Reviews

  • The Duellists (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, December 2022) As far as a debut feature film goes, Ridley Scott’s The Duellists is an impressive entry. The narrative has to do with French officers repeatedly duelling over an eventful span of history, but the real draw here is Scott’s visual artistry. When seen in high definition, it often feels as fresh as anything else available today, and the multiple visual flourishes are still wonderful. From the painting-like qualities of the film’s interiors to the breathtaking final shot that feels like an over-directed CGI showcase, The Duellists is still a visual treat. It could probably be more accessible from a story perspective, but the framework is simple enough to follow. Great care has been taken to ensure that the film looks and feels accurate—to the point that the film manages to surprise in how it treats duels (and sword-fighting) seriously and avoids many movie clichés. Not all debuts are worth seeing on their own, but The Duellists has enough that it would still be interesting even had Scott never directed another film in his life. (But he did, and the next two were nothing less than Alien and Blade Runner.)

  • A Chance for Christmas (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2022) December isn’t December without the TV listings being cluttered by undistinguishable made-for-TV Christmas movies (or, in this case, made-for-Tubi but later sold to TV channels) but A Chance for Christmas does have a slightly more ambitious premise than most, throwing an influencer with a penchant for fakery into a science-fictional Christmas Eve time loop with professional success and personal happiness on the line. The script is more clever than usual, which translates both into some moronic contrivances (live-streaming on Christmas Eve!) and halfway-witty material (such as two people stuck in a time loop rather than one). Of course, this being a Christmas movie made for undemanding audiences, you should expect from director Stefan Brogren not only a complete lack of existential dread from the looping characters, but also an utter lack of surprise at what needs to be done to escape the loop. As a result, expect to spend about an hour screaming at the characters, “No, this is not how you’re going to do it” as they chase professional excellence rather than personal contentment. But, hey, predictability is not known to be a problem for Christmas movies. Neither are dull dialogues, second-tier actors or awkward staging limited by low production budgets—so take all of that for granted. Both a better-than-average Christmas movie and a worse-than-average overall film, A Chance for Christmas is not the worst pick for December, but you still could be watching very many better things instead.

  • Phantom of the Opera (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2022) Somewhere between the 1925 Universal Horror take on Gaston Leroux’s classic novel and the modern Andrew Lloyd Weber musical (filmed in 2004) whose title song you can probably hear in your mind right now is the 1943 treatment of Phantom of the Opera. It may very well be the most faithful—Despite coming from the Universal stable, it doesn’t really insist on the horror aspect like most versions, and obviously comes decades too soon to rely on the familiar Broadway romantic musical either. Claude Rains plays the Phantom, which further helps establish this take as a more straightforward drama than others. Whether that’s desirable is something else—some versions of the story have the Phantom slashing victims like a regular psychopath while others see him as a tragic romantic figure. What the 1943 version does better than most, however, falls in the “costume drama” category: lavish costumes, very good sets and impressive early-colour cinematography. (It remains the only Universal Horror film to have won Academy Awards, in cinematography and art direction.)  Sure, the chandelier falls from the ceiling and kills a few people, but that aspect is underplayed compared to the dramatic quality that Rains is able to give to the Phantom. Accordingly, this version of The Phantom of the Opera hangs slightly under the must-see tier—it’s technically proficient, but a bit slow and arguably can’t quite deliver either the horror of the Phantom or the romance of the Opera.

  • Safe in Hell (1931)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2022) I’m adding Safe in Hell to my ever-expanding list of movies that sound a lot better described than seen. Memorable title onward, it’s, after all, a Pre-Code film that feels like one—a story in which a prostitute having stabbed her pimp travels to a Caribbean island safe from extradition… at the cost of staying in a hotel with other people trying to stay away from the reach of the law. For once, the Pre-Code status of the film means that a lot of mature material is included in dialogue and plot elements, and those looking for movies that could not have been made during the Production Code era will discover something fascinating here. Lead actress Dorothy Mackaill shows her long legs, the film goes for a downbeat tone that would not have been out-of-place during the film noir era, the film is filled with sweaty lust, and two black characters are presented in positive light without stereotypes. All of this should make Safe in Hell fascinating, so it’s a bit of a surprise to find out that it plays rather dully. Rough technical production values don’t help, but there’s nothing much worse here than in other similar films of the era. Since I usually go nuts for good Pre-Code movies, I’m provisionally going to mark this as “to revisit,” as I suspect that mood and distracted attention may have had a role to play in this disappointed assessment.

  • L’invitation (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2022) The overarching plot of L’invitation fits on a very small piece of paper, as a group of office workers are invited by a recently bereaved colleague to attend a party at his country estate. It’s what happens afterward that’s both the fun and the disappointment of it. The absence of plot means that this becomes a character study, as people are taken out of their normal office environment and asked to reveal themselves in more personal ways. There’s a lot of subtle stuff at play here—resentment from the hierarchical superiors at the display of wealth by a subordinate who recently inherited a substantial sum, male/female relationships once outside the work environment, the discomfort of being asked to interact with colleagues on a weekend outing. That’s all quite intriguing and fertile terrain for drama. The problem here, and this may more be an issue with twenty-first century viewers used to extreme literalization of a metaphor, is that the film itself feels incredibly dull for what it tries to do. I would imagine a modern treatment going to horror or outright comedy, while writer-director Claude Goretta’s L’invitation muddles through drama at very low intensity. Historically, the film was a landmark of Swiss cinema, even earning Academy Award attention. But from a contemporary perspective, it’s not quite as attention-grabbing—although it’s worth noting that, even fifty years later, much of the dynamics at play in the film will be instantly recognizable to anyone working in an office environment. If they can stay awake through the somewhat tepid proceedings, that is. [January 2023: As it happens, 1982 French film Que les gros salaires levent le doigt may be what I’m talking about when I talk about a more maximalist take on the same premise, as it takes a more outlandish comedic take on a similar premise.]

  • Nihon bundan: Heru doraibâ [Helldriver] (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2022) I don’t particularly like that there’s a movie subgenre best described as “Japanese gore comedy,” let alone that I’m familiar enough with it to call it as such, but writer-director Yoshihiro Nishimura’s Helldriver is clearly part of it. Any discussion of the film has to start with that, because if you don’t, most of the review will talk about the film’s Grand Guignol tone, in which blood sprays with the force of a firehose, horror tropes are used as a comic tool, and the film has an aggressive disregard for anything that would remind you of reality. Here we have a post zombie-apocalypse half-Japan overrun with people reanimated with an alien parasite that causes antlers to grow out of their heads, and a young cyborg girl rampaging across the landscape in the hunt for an alien zombie queen of sorts. There’s a long, wildly implausible and tortured familial backstory to it that involves someone being killed by a meteorite, but let’s not focus too much on that—because the film doesn’t. The point here are numerous scenes of comic gory deaths, extreme splatter and weirdness piled upon more weirdness in a tower of schlocky sleaze. It’s lively, if nothing else, although you need to be a gore-hound to enjoy much of it. In my case, I’ve seen enough of them to be passably jaded—I found Helldriver to be somewhere in the honest middle and too wild-and-wacky to be interesting. The comedy doesn’t fly particularly high, and the lousy special effects are underwhelming. In the end, despite gallons of blood, towering humanoid towers of alien zombies and hearts punched out by meteorites, the film is curiously average for that subgenre, squandering ideas (zombie-limbs off-road vehicle?) in a frantic one-upmanship of feverish concepts. In keeping with the too-much-is-too-much tone of this review, I’ll note that the Japanese gore comedy subgenre seemed to have its heyday around 2008–2010, and that recent examples seem sparser… unless it’s the translation delay at work.

  • Hababam Sinifi Sinifta Kaldi [The Chaos Class Failed the Class] (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, December 2022) If you’ve read my review of The Chaos Class, then you don’t need to read this one about its sequel, because it’s pretty much all of the same points except that the result is worse. I get that the enduring popularity of this film in popular movie sites is almost entirely due to a combination of its being a Turkish TV staple in the 1980s, a very specific kind of accessible humour and the presence of people who were and remained well-regarded Turkish comedians. But none of these factors cross national or linguistic boundaries, and so from a North American perspective, we’re left with a film in which thirtysomething hirsute men in unflattering outfits somehow play high-schoolers who spend more time on pranks than studies. There’s a female character whose sole purpose is split between leering and humiliation, an older character who unaccountably likes that band of underachievers and an atmosphere that feels like the worst Adam Sandler movies, except without any production expertise. In other words: unless you grew up with The Chaos Class Failed the Class, the result is dismal, unfunny and practically unbearable to watch. Ugh—the terrible things I watch solely because they get a lot of votes on IMDB…

  • Please Believe Me (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2022) I have a hard time mustering more than polite indifference to Please Believe Me, despite it being a romantic comedy in which Deborah Kerr, of course, attracts a trio of suitors. There are misunderstandings of illusory fortunes at the heart of most of the film’s subplots, but we know that true love will win over everything else. The film is at its strongest when it’s aboard an ocean liner going to America, with the old-school splendour and atmosphere of a semi-closed environment helping to build the plot. But the film doesn’t entirely take place aboard the boat, and it loses narrative momentum the moment it boards in New York and we move from the romantic-comic set-pieces to plot resolution. Kerr looks great here, and Peter Lawford can be counted upon as one of his suitors but the film itself (an unusually bland effort from comedy director Norman Taurog) feels overly bland: there are at least two ocean-liner romantic comedies starring Jane Russel that are better than this one. Please Believe Me is okay and fine if you’re receptive to that kind of romantic comedy, but it’s really not worth any undue effort to watch.

  • Westward Passage (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2022) By this time in my film education, I’m such a fan of 1930s Hollywood that I’m a good audience even for mediocre films—I can overlook many problems if the film is charming, and it takes a lot for me to go to “Wait, this is terrible!”  But “a lot” is not impossible to meet, and while Westward Passage begins with a cute sequence in which newlyweds (Ann Harding and Laurence Olivier) encounter a cranky rural inn owner (ZaSu Pitts), the rest of the film sinks fast into sheer loathing. Almost all of the film’s problems go back to the protagonist played by Olivier, a horrible pompous excuse for a writer who callously abandons his wife and child in order to pursue his ambitions. After the charming first sequence (albeit one that does heavily suggest his terrible personality), the film sinks lower and lower in horrifying plot points. They divorce, but he keeps hounding her (and his estranged daughter, even if she has remarried a much better man) years later, until we’re meant to believe that they get back together and this is a happy conclusion of sorts. No. NO. He’s awful and she’s an idiot and whoever brought this thing to the screen should be posthumously ashamed of what they’ve done. Awful dialogue and a lack of panache in Olivier’s delivery do nothing to make his character any more sympathetic—if you turn off the movie in the early scene in which he acts like a petulant child for being unable to sell his writing, you’re making the right choice because it doesn’t get any better after that. But wait, there’s more! Racism and waffling await, with the waffling from the female lead character being probably worse given that it leads to a conclusion that no viewer will believe or like. I rarely go off on 1930s movies like that, but trust me: Westward Passage is worth the venting. Absent Olivier, I doubt it would be remembered at all.

  • Walk Softly, Stranger (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2022) One of the nice things about watching lesser-known film noirs as part of Turner Classic Movie’s Noir Alley showcase is that host Eddie Muller won’t even try to pretend that everything he shows is a good movie. Having done this for a while, he’s free to pick and present movies that are, in delicately put, interesting. As in: flawed, botched and disappointing. His introduction to Walk Softly, Stranger was a case in point—dancing around its disappointing finale before talking about it in more detail after the film was over. And he’s right—this is an interesting and flawed film. What begins on solid ground for a film noir—an ex-criminal (Joseph Cotten) trying to escape his past after meeting a small-town woman (Alida Valli) he can care for—is completely undone by a conclusion that abruptly shifts to action thrills complete with a dismayingly atonal happy ending that barely makes sense in the context of what preceded it. All this happens abruptly, catching unprepared viewers by surprise and leaving them to bemoan, “What was that?” as the film wraps up. There are many levels of wrongness with that ending—starting with the idea that a film noir protagonist can ride off happily in the sunset rather than pay for his crime, but coming down all the way to a climactic sequence that suggests death only to inexplicably change its mind moments later. Yes, this was all due to studio interference—an attempt by Howard Hugues and RKO to capitalize on the success of The Third Man (shot after this one, but featuring the same male/female leads) by going for a broad happy ending. But in doing so, Walk Softly, Stranger ends up as a more convincing illustration of a noir fundamental—the happy ending is not in the cards for noir. What would have been an entirely forgettable thriller ends up an interesting botched attempt at “improving” the genre… to its detriment.

  • Novecento [1900] (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, December 2022) Look, if it comes down to “Should you watch 1900?”, the answer is a qualified no. No, unless you’re in the mood to go back to early-twentieth-century rural Italy for a multi-decade drama chronicling the relationship between two very different men—forty-five years of story presented in a four-hour movie (five and a half in the full version). No, unless you really want a scene in which both Robert de Niro and Gerald Depardieu are both shown getting a hand job—yes, there’s erect full-frontal nudity. No, unless you want to see Donald Sutherland play a raving psychopath that nails a cat to a wall and (separately) murders a kid. No, unless you’re in a mood to listen to writer-director Bernardo Bertolucci endlessly discuss the path to fascism from peasant exploitation. But I’m probably making 1900 feel far more interesting than it is, because very little in the film’s execution actually warrants its endless running time—most of what’s covered here feels overly familiar, already seen, executed without discipline or flair. Bertolucci’s trademark display of earthy eroticism and high-minded political ideas works at shorter lengths but seems lost without direction here. Accordingly, the film is a slog to watch—which explain why most viewers will focus on celebrity nudity and raving psychopathy as respites from the boredom. It takes a special kind of viewer to make it to the end of 1900—maybe it’s you, but chances are that it’s not.

  • La montaña sagrada [The Holy Mountain] (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, December 2022) No, I will not explain The Holy Mountain to you. I did not understand it, and I don’t think that anyone ever did—not even writer-director-producer-star-editor-composer Alejandro Jodorowsky. But I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t matter. Some movies don’t have to be understood. As foreign and alien as it can be for narrative seekers such as myself to abandon rationality in approaching a few films, this is a Jodorowsky joint after all—what do you expect? Maybe surrealist fantasy, maybe acid western, maybe incompetent Science Fiction, maybe unwitting comedy—The Holy Mountain is really just an assault on sensation itself, with a dismissal of logic not far behind. It takes place in the desert, this much is clear—but the rest is really up to you, with psychedelic metaphysical nonsense being at the top of the list. Few will be surprised to learn that LSD and magic mushrooms were involved in the making of the film. I usually despise those movies and probably should hate this one as well, but the panache through which The Holy Mountain is produced is something to behold—all the way to the ending that affirms that we’ve just been watching a movie. There’s nothing else like it and that’s probably a good thing.

  • The Gauntlet (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, December 2022) I honestly wasn’t planning on having as much fun watching The Gautlet. Dating from a ponderous decade in which lovers-on-the-run thrillers were as frequent as their protagonists’ tendency to die violently at the end, The Gauntlet approaches modern action-movie pacing and satisfaction. It features real-life couple Clint Eastwood and Sondra Locke as, respectively, a tough cop and a prostitute with damaging information on an influential figure. His mission is simple: escort her from Las Vegas to Phoenix, where she’s slated to testify. The plot isn’t complicated (although if you’re expecting someone to be a turncoat, then you know exactly what this is about), but that doesn’t matter, considering that it justifies one action sequence after another in a grueling odyssey across the American Southwest. Eastwood is at his steely-eyed best here, even if the nature of the two protagonists approached misogyny at times. Locke herself has a good role to play—she’s just as beautiful as ever, but she gets to do a lot of acting on the way from point A to point B. Two of the biggest, most spectacular sequences include a house being riddled with bullet holes, and another where a helicopter tracks the lead characters until a fiery crash in a power line tower. The ending is probably more suspenseful than intended, considering the tendency of 1970s action movies to deny satisfaction to audiences—it’s a palpable relief to see it end like it does. (Compare and contrast to the not-dissimilar Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry to see how New Hollywood nihilism had played out its welcome by the mid-1970s.) None of this makes The Gauntlet a particularly good movie: there’s a cartoonishness to it that clearly prevents it from being much better. But it’s a fun and satisfying thrill-ride as long as you play into its period atmosphere, and that’s more than I was expected from a film of that time. It occasionally feels more modern by about ten years, so closely does it play into some later 1980s action film stereotypes. In other words—The Gauntlet is the kind of solid action movie you watch just for fun, knowing it’s better than average.

  • Sleeper (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, December 2022) I didn’t have many movies left to watch from Woody Allen’s “earlier, funnier” period, so it was with some mournfulness that I went through Sleeper—a science fiction comedy in which Allen’s usual nebbish alter ego wakes up hundreds of years in the future, ready to take satirical potshots at 1973 American culture through science-fictional devices. Much of it works well, although you may want to have Wikipedia at the ready to catch some of the more pointed references. (Other references I recognized without help—I was very amused, for instance, that the Playboy centrefold joke ended up referring to none other than Lena of old-school Computer Science Imaging Research fame.) Allen’s comic style here is polished and efficient—the mumbling, the self-deprecation, the unlikeliness of this wholly unremarkable person being an ambassador to the future is given proper comic attention, and acts as a macho foil to an even more innocuous future than the role he plays. (Indeed, at times I was struck at how Sleeper, coming from an outspoken left-wing creator, would now be seen as skirting the outer edges of a right-wing comedy about a degenerate future. But let’s not go there.)  Don’t expect a tightly plotted story or a coherent future: At 87 minutes, Sleeper is a collection of jokes loosely strung together by a chaotic production aesthetic—a bit like Bananas. Interestingly, Allen does far more purely physical comedy here, especially in sequences where he impersonates a silvery robot butler. Sleeper is, perhaps more than anything else, a refreshing film—naïve but determined in its drive to get laughs every half-minute or so. It’s enough to make you pine for more of those “earlier, funnier” Allen movies.

  • Radhe (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, December 2022) Dear Indian cinephile friends: Please stop the downvoting campaigns for movies you don’t like on IMDB. The histogram of votes isn’t fooling anyone, and you end up promoting films that give a terrible impression of your cinema, your culture and your country. Radhe, at first glance, looks like a popular film. So many votes! It must be the people’s choice! But no—as has become depressingly frequent (and an acknowledged issue), there’s some systemic ballot-stuffing going on there, and so badly-reviewed Radhe ends up one of the most popular films of 2021, which leads me to suffer through it. Well, “suffer” may be overstating it: While Radhe is not a good movie, its sins are similar to the worst excesses of 1980s Hollywood cop movies: A macho protagonist dispensing ludicrous levels of violence on stock antagonists, while delivering action sequences, tough-guy poses and (this is unique to India, and not 1980s cop film) musical numbers. Compared to many Indian thrillers of late, it’s both prototypical and featureless. I did like a few things: Salman Khan’s mugging for the camera can be unintentionally amusing, Disha Patani is superb, the musical numbers are fun and the action scenes can be amusing as well. Despite dodgy special effects (also an Indian constant), the film has been made with a decent budget and some filmmaking skills. Alas, it’s all in the service of a dubious package of might-makes-right brutality from the so-called hero, rote plotting, uninspired inclusion of expected elements and a very conservative approach that, when measured against many other examples, makes me feel as if Indian cinema actively regressed over the past decade. Unless it’s the downvoting campaign effect of popularizing the bad movies and over-praising merely competent ones. Come on, Indian cinephile friends: stop with the vote manipulation. It’s just making every one of you look bad.