Reviews

  • Regarding Henry (1991)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) You don’t watch Regarding Henry for the plot. From a very early point, you’ll be able to recognize and anticipate everything that’s going to happen, the middle-class values it espouses as being obvious and the sub-threads that will illustrate that thesis. Even in execution, this is the kind of film that shouts its foreshadowing, leaves no emotional trigger unfired and takes forever to get to its most obvious plot points (“Ritz!”). It is close to the epitome of a very specific kind of Hollywood drama that passes off bromides as earth-shattering revelations, treats lower-class people as likable tools for the middle-class and hypocritically seems to reject the ideology of the super-rich as aggressive. In a few words, the plot has to do with a super-powered high-class lawyer with no morals who is shot in the head during a convenience store robbery and then, thanks to amnesia, has to rebuild himself from the ground up. You will not be surprised to see the new him be disgusted at the old him, or actions related to that shift being Regarding Henry’s climax. Casting Harrison Ford in that lead role is both a coup and a curse—1991-vintage Ford could project confidence-becoming-arrogance like few others, and his very reserved acting style serves him well in the lengthy middle part of the film, where he’s a catatonic mute gradually learning everything again. It’s in the later part of the film that Ford’s acting limitations become more obvious—but by that point we’re supposed to be deeply invested anyway. Annette Benning does have a more challenging role as the wife undergoing her own trials as her husband rebuilds himself—and she does look great in a curly red hairdo. But while very little of the film’s description so far may seem appealing, it’s a measure of veteran director Mike Nichols’ expertise (working from a script by J. J. Abrams—yes, that J. J. Abrams—who also has a small role here) that the film feels rather watchable throughout. Despite fundamental flaws that would have toppled a more cynical approach to the film’s direction, Nichols makes Regarding Henry work, somehow, even when he’s slumming. It’s far too manipulative to be anything but adequate, but at least it rises to that level—which wasn’t necessarily a done deal had anyone else had helmed it. It’s clear that a better script would have featured more interesting justifications about the ideology of the super-driven Manhattan lawyer, or how the child is the father of the man (all over again) or believable dramatic arcs for people surrounding the protagonist or, well, anything better than the Ritz thing. “Watchable” may not feel like much of a compliment, but considering where Regarding Henry started from and the multiple hurdles it throws in its own path, it will have to do.

  • Heart of the North (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) I just can’t help myself—As soon as TCM schedules a Mounties-related “Northern,” I have to see it. Despite the cheap clichés, despite the wacky portrayal of Canadians (or even worse; French Canadians), despite the dubious imposition of American values to a Canadian context, I have to watch it and complain about everything I don’t like. In the land of the Northerns, however, Heart of the North is a landmark. Produced by Warner Brothers, it’s a relatively rare Technicolor picture from the 1930s, showcasing natural backdrops (not Canada’s, but California’s) in gorgeous blue and green. Based on a novel, the plot has some substance to it as RCMP officers pursue robbers who attacked a steamship gold shipment, heading deep in the wilderness to catch their men. In parallel, we have some disagreements between a wilderness-loving Mountie and his urbane girlfriend stopping them from getting engaged; an adorable (yet slightly creepy) moppet cranking up the aaaw-factor in generally disconnected interventions, one RCMP officer with a bad case of PTSD, arguments between merchants and the RCMP, and a few other things that somehow manage to fit within a mere 83 minutes. There’s an awkward action sequence featuring a plane diving down so that the Mounties can shoot at canoes, a little girl with (somehow!) a red serge Mountie uniform, and an ending that pivots on a Mountie with mental health issues gunning down the main antagonist (and getting awarded a medal for his actions!)  It’s wildly over-the-top and yet not that awful to watch, thanks to cinematography that takes as much advantage of natural surroundings (and a fair bit of “special effects”) as Technicolour could in the 1930s. Dick Foran stars, but the young Janet Chapman is the most memorable performer as a plucky orphan cosplaying being a Mountie. Heart of the North is an affront to everything the Mounties were doing in the 1930s, but I still found it weirdly compelling—easily entertaining, even as it’s completely ludicrous.

  • Lady of the Lake (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) Little-known French-Canadian horror film Lady of the Lake could have sunk even further in obscurity if it wasn’t for local horror channel Frissons TV’s ongoing efforts to unearth forgotten horror films made in Quebec, and arranging for a prime-time showing accompanied by an interview with the filmmaker. In Lady of the Lake’s case, Frissons TV got filmmaker Maurice Deveraux out of “retirement” (so to speak—he hasn’t written or directed a film since 2007, but now works in audiovisual production and is writing/drawing a comic book series) so that he could talk about both Lady of the Lake and his follow-up film End of the Line in a nice showcase for his work. Let all viewers be warned: Lady of the Lake is a rough watch in spots. Executed on a threadbare budget, rather more ambitious than reasonable (with a time-travelling subplot on a micro-budget) and filmed with mid-1990s analog technology, it doesn’t compare with what even a modern iPhone is capable of doing. But at the same time, the gritty nature of the film makes its achievements seem all the more remarkable: Numerous complex underwater shots confound the imagination until you hear Deveraux reveal that they were largely shot in a public pool with a glass sidewall. Heading to Quebec’s rural areas is a good way to get both modern and historical sequences. The story itself will feel familiar, with a witch manifesting herself as a sexy young woman (Tennyson Loeh) but Deveraux has the good sense to avoid making the film too literal—after some awkward early moments, the film finds a much better groove by positioning itself at the edge of dreams and reality. I’m not saying that the result is perfect—I had absolutely no attachment or sympathy to the lead actor, and the film could have benefited from another script rewrite to make its structure more meaningful, raise the stakes and make the result less repetitive. But French-Canadian underdog fondness oblige, Lady of the Lake doesn’t play all that badly today—although you need to approach it more as a visual poem than a sharply-edged plotting machine.

  • My Brother’s Wedding (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) One of the essential functions of the L.A. Rebellion movement wasn’t just keeping black cinema alive after blaxploitation or preparing it for its Spike Lee-driven renaissance in the late 1980s, but offering realistic portrayals of black characters and families in a decade where such things were uncommon elsewhere. Writer-director Charles Burnett’s My Brother’s Wedding is just a touch too ironic and contrived to qualify as fully realistic, but it does feature an aimless black man trying to balance his friendship with an ex-con with the demands placed on him by his brother marrying an upper-middle-class woman. Tensions come to a head rather late in the film, as the protagonist has to choose between a wedding and a funeral. It’s counterproductive to avoid discussing that My Brother’s Wedding is rough on the technical aspects—it’s clearly made on a shoestring budget by a raw director. The script has good ideas but struggles to smooth them out into a fluid narrative—the ending crisis comes crashing far too late in the film to allow for a fully developed dilemma or it demonstrably leading to solid character development. Many scenes either build up endlessly (the dinner sequence, for instance) or come and go without making a maximal impact. But if you can be indulgent in the moment-to-moment execution of the film, it does add up to something better than its individual parts: an honest, credible examination of a character in a bad situation, touching upon many larger issues and doing it in a way that finds an interesting middle ground between outright drama or comedy. (This is not a comic film by any measure, as reinforced by its ending, but it gets a few laughs and concludes on a giant irony.)  It’s a minor miracle that the film has survived—like many, many L.A. Rebellion films of the black interregnum, My Brother’s Wedding was shown a few times, then shelved for decades before being rediscovered, restored and enshrined in black cinema history.

  • Licorice Pizza (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Amazon Streaming, August 2022) Over the past twenty-some years, I’ve learned to like Wes Anderson’s films, to enjoy the quirks of the Coen Brothers, to pay respect to Pedro Almodovar’s approach, and to take the good with the less-good in Steven Soderbergh’s filmography. But I’m still as ambivalent about Paul Thomas Anderson’s work as I was when watching Punch-Drunk Love in theatres. There’s clearly some kind of genius at work here (or, at the very least, a cinephile filmmaker), but while I can like moments of his films, they all generally fall flat when considered as a whole. Licorice Pizza is no exception. I was more interested in the film than his previous ones, by its virtue of focusing on 1973 Hollywood, with its fictional characters interacting with the movie industry and more-or-less disguised historical figures. In that, the film generally holds its promises: Sean Penn plays a character meant to evoke William Holden (although the real Holden was reportedly not as much into romancing young girls as the Penn caricature), an excerpt of Breezy is quoted in an audition scene, Tom Waits has quite a bit of fun playing a take-off on Samuel Peckinpah, while Bradley Cooper easily walks away with the film’s highlights with a nightmare caricature of producer Jon Peters. Still, much of the film revolves around a teenager ably played by Cooper Hoffman, a child actor who realizes he’s got a brighter future as an entrepreneur than an actor. The plot of the film, as it goes from the first to the last scene, has to do with his romantic infatuation for a woman eight years older (a great performance from Alana Haim). And this is where Licorice Pizza, for all of its finely observed period details, Hollywood insider fun and good cinematic eye, starts falling apart. For one thing, there’s something gratuitously, deliberately wrong in picking a romance between a sixteen-year-old boy and twenty-four-year-old woman—just imagine a gender-flipped film and see how far that thought goes. It seems even more unexplainable that a slight rewrite could have made it more palatable—bump his age by three years, reduce hers by two and you’re close to something still interesting but not quite as repellent. But that’s small potatoes compared to the film’s biggest issue—an episodic structure that can’t keep its tone straight or its events at least plausible. It’s even worse when you consider that the entire film takes place over less than a year—and again, there’s a wasted opportunity to show growth and lessen the age-difference factor. But no, Licorice Pizza jumps from one long sequence to another—some of them funny, some of them not, many of them just dull. Now, not everything has to stick to a Fieldsesque three-act structure, but as not of it seems deliberate for no good reason. Is it still worth watching? Well, more than many other films of the same director. But frankly, given the choice, I get more consistent results with the vulgar authorism of Paul W. S. Anderson.

  • Huo xing ren [Les hommes d’une autre planète] (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) Ho, boy. Wow. Even in the land of obscure films, Huo xing ren takes a prize of sorts, as this 1976 Thai Science Fiction/kaiju film barely has 65 IMDB votes as of August 2022. Even better—I’ll call by its French title Les hommes d’un autre planète [Men from another planet], as the film was apparently never translated into English… or if it was, not even IMDB knows about it. There are, mind you, reasons for this obscurity. If you’re seeing the film without context, you’ll realize early on that it’s not very good. Cinematographically dubious, it has a terribly stupid plot, worse characters and laughable production values. The French dub is a kitsch masterpiece with un-synched audio, unconvincing voice actors and the incongruous use of an instrumental version of the 1960s French novelty pop song “Monsieur Cannibale.” Approaching this film cold is probably the best way to go, as we zip from kids playing in a Thai temple to them discovering a statue of a mythical defending god to aliens landing on earth to low-rent kaiju insanity as a monster stops on shoddy “street” high-rises, to a triple-threat fight sequence on the moon involving a Thai god, an alien invader and an American robot. If this sounds interesting, I may have done too good a job in describing an awful film. On the other hand, well, “Thai kaiju” is really all I, or you, will need in order to decide if you want to see this. Need any more proof of the film’s obscurity? Well, it has only two user reviews on IMDB, and you’re going to be sorely disappointed if you try following the links to external reviews, many of whom are broken. Fortunately, and again as of this writing, the single best source of information about the film’s wild patchwork Japan/Taiwan/Hong Kong/Thailand production history is on Roberto Zanni’s Italian-language blog—it’s well worth translating to get a gist of it. I’m not often a big fan of those “so bad it’s good” movies—life’s too short to convince yourself that you’re enjoying something terrible—but I’ll have to admit that there’s a hypnotically engrossing quality to director Hung-Min Chen’s Les hommes d’une autre planète: How much crazier is this thing going to be? What is going on? Is there a limit to how cheaply is it going to be executed? The only way to know if you’re going to get an answer to those questions is to keep watching, and marvel once more at the idea that there was such a thing as a Thai kaiju film.

  • The Three Musketeers (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, August 2022) I’m a bit… vexed in trying to write a review of the 1973 version of The Three Musketeers—not because there isn’t anything to say, but because I have the feeling I could just copy and paste my review of its second half, The Four Musketeers, and it would apply just as well to this first film. Maybe a summary? Let’s try this: Every era gets the Three Musketeers adaptation it deserves, and this early-1970s is almost exactly what we’d expect from the era: colour cinematography, lavish costumes, plenty of on-location shooting, but blurry image quality, not-quite-there action choreography, and a sometimes-scattered script. It’s less impressive on a sword-fighting level than previous entries, more in terms of immersion, and far more in terms of humour, especially the pedigree of director Richard Lester (who first intended the project to be a Beatles vehicle). Perhaps the most seventies element of the film is the cast, which merrily has Oliver Reed, Raquel Welch, Richard Chamberlain, Michael York, Christopher Lee, Faye Dunaway and Charlton Heston in the various roles. That’s… quite a cast, and it’s not a cast that could have been assembled at any other time but the early 1970s. (Although, yes, many reunited fifteen years later to film The Return of the Musketeers.) The result is rather enjoyable. It doesn’t have the sweeping cinematography of other attempts, nor the delirious special effects of the 2011 version or Gene Kelly’s athleticism of the 1948 version, or the pure swashbuckling of the Douglas Fairbanks’ 1921 take. But it’s reasonably close to the text (especially if you watch it with its concluding instalment The Four Musketeers), technically proficient enough and tonally consistent with the text. It’s hard to ask for much more… except, perhaps, the newest generation iteration on the same tale, filtered through today’s sensibilities.

  • The Mysterious Island (1929)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) There are many reasons why I don’t like 1929’s The Mysterious Island, but one really good reason why I respect it. Let’s get the bad out of the way first: For modern viewers, the biggest problem of the film is that it’s a big-budget spectacle that comes from the awkward period between the introduction of sound and its widespread adoption. Designed, produced and largely shot as a silent in an era where crowds were flocking to sound films, it found itself—after a three-year-long production—nearing release with dim commercial prospects… so they added sound. A little bit. In a few sequences. In-between silent scenes with title cards. To say that the result is dumbfounding is understating it, although twenty-first-century audiences used to the weird 1928–1930 interregnum should be familiar with the form. It goes without saying that, as an ambitious big-budget production in the late 1920s, it’s working with baling twine and duct tape in trying to sell us the illusion of a vast underwater adventure. The special effects are rough, and so is everything else about a very ambitious adventure film with Science Fiction elements. The third thing that irks me most is that, despite adapting Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, the plot has nearly nothing to do with that classic novel: It’s less a Robinsonade about travellers rebuilding civilization on an island than a series of Captain Nemo adventures prefiguring his role as a supporting character in the original novel. The film’s interest is also lopsided—rather dull in the opening half, much better in the spectacular second one. So, yeah: a big-budget, spectacular Hollywood adaptation that ignores most of its source material. Sounds familiar! And yet that’s the one thing that did intrigue me about this version of The Mysterious Island—it’s a fascinating example of how Hollywood studios have always aimed for expensive spectacles, even when hobbled by the technical capabilities of the late-1920s. Special effects shots are unconvincing, director Lucien Hubbard’s staging is ludicrous, the characters are badly written and the dialogue (read or heard) is ridiculous… but that’s Hollywood’s century-old instincts here realized in their rawest expression. It’s also a relatively rare Science Fiction film prior to 1950, which is rather interesting for SF film historians. (Those film historians also note that the film only made $55K out of a million-dollar budget, perhaps killing off the nascent genre for decades.)  On the other hand, don’t expect much pure viewing please from The Mysterious Island: it’s an artifact, artificial enough that it rarely creates the immersive sense of disbelief to work as more than a demonstration of the era’s filmmaking craft.

  • Taxi 5 (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, August 2022) The French Taxi series is hardly a succession of distinctive films—I had to check my notes to confirm that I hadn’t skipped one along the way. But this fifth belated entry does manage to break from the previous four in existing in the same rough continuity, but replacing its leads with suspiciously similar successors. Once again, we have a cop and a car enthusiast as leads, except that this time the cop is the car enthusiast, while the nephew of the previous films’ car enthusiast is a bit of an idiot with few driving skills. That does change the dynamic a bit, but not really the intention in heading to sunny Marseilles for a plot that combines bank thieves (in an acknowledged lift from previous films) and car chases. Budget oblige, the car chase fans will have to be patient in waiting for Taxi 5 to prove its raison d’être—There are maybe four of them in the entire film, and the first two (a fast drive through Paris and a comedic chase in Marseilles with underpowered cars) feel like throat-clearing. The film gets better with its central showpiece, an action sequence that flips back and forth between a serious fast-car chase through Old Marseilles’ tiny streets, and a comedic pile-up that makes no sense but looks like stuntmen having fun (it brings to mind previous efforts from the Rémy Julienne stunt team—see the opening pile-up in Bon baisers de Hong Kong). Ironically, the final car chase on highways heading out of Marseilles is much faster but rather less exciting—a clear example of how car chases are about danger from the environment, not the speed of the cars themselves. That last action beat also ends on a very predictable note that apes the conclusion of 2 Fast 2 Furious, easily the weakest of the Fast and Furious franchise that this film is taking notes from. If I’m spending that much time talking about action sequences rather than the story or characters, it’s for the predictable reasons: Whenever it’s not racing, Taxi 5 is often a bore. The comic relief is overdone, especially when the film stops to spend time with an unlikable bunch of misfits staffing the local police force. It does marginally better whenever it’s focusing on likable lead Franck Gastambide (who also writes/directs) and the beautiful Sabrina Ouazani even if she’s severely under-used throughout. Alas, for some unexplainable reason, Taxi 5 seems to multiply sequences featuring the film’s most intolerable characters. The ratio of action to comedy is not ideal, nor is the film’s fascination with incompetence and abrasiveness. Combining the cop and the skilled driver doesn’t leave much for the other lead than goofing off, and it’s not that funny. You would think that filmmakers aiming for a crown-pleasing blockbuster would understand that… but no. Taxi 5 becomes the usual death-spiral spinoff sequel, made and featuring a B-team of less-talented people playing with elements they don’t quite understand. It does have a bare minimum of fast cars, cute girls and fast chases, but nothing more—and no one is holding their breath for Taxi 6. This series is done and has been done since the second film: let it die.

  • The Harder They Come (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) Many movies can be said to be atmospheric, but The Harder They Come is in a class of its own. Part of it has to do with rarity—few other films came from Kingston, Jamaica in the early 1970s, and fewer still offered such a compelling blend of street-level drama and music. The film is noteworthy both for cinephiles and music lovers for introducing the world to reggae music, and the terrific soundtrack bears this out, with a number of roots classics peppered throughout. (This is a film that takes a brute-force approach to its soundtrack, though, as it rotates between a few songs over and over again to create, within the span of a single film, the feeling you get from hearing a current hit over and over on Top-40 radio—by the time “Pressure Drop” or You Can Get It If You Really Want.” hits, all reggae fans are like yeaaaah.)  The plot and execution are, frankly, messy in the way low-budget independent films often were at the time: The Harder They Come’s production (which reportedly lasted for years) uses whatever is on hand without many refinements, and doesn’t necessarily feature professional actors either. Accordingly, it feels almost refreshingly raw: Its Jamaican production, through director Perry Henzell, gives it that authentic atmosphere we were talking about. It also leads to a plot that would have been a hard sell at any time prior to the New Hollywood era—with a singer-protagonist (the legendary Jimmy Cliff) that regularly resorts to crime (including murder) in order to escape a hardscrabble life and increased police attention. (Cynics will argue that there’s not much of a line between The Harder They Come and more recent efforts such as Get Rich or Die Tryin’.)  But for all of its anti-hero, rough execution and soundtrack repetition, The Harder They Come managed to capture something very interesting—the portrait of Kingston in the early 1970s, a life much closer to third-world poverty standards than the glossy image of Caribbean Island living that has been marketed since then.

  • Observe and Report (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2022) Much was written, back in 2009, about Observe and Report’s darkly acid sense of humour—especially compared to the kind of comedy that star Seth Rogen was getting known for. (Marketing had much to do with mismatched expectations.)  Here he sheds (and shreds) his amiable stoner persona for more challenging material as a bipolar mall security guard with dark ambitions. As the film begins, he’s getting frustrated at being “just” a mall security guard, he’s got a crush on a perfume counter attendant and a flasher is terrorizing shoppers at his mall. But what if he could become a real policeman, get the unattainable girl and catch the flasher? While there are elements here of a much lighter comedy, the execution is acid: it’s clear that the protagonist is not well and not the kind of person you’d want as a policeman. (Some will object that the most unrealistic element of the film is the way the entire police force rejects the trigger-happy protagonist, but I digress.)  The tone of the film makes it clear that we’re not supposed to cheer for him… making the very ironic conclusion a bit of a light slap. For Rogen, the role expands his persona based on similarities with other roles. Anna Faris is fine as the romantic interest, but Ray Liotta is more remarkable as a rotten-solid policeman exasperated by this pretender, while Michael Peña predictably steals the show as a wild colleague. If Observe and Report makes you uncomfortable, well, that’s what it intends: This isn’t meant to be anyone’s favourite film, but an off-putting, something’s-wrong-here kind of thing. (Predictably, it got destroyed at the box office, $27M to $183M, by the superficially similar but much fluffier Paul Blart: Mall Cop released a few months earlier.)  I found it off-putting but more interesting than expected, and somewhat more complex than many other Rogen vehicles by dint of the difference between how the character acted versus how he was portrayed. But I’ll understand anyone who finds it reprehensible and unbearable. The French-Canadian dub is weird—with some English swearwords kept, while others are translated into accented French.

  • Bless Their Little Hearts (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2022) There is, at first glance, not much to Bless Their Little Hearts. As a gritty realist slice-of-life drama about a struggling black family in South-Central L.A., it revels in grainy black-and-white cinematography, lackadaisical camera placement, small-scale drama and low-end production values. It’s meant to show us the life of a lower-class family, even though the father having a second family isn’t quite “typical” in any sense of the word. The characters are barely in control of their destiny, tossed around by unemployment, families and expectations. There’s little here in terms of spectacle, thrills, laughs or edification. But that’s the point of Bless Their Little Hearts and the reason why it reverberates today. For a very, very long time, such depictions of ordinary black people were never captured on film. Movies were expensive to shoot, and non-privileged people did not have access to the means of cultural production. This is largely why the L.A. Rebellion movement of the late-1970s and early-1980s (of which director Billy Woodberry belonged to) was so important: it started to empower those who were not captured in their own worlds in movies. (It also bridged the gap between blaxploitation and the type of black cinema exemplified by Spike Lee, which is a big blank spot in most cinema histories.) I may not particularly like watching Bless Their Little Hearts all that much—too long, too slow, too ordinary for my genre-craving tastes (although the character of the wife, played by Kaycee Moore, gets at least a pair of great scenes)—but I recognize that it’s an important film in its own specific way.

  • Medicine for Melancholy (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) Some films are clearly ennobled by the later actions and renown of their cast and crew. Medicine for Melancholy would be a perfectly respectable low-budget romance no matter who was in it or what they did afterwards—as an off-beat romantic drama featuring two young people spending a short cut intense time together in San Francisco, it has the flavour of the French New Wave, the city-celebrating charge of something like Before Sunset, the social engagement of ambitious independent filmmakers and a unique visual signature to its severely desaturated cinematography. But here’s the thing: its writer-director Barry Jenkins went on to direct the Academy-Award-winning Moonlight and so Medicine for Melancholy suddenly became far more important as a piece of juvenilia. But if that’s juvenilia, then most people should be so lucky as to have that on their filmography: After a bit of a rough start with gratuitously desaturated visuals and characters that aren’t the most warmly sympathetic, the film eventually finds its groove: Wyatt Cenac becomes more interesting as time goes by, while the striking Tracey Heggins sees her character warm up and reveal more of herself. Soon enough, the romantic talk becomes a proxy argument—between his proudly radical black agenda and her more inclusive viewpoint, between his activism in trying to save San Francisco from the alien technocratic monsters displacing the less fortunate inhabitants of the city and her more cosmopolitan assimilation-friendly outlook. As the cliché holds, San Francisco is an intrusive third character here, as the housing crisis plays as a backdrop to a romance between two increasingly rare black people in San Francisco. With such tensions at play, it’s a disappointment but not a surprise if the ending is less upbeat than you would expect—Jenkins isn’t known as an ebullient comic director, after all, and Medicine for Melancholy wears its glum outlook in its title. Still, it’s a strong novice entry for him, and one that clearly announces the mixture of character-based drama and social issues that would characterize his later films. It’s all the more effective for having been completed on a shoestring budget. Those who make a point of tracking down the film after seeing Jenkins’s later movies will not be disappointed.

  • We Met in Virtual Reality (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) The curio factor alone is enough to make We Met in Virtual Reality worth a mention or two—entirely “filmed” within VRChat during the worst of the pandemic lockdown, it’s a film that features human voices but entirely synthetic visuals. A documentary showcasing avatars and their screen names, it’s a meandering, often unfocused look at communities existing right now in virtual reality. Much of the thematic intention is to show the incredible capacity for humans to make social connection despite all obstacles—never mind the technology, the absence of faces, and the often-imperfect avatars: the people in the film are pioneers in creating virtual dance classes, lending help to each other, having virtual parties and presentation, having fun having virtual joyrides and even, yes, falling in love online. The illusion never breaks: even in describing how cyber-soulmates take their relationship to a physical level by visiting each other, the film features an illustrative virtual plane trip with participant voice-over describing their actions and feelings. It would be easy and cheap to criticize the result—pointing out, for instance, that the film leaves a curious impression by selecting a succession of people all too willing to admit that they have trouble fitting in a physical life—through disabilities, anxieties or difficult histories, they have easier times creating connections virtually than physically. This is not explored, though—and I suspect that you wouldn’t have to go full-VR to find many people who have an easier time connecting online than in real life. Nor is it an easy film to watch: while the first few minutes are original enough to be interesting, the grotesque variety of art style, limited graphic quality and limitations of virtual cinematography eventually make this film obnoxious to watch. It quickly became apparent that director Joe Hunting’s film was best approached as an illustrated podcast—to be listened to while doing something else rather than becoming an exclusive focus on attention. Still, by the end of the film, I felt a curious affection for most participants—they managed to connect to other people even through cumbersome technological layers, and made their own lives a bit better at no obvious disadvantage to anyone else. (Whether this is true in physical space is something the film refuses to tackle.)  No, I’m not downloading VRChat—but I wish them the best, and I hope that the much-heralded metaverse, if ever it arrives, fits their needs rather than those of capitalist billionaires.

  • Born in Flames (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2022) I’ll maintain that utopia is a severely underused theme in Science Fiction cinema. Yes, it’s exciting to go dystopian and revel in grimy darkness—but should there be an equal thirst to show what we aspire to? Dramatically, utopias work really well when they’re threatened by their antithesis, so there’s no reason to explore good-and-evil by featuring a good world under attack. As Born is Flames begin, it feels as if we’re going to get something rare—a far-left progressive feminist utopia, ten years after a bloodless revolution that changed everything. Tell me more, I say—tell me how this happened and how much better this new world is, and how it’s being threatened. Make me believe in your ideal vision for the world. But after a promising first few minutes, reality sinks in—Writer-director-producer Lizzie Borden either doesn’t have the rigour, the intention or the means to deliver on the premise of those few minutes. Rather than present us with a post-revolution utopia, Born in Flames shows us the revolution—the listless jobless men rioting, the law-and-order forces oppressing minorities, the revolutionaries jailed and killed, and the violent takeover of the mass media. Well, OK, then—maybe it will be able to articulate the way to a better future… but no. Clearly produced by an amateur, cash-strapped, overly ambitious filmmaker, Born in Flames swings wildly from one thing to another—didactic manifesto piece at times, dystopian freedom-fighting drama the next, incomprehensible awkward collage throughout. I respect the ambition, but not necessarily the result: by the end of the film, it feels as if everything was thrown in the blender and the result suffers from a severe lack of focus. Knowing that the film was reportedly produced over five years with a $30,000 budget and many non-professional actors does help to understand how it ended up like this—how can you produce a coherent result under these conditions? Still, the potential for greatness in Born in Flames is scarcely realized. Seeing Eric Roberts pop up briefly and Oscar-winning director Katheryn Bigelow in a rare acting role is not quite enough to compensate for the colossal letdown. I could be glass-half-full and point out how rare Born in Flames’ viewpoint remains—but it’s a bit of a chore to sit through and frustrating throughout.