipedia) aren’t all fine thespians, and Gran Torino plays better as a story than a piece of cinematographic art.  Still, it flows nicely, deals with social issues of clashing ethnicity and justice and does offer a bit of an unconventional take on the big dramatic finale.  Irreverent, surprisingly sentimental in a very “crying manly tears” fashion, Gran Torino does stand not only as an interesting film in its own right, but kind of a last-days answer to many films in Eastwood’s filmography.

  • Ride Along (2014)

    Ride Along (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, December 2014)  By now, the mismatched-buddy-cop routine is old, so it’s more a matter of execution than originality of premise.  Here, Kevin Hart gets to play a diminutive motor-mouth trying to impress a grizzled police officer in order to earn his approval to marry his sister.  It’s all familiar stuff (and no one will go see Ride Along in order to make sense of its criminal subplot), but fortunately it’s sufficiently well-made to carry viewers along for the ride.  Ice Cube as a gruff cop is now practically typecasting (although there’s a pretty funny flash-cut with a Cypress Hill sting), and he plays it as well as anyone could.  Hart himself is also funny in a role that easily could have turned annoying.  The film is by-the-number (in fact, so by-the-number that you can find an admiring mention of its early script in the 2004 formula-screenwriter’s-bible Save the Cat!) but unobjectionably charming in its own mass-market sanitized way.  It may not amount to much, but it’s a decent time-waster.

  • Sex Tape (2014)

    Sex Tape (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Video on Demand, December 2014)  Someday, a more advanced civilization will comb over sex-themed mainstream American comedies to analyze the trouble psyche of North America and the results won’t be pretty.  They’ll wonder at the strange blend of titillation and reprobation that seem to form the backbone of such movies and conclude ghastly things about our hang-ups, our push-pull relationship to sex and the ways we compartmentalize aspects of our lives.  In the meantime, we get to enjoy the cheeky-but-never-arousing Sex Tape, which seems determined to stay on the good old grounds of humiliation comedy as soon as naughtiness is involved.  To be fair, Cameron Diaz and an unusually-gaunt Jason Segel seem game to do just about anything in order to get laughs –still, it’s the supporting players who often get the best scenes, whether it’s Ellie Kemper and Rob Corddry sharing one of the film’s rare truly-naughty moments, or Rob Lowe playing up to type as a coked-out boss.  The film gets a decent amount of chuckles and grins, but often feels like a wasted opportunity by playing it as safe as possible given the subject matter.  As such, Sex Tape ends up in an unremarkable wasteland of conventional comedies, curiously forgettable despite the subject matter. 

  • Intouchables [The Intouchables] (2011)

    Intouchables [The Intouchables] (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2014)  Some movies seem to come out of nowhere even when you’re paying attention, and so I recently realized that I hadn’t seen Intouchables even though it had received an astonishing number of box-office admissions, reviews, awards and popular votes on IMDB.  Of course, North-America viewers may be excused: The film wasn’t widely released in the US, but was a striking success elsewhere in the world (including in its native France, when it raked up more than 19 million tickets sold) and if you check the details of its high IMDB ranking, you can see the difference.  You will ask, of course, whether the film deserves this overseas success, and the answer will be comforting: As a story about a paraplegic French aristocrat who hires a poor black man as his caretaker, Intouchables has almost all of the checklist items for heartwarming Oscar-bait movies: Physical disability, class struggle, romance, triumph-of-the-human-spirit stuff, etc.  But Intouchables does more than the strict minimum, most remarkably allowing us early on to laugh along with the disabled character rather than being put off by his condition.  The first five minutes, remarkably enough, give us a nighttime car chase through Paris highways that results in a high-comedy sequence that sets the tone for the rest of the film.  Disability here isn’t to be pitied, and while most of the film revolves around the impoverished, borderline-criminal young man (Omar Sy, in a compelling performance) who becomes an aristocrat’s caretaker, the far more interesting character is the aristocrat (played by François Clouzet, incredibly likable) who voluntarily chooses to entrust his life to such an irreverent character.  It’s based on a true story, but loosely enough not to matter.  While the film does have a number of lengthy moments, a weak ending and some on-the-nose segments, it’s insidiously effective –by the time it’s over, it manages to follow a fairly rote formula in a way that’s lively and entertaining enough to be enjoyable.

  • The Notebook (2004)

    The Notebook (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2014)  I’m not a big fan of big romantic dramas, but in the decade since it was released, The Notebook has become a modern classic-of-sorts in its genre, as essential viewing for romance fans as, say, the contemporary Shaun of the Dead can be for zombie fans.  And despite the cynicism that one can bring to it, The Notebook remains curiously effective in large part due to great performances and a killer hook of an ending that wraps it as definitely as any romance can.  This is, obviously, the film that has made Ryan Gosling famous as a sex-symbol, and solidified a Hollywood career for Rachel McAdams – their onscreen performance is compelling (although by now nearly everyone knows that they weren’t getting along at the time) and their much-lauded poster-making rainstorm kiss scene can impress even the curmudgeons in the audience.  Director Nick Cassavetes goes old-school in the way he helms the film, and that earnestness helps sell the old-fashioned story being told.  The last few minutes are exceptionally effective, and cement the film’s high-drama romance.  While The Notebook may not target me, there’s no denying how well it works at its intended goals, and deserves its place as a film whose reputation has grown in the years since its release.

  • Don Jon (2013)

    Don Jon (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2014) Has Joseph Gordon-Lewitt become the spokesman for an entire generation?  That’s a lot of pressure to put on a guy’s shoulders, but in comparing Don Jon with (500) Days of Summer, it’s hard to avoid feeling that in-between those two characters, he’s tackling how modern young men feel about love.  But whereas his (500) Days of Summer character was a hopeless romantic, his Don Jon is a cynical, stunted ladies’ man addicted to pornography, to a point where it’s cutting him off from the world.  It takes an encounter with an equally-addicted romantic movie fan (Scarlett Johanssen, playing against type as an unlikable urban princess) for him to grow up a bit.  That Gordon-Lewitt would take on such a role is impressive enough, but to find out that he both wrote and directed the film makes it even more impressive.  Don Jon is at its best in its first two-thirds, as the story remains relatable and sharp-witted observational (the Swiffer scene is the one that remains in my mind weeks after seeing the film); the last third gets a bit preachy and far-fetched to its own detriment.  I would have liked to see a bit more commentary on the toxic pull of romantic comedies and a little bit less of the ending’s easy sentimentalism.  Still, as a directorial debut Don Jon is self-assured enough to be interesting, with good performances from good actors and a script that’s both funny and insightful.  Let’s hope we won’t have to wait too long for Gordon-Lewitt’ next film as a writer/director.

  • The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

    The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2014) There are few surprises in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.  If you’ve read the Suzanne Collins book, it’s a pretty faithful adaptation.  If you haven’t, then it’s a straight continuation of the previous film, with somewhat better direction by Francis Lawrence and a structure that consciously echoes the first film… before breaking out of it.  Jennifer Lawrence continues to be the anchor of the series, while Josh Huchinson does his best to stay out of the way.  The background details of that imagined future still don’t make sense, and the story gradually picks up steam until it sparks into the long-awaited insurrection.  Otherwise, though, it’s serviceable without being particularly memorable.  It sets down the necessary element required for the sequel.  If that’s less than enthusiastic as a reaction, it’s largely because there’s a glut of such young-adult films all crowding the marketplace and their cynical intentions are only too apparent.  It is what it is, though, and as far as execution is concerned, this second volume is competent enough, with just a bit more spark to it than the first film.  Bring on the third and fourth movies… it’ll have to end at some point.

  • Bruce Almighty (2003)

    Bruce Almighty (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2014)  A good chunk of Jim Carrey’s early filmography from Ace Ventura to Liar, Liar (both also directed by Bruce Almighty’s Tom Shadyac) is made of high-concept comedies built around Carrey’s mannerisms,: Past 2003, Carrey would attempt more and more dramatic roles, and his return to comedy would either feel dated or aimed in a different direction.  In this light, Bruce Almighty certainly feels like the last in a good Shadyac / Carrey line-up, offering Carrey the chance to play both mild-mannered everyday-man and unhinged rubber-faced maniac.  The premise couldn’t be simpler: Following a terrible day, an ordinary man curses God and is given his powers and responsibilities to see if he would do better.  As an excuse for Carrey to play with divine powers, it couldn’t be better: water parts, girlfriends get curvier and various religion-based puns rain down on the audience.  It’s not hilarious, but it’s relatively amusing, almost entirely unthreatening despite the religious subject matter and Carrey gets one good reason to play the kind of comedy that made him famous.  Morgan Freeman is perfect as God, while Steve Carell has an early supporting role as a foil and Jennifer Aniston is cute but unremarkable as the perfunctory girlfriend.  For all of the chuckles, though, there are few outright laughs, and the film’s insistence to remain respectfully grounded (all the way to third-act sermons) stops its absurdity from being more gripping.  The results, in other words, don’t quite live up to the premise and the result settles for a middling average.

  • The Forever War, Joe Haldeman

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin, 1975 (2009 reprint), 288 pages, ISBN 978-0312536633

    I have spent a good chunk of my reading time this year rereading a few Science-Fiction classics (Card, Heinlein, etc.), usually to disappointing results: Finding out that old favourites haven’t aged well since one’s teenage years is common enough that SF fans often use the expression “visited by the suck fairy” to describe how books seem to curdle on their own once reread with a contemporary (and often, more personally mature) perspective.

    So it is that I’m overjoyed to report that Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War has not been perceptively visited by the suck fairy. It remains just as interesting now as when it was published forty years ago, and it has lost little of its qualities since then. (This being said, keep in mind that I was reading the 1997 “definitive” edition, notable chiefly for including a middle section that wasn’t in the version I read twenty years ago, along with a number of small fixes here and there.)

    The story is familiar enough: An unwilling man is drafted in the war effort against an alien race, and (thanks to the wonders of time dilatation) ends up living through the ensuing multi-millennium war. Through his relatively contemporary perspective, readers find themselves pushed farther and farther in an equally alien future. There’s military action, romance, savvy SF devices deployed well and hard-hitting enough narration to make the novel instantly gripping, even from its classic first line (“Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.”) It’s not an accident if it’s from a Vietnam veteran who was wounded in combat.

    The lineage that The Forever War owes to an entire tradition of military Science Fiction (most notably Heinlein’s Starship Troopers) is obvious, as are its intentions to subvert some of the inherent heroism in the genre. It’s notable, for instance, that the protagonist of the book isn’t a particularly good warrior, and that his only notable feat of military prowess comes very late in the novel—until then, he accidentally survives through luck and caution.

    Interestingly enough, it’s that grounded view of military service that has allowed The Forever War to survive through the decades. War, Haldeman seems to be saying, is not noble or glorious when you’re the grunt on the frontlines: it’s a scramble for survival, it’s something that separates you from your loved ones, it’s in service of other people who may not care all that much about you. The profound sense of alienation that carries through the novel was partially meant to reflect the aftermath of Vietnam for its veterans, but it still carries a potent charge today when measured against other more triumphant military-SF novels. In many ways, The Forever War is both a veteran’s novel, but one that can be readily understood, and championed, by readers without a minute of military service.

  • 300: Rise of an Empire (2014)

    300: Rise of an Empire (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2014)  My strongest reaction to the first 300 back in 2004, once past the first few garish beheadings, was the realization that I had suddenly been kicked out of the “young males, 18 to 34” demographic category: I found the film excessive, manufactured, far too violent and aimed at younger viewers.  So, in saying that the sequel isn’t too bad, I’m just coming to terms with the idea that I’m even older than I was back then.  Striking a balance between more of the same and a little bit of new, 300: Rise of an Empire wraps itself around the original film by explaining the origins of its antagonist, taking place alongside the first movie’s timeline and concluding a little bit later.  Director Noam Murro renews with the heavy (and bloody) post-processing aesthetics of the Zack Snider original, but benefits from a script that takes place largely in a naval environment, allowing for a bit of extra variety to the visuals.  Sullivan Stapleton is no Gerald Butler as the lead, but Eva Green makes a strong impression as the quasi-demented antagonist and almost single-handedly makes the film watching for something other than visual style.  Otherwise, it’s a slick historical action war movie, which is to say that it’ll please a certain viewership and doesn’t cater to others.  Worth a look, but maybe not a thought.  

  • The Zero Theorem (2013)

    The Zero Theorem (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2014) I actually had big hopes for this film.  Director Terry Gilliam is a true iconoclast, and his filmography contains a number of classics.  But then again, his filmography is also filled with less-successful material and lengthy pauses between projects.  Alas, The Zero Theorem doesn’t qualify as a success: While thematically ambitious and as visually intriguing as most of his other projects, this science-fiction film unfolds without rigor, letting its excesses run wild while not ensuring that the basic demands of the plot are met.  There are moment of wit (including a gigantic sign telling park visitors what not to do in great detail) and intriguing characters: Christoph Waltz is good in a nearly-unrecognizable role, whereas Mélanie Thierry makes for an unconventional romantic interest; Matt Damon and Tilda Swinton are unexpectedly fun in small roles.  Still, The Zero Theorem’s existentialist musings quickly devolve into pure incomprehensible yadda-yadda, choosing pretention over substance.  The story has tone issues that the film’s manic design only makes worse, while the conclusion doesn’t do much to bring all of the separate plot threads into a satisfying conclusion.  It’s a film best appreciated (and then again, not that much) by cinephiles and Gilliam completists rather than general audiences who will watch it and shrug: The Zero Theorem ends by disproving itself.

  • About Time (2013)

    About Time (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2014) On one hand, this is a terrible science-fiction film.  On the other hand, this is an excellent science-fiction film.  Those aren’t necessarily contradictions, if you accept that SF is at its best when it aims to illuminate facets of humanity and if you accept that genre SF has evolved to be as self-consistent as possible.  Written and directed by Richard Curtis, a talented artist with no background in genre SF, About Time firmly belongs to the naïve school of SF that believes that the worst logical flaws are irrelevant as long as viewers are moved by the emotional consequences of the science-fictional device.  And on that point, About Time is quite successful: While its time-traveling device isn’t much more that fuzzy wish-fulfilment (go in a closet, close your fists and wish really hard) with no consistent set of rules save for those that can be ignored by dramatic impact, the film does manage to poke at some of life’s biggest emotional dilemmas in a way that feels relatively fresh.  It helps, of course, that it’s part of the gentle British rom-com tradition: Domhnall Gleeson makes for an affable romantic hero, whereas Bill Nighy steals every scene as an amiable man who has figured out much of his life.  The film is a bit of a slow burn, starting in firmly comic territory before going into heavier themes.  Sure, it’s frustrating that the rules of the premise don’t seem to hold together, or that lies seem built-in most of the protagonist’s relationships.  But the film itself is pure charm, and such likability goes a long way in leaving viewers with a big smile and a bit of a heartache.