Reviews

  • The Gang’s All Here (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Like many Busby Berkeley musicals, The Gang’s All Here is an otherwise average genre entry made remarkable by a few signature scenes. In this case, Berkeley’s colour debut earns its rave largely through Carmen Miranda performing “The Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat” while backed up by dozens of fruit-clad dancers – a visually inventive anthology number (girls waving gigantic bananas!) no matter how you see it. True to form, the film also scores a terrific concluding segment, “The Polka-Dot Polka,” again due to Berkeley’s staging of a large-scale hallucinatory ensemble dancer number. It’s not just in colour: It’s incredibly colourful in its design, and clearly shows how Berkeley could marry new elements to his cinematography. The rest of the film? Fair, but not particularly remarkable. The plot is equal romance, equal musical, and equal wartime propaganda. Benny Goodman and his orchestra show up for a bit part and a few numbers. There’s also a version of “Brazil” that’s good for an earworm or two. Miranda gets a really good showcase here, and Berkeley also scores a good directing coup with a complex one-shot opening sequence taking up from fiction to, well, more fiction. Some contemporary reviews made comparisons with Fantasia (I’d add 2001: A Space Odyssey) and they’re not wrong – even more so than many black-and-white Berkeley productions, The Gang’s All Here gets its best visual impact by pure shapes and movement, with the humans being mere props to a bigger vision. It may not be one of Berkeley’s very best musicals on a sustained basis, but it ranks as a can’t-miss entry in his filmography solely due to its high points.

  • Daughter of Shanghai (1937)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Until very, very recently, the history of Asian performers in Hollywood was, in a word, dismal – which makes the extraordinary career of Anna Mae Wong in the 1920s and 1930s even more remarkable. Alas, her filmography is not always pleasant to watch – her roles were often heavily smothered in exoticism even when they didn’t need to. It’s in that context that Daughter of Shanghai becomes something quite special – enough so that the film was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry in 2006: It’s a very, very rare film from Hollywood that actually gives Wong a featured role in a film that directly addresses issues of importance to the Asian-American community – in 1937! Here, Wong teams up with Philip Ahn as a pair of investigators trying to get to the top of a human smuggling ring. She plays the avenging daughter of a businessman who died resisting organized crime; he plays a federal agent on the case. As was often the case for B-grade genre films, Daughter of Shanghai breezes by at a scant 63 minutes, roaring from one plot point to another – the identity of the ringmaster is actually interesting considering the context of the film. Now, there’s a fair criticism to be made that the progressive values of the film outweigh its more traditional film qualities, or that the presence of two Asian-American leads doesn’t necessarily to a film that escapes the white-male dominance of its production crew and likely audience. That’s all true: the film is often problematic even with its qualities. But that should not lessen the landmark nature of the film’s achievements – a rare bright spot in an otherwise sorry landscape of Asian-American images in Hollywood history. Alas, it was a film released toward the end of Wong’s career – there were a few follow-ups to Daughter of Shanghai, but nothing like what it should have led to.

  • Dead of Winter (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2022) Any film that dares re-create a Gothic horror story in a somewhat modern setting gets my attention – that it happens to star the lovely Mary Steenburgen is a really nice bonus. Taking place under a deep cover of snow and ice, Dead of Winter sees a struggling actress (Steenburgen) travelling to an upstate mansion under the impression that she’s auditioning for a part in a movie. It’s for a part all right – but in a twisted familiar melodrama of familial feud, murdered women, identity replacement and amputation. Locked in the middle of nowhere, her frantic efforts to ask for help result in a devilishly frustrating confrontation with visiting police, in which her captors coolly argue that she has lost her mind. Dead of Winter, appropriately shot in Ontario, honestly comes by its Gothic credentials – it’s an unofficial remake of the 1940s domestic thriller My Name Is Julia Ross, itself adapted from The Woman in Red, a novel written in the heyday of British mystery fiction. While Roddy McDowall is suitably creepy as the antagonist, Steenburgen has a lot to do here, with the plot naturally leading her to play three different roles. The plot is almost entirely preposterous down to the importance of free gas station goldfishes (don’t ask) – but the point here is the thrill of a woman stuck in the middle of nowhere, desperately trying to escape a situation rigged against her. The film stands as director Arthur Penn’s last theatrical release – even if the true authorship of the film is muddled through a mid-production change. The result is not that good, but it’s reasonably entertaining – and a treat for Steenburgen fans.

  • Living in a Big Way (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Relying more on Gene Kelly’s comedic/romantic talents than his dance prowess, Living in a Big Way is sometimes identified as a comeback picture of sorts for him. After the doldrums of his military service, this is the film that offered him a chance to choreography a few numbers, work with Stanley Donen (who would co-direct many of his later hits) and develop his comic persona. The story is something that could only work in the immediate post-war period – servicemen coming back from the war to find that their hasty wartime weddings were not built on a solid foundation. Here, the dramatic conceit is taken to a comic extreme when his new wife proves to be much richer than he expected, and a chunk of her family leagues against him. Of course, it’s up to Kelly’s usual charm, his dance routines (including a number set on a construction site that is classic Kelly) and the intervention of the movie gods to set things straight. Living in a Big Way is not a great movie despite the pedigree of writer/director Gregory La Cava – while the post-war setting definitely makes this a film of the late 1940s, there’s a feeling that the film tries to recapture the screwball comedies of remarriage of the 1930s without quite making it work. It’s still worth a look for Kelly fans, but only just.

  • The Dyatlov Pass Incident aka Devil’s Pass (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Message to filmmakers: if you ever find yourself helming a found-footage film, turn back – you may be getting lost. One of the few things distinguishing Devil’s Pass from so many found-footage films of the early 2010s is finding that it’s from once-A-list director Renny Harlin (whose career never really recovered from Cutthroat Island). Harlin’s filmography, of course, is a weird one – from 1990s Hollywood blockbusters to cheap horror/action B-movies to a few Chinese-language movies to, well, who can say – he’s not a director with a strong personal style, and his filmography screams work-for-hire. But with Devil’s Pass, he finds himself handling a wild take on the much-overhyped Dyatlov Pass incident in which Russian hikers died under (if you believe it) mysterious circumstances. What begins as conventional found-footage horror (with American adventurers/filmmakers heading over to the site of the incident for a documentary) eventually becomes a wild science fiction narrative with time loops and mutations. That’s not exactly bad… but I’m not sure the film’s tone is under control. Those who are exasperated with found-footage films will not be converted over by this one, which has enough out-of-focus shots, constant shrieking, annoying characters, dumb decisions and footage that can’t logically exist to reaffirm the film’s belonging to the subgenre. While the opening does raise the hope that the characters will be interesting enough to follow (not always a given in the found-footage method), the rest of the film pretty much dispenses with characterization except in providing different pitches for the inevitable constant screaming. Where Devil’s Pass does better than the average, however, is in Harlin’s experienced directing and in the bonkers concluding arc that goes the extra mile in providing an interesting conclusion. So interesting, in fact, that it unbalances the rest of the film – what were we doing losing our time with those losers if there was such a neat idea waiting at the end? Alas, while this may be enough to help Devil’s Pass float above many, many other found-footage horror films, it’s not quite enough to get it to a recommendation. It feels like a lot of work for not a lot of payoff, and something that could be easily summarized as “…and they all died in mysterious circumstances you won’t care about.”

  • Highway to Hell (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2022) As far as high concepts for a horror movie go, retelling Orpheus and Eurydice in a late-1980s context is not bad nor that original – it’s not that big a surprise to find that well-known filmmaker Brian Helgeland came up with the screenplay of Highway to Hell. It helps that the film doesn’t take itself all that seriously despite its classical inspiration, and that it all starts from Las Vegas. As a young man goes to rescue his girlfriend from having been brought to hell by a zombie cop, we get a tour of a satirical vision of the netherworld mocking 1980s society. While the two lead actors remain little-known (well, depending on how you feel about Kristy Swanson), there are a few cameos in supporting roles, including pre-stardom Ben Stiller and Gilbert Gottfried, as none other than Hitler. Unfortunately, despite an imaginative premise and some occasional wit in the execution, Highway to Hell remains limited to cult-movie status: it doesn’t quite have the budget (or the special-effects sophistication) to do justice to its ambitions and must settle for an evocative approximation. Even its best moments almost do it a disservice, highlighting how much better the film could have been had it had the budget, time or additional motivation to do better. But the result is still quite a bit better than you’d expect from a little-known 1991 horror comedy.

  • Ginger e Fred (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Writer-director Federico Fellini was an old man (at 66) when Ginger e Fred was released, and it’s uncanny how much it feels like an old man’s movie. There’s the topic matter, obviously, as two aging performers accept to reprise their long-ago impersonations of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers for a vulgar TV show – This is, from the premise onward, a film about the past, whether to revive it or attempt to recapture it. This backwards-looking stance is reinforced by casting, with Fellini acolytes (Marcello Mastroianni and Giulietta Masina) echoing earlier, younger performances in his earlier films. Then there’s the film’s thematic wrapper, as it seems to grouch over the omnipresence of televisions and the vapidity of its shows. In form and function, Ginger e Fred stands between nostalgia, crankiness and wistfulness. While I won’t rank this among the best of Fellini’s work, it does have the director’s later-career blend of realism and impressionism, with some huge plot manipulations (such as a power blackout in a TV studio) as a way to heighten the drama of the piece. Both Mastroianni and Masina handle their characters well, and anchor a film that often seems to fly off in brief background tangents and small passing details. It takes a while to get going: the script’s structure is very conventional at first, only getting deeper and deeper in non-realism as it advances. But Ginger e Fred is interesting all right – both on its own, and as part of Fellini’s career.

  • Cosmic Dawn (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Ugh, what a terrible film. I don’t expect other people’s reaction to Cosmic Dawn to be quite as negative as mine, but it just happens to push a few of my buttons. For one thing, I’ll remind everyone again about the inverse relationship between serious SF fans and paranormal credulity – one of the reasons why SF fans enjoy the genre is that they know fully well the distinction between reality and woo-woo: It’s hard to find more skeptics than those in attendance at a Science Fiction conference. So, when you’ve got something like Cosmic Dawn merrily making a film about alien abduction that clearly believes in alien abduction (as writer-director Jefferson Moneo affirms in the film’s promotional material), there’s little space for dramatic tension. But that stance could have been excused had it led to something more gripping in its execution. Alas, it takes the patience of a saint (or a true believer) to sit through Cosmic Dawn’s purple-tinged duration, whether it’s an endless prologue about a girl whose mother gets abducted, repetitive scenes of weirdness in a cult housed in northern Ontario, or an overdone ending that has no surprises whatsoever. I did like a few things – most notably the idea of a used bookstore run by Emmanuelle Chriqui. But in many ways, I see in Cosmic Dawn an unimaginative deployment of several low-budget Science Fiction film clichés – weird visuals without coherence, fake-ambivalent plot developments that merely prolong a foreordained ending, a pretentious tone that is absolutely not justified by its content, “clever” twists that don’t hold up to closer scrutiny, and half-baked ideas offered as meditative. Cosmic Dawn is obnoxious when it’s not being boring, and a disappointment when it doesn’t lead to anything.

  • Dear Evan Hansen (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Good lord, have I loathed a character so thoroughly as I hate Evan Hansen? I didn’t mean to, I swear – I’m an unlikely but indefectible musical fan, and Dear Evan Hansen is not shy about the fact that it’s an adaptation of a Broadway show with characters singing their heart’s desires. But that obnoxious pipsqueak Evan Hansen is something else. From the get-go, he’s showcased as this unbearably neurotic high-schooler with severe anxiety issues that he seems unwilling to fix no matter how he got there. Are we seriously going to spend an hour and a half with this loser as our hero? But wait, it gets worse as the plot mechanics are introduced. From awkward schlub, Hansen (played by Ben Platt, then 27 and looking like it) becomes a serial liar and fabulist pretending to have been the best friend of classmate having killed himself. Caught in a vortex of comforting lies and social media attention, he keeps digging the hole that will inevitably swallow him… and the film asks us to think of him as a poor pitiable victim. Oh my. Hell no. I did like a few things, mind you: the “Sincerely, Me” number is a great use of cinema in illustrating a musical number, and Amandla Stenberg makes a reliably strong impression. But the rest is often unbearable. Dear Evan Hansen strikes me as a film that has already aged very quickly and very poorly – a reflection, perhaps unconscious, of the most annoying trends and pretensions of the late 2010s. But, hey, I’m old and not the target audience for the film – you decide whatever you want to believe.

  • Double Impact (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) You can see in Double Impact the intention to make Jean-Claude van Damme a more respected actor – through the now-familiar trick of having him play two roles as estranged twin brothers. It’s not that much of a stretch – and there’s enough fighting action to reassure viewers that he’s still an action star even in playing two roles. The messy plot relies on a familiar blend of criminals, smugglers, drug shipments, clubs, triads, explosives and a shipping containers climax. The Hong Kong location adds atmosphere to the story and bodybuilder Corinna Everson brings something interesting to a henchwoman role (although – weren’t bodybuilding female villains a flash-in-time kind of trope back then?), but this isn’t a particularly memorable action film. Even the love scene is… a jealousy-powered dream sequence? Weird. The twins-gimmick is surely more memorable than many other early van Damme films, and there’s some stunt work to bring this somewhere else than a straight-up fighting film. In the end, though, Double Impact is a serviceable action film for fans of the lead actor… and something substantially duller for anyone else.

  • South of Heaven (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Look, filmmakers: You can’t just declare your film to be neo-noir and expect that everyone will agree with you out of sympathy – you have to put some work into it, and make sure you at least understand the aesthetic and thematic core of noir. Or you can do like writer-director Aharon Keshales does in South of Heaven and just throw up stuff in the movie without really caring whether it’s tonally consistent, whether it undercuts other parts of the film, whether it’s the best use of the actors or whether it’s more than a blend of predictable tropes and incoherent plotting. You can, sometimes, see the glimpses of a more successful film in South of Heaven… if only it could stick to an approach for more than five minutes, or at least try to execute the familiar clichés in an engaging fashion. Instead, we get an ex-felon returning to his dying wife, getting embroiled in a criminal overlord’s sombre schemes out of sheer happenstance (even though there are plenty of hints about him being tempted by criminal activity), reacting in interesting ways, but seeing his plans unravel in dark comic fashion. There are about five and a half genres in that brief plot summary alone, and the film itself is no better when watched one minute after another. Featuring Evangeline Lily in the worst imaginable haircut and a miscast Jason Sudeikis acting tough, South of Heaven makes too many mistakes to avoid being ridiculed. At some point, everything the film does, every choice it makes simply feels like a wrong one. It whiplashes from comedy to tragedy to suspense to indifference faster than you’d think possible. From time to time, it gets a good idea (such as the protagonist kidnapping his enemy’s son to turn the tables) but blows that lead with something stupid. An unimaginable coincidence powers much of the plot, and the film goes for a moody ending that just screams pretentiousness once we’re already done caring for whatever happens during the action-driven climax. There are misfires and then there’s South of Heaven, a constant far-too-long parade of mismatched script pages glued together. That it’s not a complete failure (thanks to Mike Colter, an audacious one-shot, or occasionally shifts in power relationships) only makes the result feel worse. Skip it – there’s only frustration here.

  • Teen Titans Go! & DC Super Hero Girls: Mayhem in the Multiverse (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2022) Is it a valid criticism if the film itself hits you in the face with it? Looking at its title, Teen Titans Go! & DC Super Hero Girls: Mayhem in the Multiverse promises a team-up or a fight (or probably both) between the Teen Titans Go! crew and the DC Superhero Girls. Alas, the wilder Teen Titans primarily end up being sarcastic commenters on a story that involves the superhero girls. This is an issue, especially since fans of the anarchic Teen Titans Go humour may be bored by the far more conventional (and non-comedic) antics of the Super Hero Girls. But here’s the thing: poking at the fourth wall as they usually do, even the Titans comment on their lack of involvement in the show. Sure, there’s a coda that gets them fighting to save the multiverse, but it feels like a half-hearted contractual obligation. The result is a disappointment no matter how you slice it: the Superhero Girls feel undercut in their own films, while the Titans feel overly constrained. They will probably attempt something a lot like it again in a few years – let’s just hope it will be better.

  • The Mutations aka The Freakmaker (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) It’s going to take a specific kind of viewer to stay interested in The Mutations, even if having Donald Pleasance running around as a mad scientist does have its own unarguable charm. There’s some cool plant-growing footage over the opening credit sequence, but any interest in the film goes down whenever the plants are replaced by humans. The plot is a lazy mad-scientist shtick with the antagonist having plans to create human/plant hybrids by experimenting on young female college students. Partially inspired by -and aping- the classic horror film Freaks, the film can be gross at times as it unrolls a literal freak-show, but these little shocks can’t come close to making the rest of the film feel any better. Bah – nobody has to like 1970s low-budget British exploitation. Except for those who do.

  • Gold Diggers in Paris (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) The Gold Diggers series had five or six films, depending on whether you consider the silent film part of the series. Given that only a few minutes of the 1923 and 1929 instalments have survived to this day, you can argue that twenty-first century film viewers should consider this a four-film series. No matter the minutia, what’s certain is that Gold Diggers in Paris is the last of the series – and it feels like the least. The 1933 one had some brilliant moments for that era of filmmaking; the 1935 and 1937 ones had Dick Powell and Busby Berkeley. This one? It does have Berkeley helping out on the dance sequences, but not much else. The story is a snooze involving a Parisian cabaret that dispenses with the gentle battle-of-the-sexes (or rather battle-of-the-classes) that had been a gentle but persistent theme of the series so far. Heck, even the female casting feels non-existent. The Parisian sets are unconvincing (despite some stock footage), the novelty Schnickelfritz Band is shoehorned in, and even the climactic Berkeley number feels rote. It’s a bit too well-natured to be dislikable, but Gold Diggers in Paris just feels like a redundant film. One so useless that it killed off a series that went out of steam during its duration. Too bad, because the previous instalments each had their own charm and interest.

  • Bons baisers de Hong-Kong [From Hong Kong with Love] (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2022) Oh boy, what a film. Bons baisers de Hong-Kong is certainly not the only, the first or the wildest James Bond parody, but I defy to find another such film that has… let’s see… a plot based on the kidnapping of Queen Elizabeth II by a lovelorn villain played by Mickey Rooney; no less than Bernard Lee and Lois Maxwell playing their own Bond roles (how did that happen?!?); cameos by Groucho and Harpo Marx (or lookalikes?); car stunts from Remy Julienne’s team; and noted 1970s French comedy team Les Charlots, for which this is a star vehicle. The film itself is not necessarily successful: you can see it desperately make jokes, but it’s not a given that they’re funny. Still, the film is something wild to watch. Quite a bit of it depends on Elizabeth II impersonator Huguette Funfrock (whose career was solely limited to playing QEII or lookalikes) and her being a reminder that Our Majesty was a little hottie in her prime – and this isn’t baise-majesté as much as an essential plot point when it’s revealed that the villain kidnapped her out of sheer lust. Much of the film takes place in Hong-Kong and borrows liberally from 1970s martial arts films. Having this being a showcase for Les Charlots is a double-edged sword: while the film is an out-and-out comedy, Les Charlots’ humour styling has not aged well, and the film is guilty of quite a bit of “You already know these guys and you’re expecting to laugh, so laugh already” without building a coherent foundation for the comic set-pieces. But that’s hardly the point – most of the fun of Bons baisers de Hong-Kong is simply in waiting for the next wild thing to come out of the film.