Reviews

  • Passenger 57 (1992)

    Passenger 57 (1992)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2021) The mid-to-late-1990s still reign supreme as the best-ever era for big brash action movies, but the early-1990s were quickly putting together the pieces to get there, and transitioning from the dour 1980s buddy-cop clichés to the vastly more ludicrous style of the latter decade. Passenger 57 isn’t that good of a movie, whether you’re talking about an action film or a straight-ahead thriller: it’s got some weird ideas about spatial unity of action (going from the plane to a country fair and back), is slightly too enamoured of Wesley Snipes as its protagonist (although it did launch his career as an action hero), sounds dissonant with its jazzy score, and doesn’t seem quite so willing to exploit the elements at its disposal. Still, there’s some entertainment value in seeing Snipes as an overconfident air security expert dealing with a terrorist engineering his high-flying escape. As antagonist, Bruce Payne regularly out-acts Snipes by chewing scenery as if it was an onboard meal. The classic line “Always bet on black” is perfectly placed here, explaining its enduring appeal even for white guys like myself. Alex Datcher has a small but eye-catching role as a likable flight attendant, while you can spot Elizabeth Hurley as a supporting villainess. I’m still dubious about many of the script’s attempts to extend the action — the opening can sporadically slow, while the third-act detour off the plane seems out-of-place in a thriller that is otherwise centred around civil aviation. But it’s watchable, even if for the wrong reasons. There’s no doubt that the same concept would have been made very differently even five years later (case in point: Executive Decision and Air Force One), and so you can see in Passenger 57 one of the transition points between 1980s thrillers and 1990s action.

  • Avril et le monde truqué [April and the Extraordinary World] (2015)

    Avril et le monde truqué [April and the Extraordinary World] (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2021) There are plenty of things I like in animated family film Avril et le monde truqué… and plenty I don’t. On the good side, it’s an almost insanely ambitious steampunk story, quickly sketching an alternate reality where Napoleon III dies freakishly, scientists are kidnapped, petroleum is somehow never discovered as an energy source and we find ourselves in 1941 with wood-powered everything, near-complete environmental collapse, the French going against the British and plenty of other surprises when a mysterious force appears. With a visual look borrowing much from the ligne claire school of comic books, the film at least looks interesting, which is followed though by a few spectacular set-pieces. As far as steampunk movies are concerned, this is one that plays big — the possibilities of animation are unleashed and the result comes from a rich imagination. On the other hand, there are two constant irritants (possibly idiosyncratic) that kept me from having a good time. The most specific one is clearly influenced by having read a lot of written Science Fiction with an emphasis on plausibility: The world sketched by Avril et le monde truqué is a nonsensical mess, only believable by easily impressed kids and few others. The idea of holding back scientific progress by kidnapping scientists and hiding them is roughly as plausible as the world becoming a grey plant-less wasteland due to tree harvesting. Of course, this is a film that eventually reveals its evil puppeteers to be sentient Komodo dragons, so it’s not as if it’s going for plausibility in the first place. The other problem, perhaps more serious, is a mixture of a depressing opening and the meaningless of death. Thirty minutes in, our unappealing heroine is scrabbling together a miserable existence following the death of her parents and the prolonged agony of her talking cat, all set against a large-scale portrait of war and environmental collapse. Dispiriting stuff — but don’t worry, as death in this film is a mere suggestion after seeing the number of characters resurrected from the dead on a fairly regular basis. There’s a sloppiness to the script that matches that of the world-building, and it’s hard to remain invested in the story when I’m constantly groaning, “This is so stupid” under my breath. It does mark co-directors Christian Desmares and Franck Ekinci’s Avril et le monde truqué as the product of a creative crew unsure of itself and all too willing to shove absurdities under the unacceptable excuse of “this is a kids’ film” — better filmmakers take care to craft something that can sustain adult scrutiny. I will champion the film as an unusual, even striking steampunk science fiction film but being distinctive is really not the same thing as being satisfying, and we here see the difference starkly.

  • La casa 3 [Ghosthouse] (1988)

    La casa 3 [Ghosthouse] (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2021) Acceptably executed but narratively suspect, La casa 3 best shows its low-budget exploitation roots in the way it throws better movies in a blender and tries to pass the incoherent result as something that is worth our attention. It has a haunted house, creepy clown dolls, spooky time-travelling radio signals, an exploding mirror, and a bus-smashing downer finale — if you’re expecting all of those elements to fit together harmoniously, well, it’s not for nothing that the film is well known in so-bad-it’s good circles. It does help that the film, written and helmed by Italian exploitation veteran Umberto Lenzi, is rather better shot than would be the norm for lower-budgeted, markedly commercial films such as this one. The creepy clown doll is rather better than the rest of the film and so are snippets of the score, but that’s really not quite enough to shake the low-imagination, slap-dash way La casa 3 is put together. The story, characters and individual plot beats are terrible in ways that the presentation can’t quite overcome.

  • Promising Young Woman (2020)

    Promising Young Woman (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) I was not looking forward to Promising Young Woman. On paper, especially with spoilers (it’s hard to resist not looking up the synopsis when nearly every reviewer raves about the ending), it feels like a buzzword bingo regurgitating the past few years in gender-based social activism: female filmmakers unloading grievances is not anything new or all that original. I’ve seen many such movies over the past few years, and they’re starting to blur together in clichés: all female protagonists are traumatized, all male characters are bad, the police/justice system won’t save you, violent revenge is the way to go, and so on. But to see Promising Young Women being nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award gave me some hope that it would go beyond the obvious — while the Oscars have always courted the approval of the chattering class for their social activism (remember: The Academy Awards are the façade of what Hollywood would like us to think about Hollywood), they don’t usually go out of the way to nominate bad films. And indeed, it doesn’t take a long time to figure out that, despite soapbox messages and an aggressive intention to provoke, Promising Young Woman is a really well-crafted thriller, propelled by writer-director Emerald Fennell’s genuinely daring storytelling, great scene-to-scene narrative momentum (even in the film’s most difficult to watch moments) and well-crafted pacing. It is meant not just to press buttons, but to hammer them with glee, daring viewers to keep up with an escalation in revenge narratives. I’m not going to pretend to be unmoved or un-scandalized by the result — I certainly have issues with the mini-speeches featured in the narrative (oh, there’s the bit about nice guys, there’s the bit about women keeping other women down, there’s the bit about the judicial system being terrible… and there’s the inevitable bit about the seemingly good guy not being such a good guy) and I could pick apart the script showing where everyone reacts to the heroine with further confrontation, further justifying the film’s point of view. But I’m not really interested in scoring points: the film doesn’t let the protagonist’s aberrant behaviour go unquestioned, and the ending is indeed something that navigates a very fine line between a downbeat lesson and a triumph of warped justice. Carey Mulligan (an actress I don’t usually very much) is terrific here in playing a complex character that’s not necessarily meant to be a virtuous avenging angel. Bo Burnham is also quite good as a male lead who spans a spectrum of good or bad. But the star here is a script that, despite a few annoyances, does manage something fresh and compelling even with brutal material that riffs on emerging clichés. Promising Young Woman is far from my favourite film of the year, but I understand the acclaim and the Oscar nomination. I even get how, in its own way, it could be a moral lesson of sorts: To repeat something I’ve said about the not-dissimilar Fatal Attraction, this is the kind of story we tell ourselves to keep each other in line.

  • Murderers’ Row (1966)

    Murderers’ Row (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2021) Dean Martin is back as suave spy-photographer-womanizer Matt Helm in Murderers’ Row, a follow up to The Silencers: another Bond parody in which attractive co-stars help him foil dastardly plans. This second of four Helm movies is certainly in-line with the first: we get Helm at home with a plethora of gadgets optimized for the playboy lifestyle (pouring drinks in glasses, pouring women in pools), we get Dean Martin songs on the soundtrack (with another affectionate jab at Frank Sinatra), we get cartoonish villains, we get sexy co-stars. Indeed, Murderers’ Row benefits from a terrific co-star — none other than 1960s vintage Ann-Margret as a scientist’s daughter who comes to help the protagonist. The tone here is also an extension of the previous film: a mix of sex comedy in describing Helm’s alcoholic libidinous life, of spy thriller over-the-top evil plans, and of curiously restrained comedy to glue everything together. Spectacular sights include hovercrafts and an entire third act shot on a vast industrial construction site. It’s sort-of-fun if you can stomach Murderers’ Row’s good-natured sexism (if such a thing can exist), although it often feels — as with its predecessor—that it can’t quite commit to the comedy and leaves many jokes on the table. The pacing is also an issue, as the film seems far denser and more interesting in its first act, only to grow lax and repetitive in the second. Still, Martin is quite good at essentially playing his own rat-pack persona and if this is the kind of thing to make you smile, then Murderer’s Row should count as one of the better Bond imitators of the era.

  • California Split (1974)

    California Split (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) I don’t gamble and I’m not often a Robert Altman fan, so my expectations going into California Split ran low. This is, after all, a very Altmanesque film (complete with overlapping dialogue made possible by the then-innovative technique of using eight-track mixing) about two gamblers meeting each other and going through the highs and lows of the lifestyle. Surprisingly, though, I quite liked the result. From a clever opening sequence mixing an instructional tape with ironic counterexamples, the script has a sure-footed take on the toll and exhilaration of full-time gambling, taking us to casinos and pawn shops along the way. It helps to have two capable actors anchoring the cast: George Segal as the gambling apprentice, but especially Elliott Gould as the inveterate devotee to a life spent chasing the next sure thing. The atmosphere of mid-1970s Los Angeles and Reno is nicely portrayed, and the typically Altmanesque cacophony is used to good effect when it comes time to represent the confusion of a gambler on a multi-hour binge. Interestingly enough, California Split resists the temptation to offer a moral lesson— while one of the protagonists may have had a moment of clarity, the other clearly intends to keep on doing what he’s been doing not-that-successfully. It all comes together for a film that’s still quite entertaining, with a filmmaking technique that feels appropriately modern at times.

  • Blood and Sand (1941)

    Blood and Sand (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) There is a melodramatic intensity to Blood and Sand that makes it as ridiculous as it’s hard to resist. It’s a drama that boldly heads to Spain to tell us about the dramatic life of a matador as he outdoes his dead father’s accomplishments, encounters initial success, and is then seduced and destroyed by the trappings of fame and power. There isn’t much in terms of ethnically authentic casting, but Tyrone Power does well in the lead role, with female co-leads going to the wholesome wife played by Linda Darnell and the seductive vamp given life by Rita Hayworth. It’s all very colourful in that early-Technicolor garishness, archly presented in a way that leaves no room for subtlety. There’s bullfighting, singing, dancing and high tragedy in the Greek sense of the term, with the hero defeated by his success. If Blood and Sand is often too unsubtle to be taken all that seriously, there’s some narrative rhythm to the story that backs up its vivid presentation, and the result is not quite as dull as you’d expect.

  • The Unforgiven (1960)

    The Unforgiven (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2021) In the pantheon of revisionist western movies, you could be forgiven for initially mistaking 1960’s The Unforgiven with 1992’s Unforgiven. But while both movies are independent from a storytelling perspective, they do share an intention to question some of the unexamined tropes of the genre. Clint Eastwood’s 1990s masterpiece was a deep meditation on violence that cleverly rifled through decades of doubts about impassible virtuous gunslingers, but if The Unforgiven isn’t anywhere nearly as successful, it does tackle the legacy of racism against Native Americans on film. But the way it gets there, though… can be problematic. Burt Lancaster ably stars as a rancher who learns that his sister (played by Audrey Hepburn) is, in fact, an adopted Native girl. That doesn’t go very well among the white settlers, and it doesn’t take a long time for them to become at odds both with their neighbours and with the Native Americans coming back to claim the girl as their own. It all climaxes in a scene that, for once, feels decently original — that of a dirt house being set on fire as Native Americans ride on the rooftop. The meditations on racism are atypical and rather welcome, considering the state of Native Americans in 1950s Hollywood, but the film itself is far from being as accomplished as one could have expected. Reading about its production history does help explain why, with enough behind-the-scenes drama (deaths, injuries, near-death experiences, and a disengaged director) to make a movie of its own. Suffice to say that the herky-jerky scene-to-scene rhythm of the film may not have been in the initial plans. Of course, there are other issues — as much as I love Audrey Hepburn and the lovely long hair she has here, she’s perhaps not the best pick for a Native American. Her performance bulldozes through objections of ethnically inappropriate casting, but it’s one more thing in a long series of issues with The Unforgiven. Lilian Gish and Audie Murphy are quite a bit better in supporting roles, each of them having a few standout sequences. Meanwhile, Lancaster provides yet another example of how he was willing to use his stardom to enable projects that poked at the kind of leading man he was supposed to play. In the end, The Unforgiven remains a provocative, big-budget revisionist western before it was cool to make revisionist westerns and in that, at least, it has appreciated from the underwhelming critical and commercial reception it got upon release.

  • Webs (2003)

    Webs (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2021) You can almost introduce Webs in a way that makes it sound interesting: What if electrical workers in Chicago stumbled upon a forgotten nuclear-powered laboratory in a disaffected building, and triggered the equipment so that it sent them to a parallel dimension characterized by humans fighting for their lives against spiderlike aliens? I mean… that’s not high art, but it’s as interesting as your average summer blockbuster. But the trick, as they say, is in the execution and it quickly becomes clear that Webs is coming straight from the made-for-Syfy TV-movie factory. Indifferent filmmaking skills and a very low budget combine to create something that quickly reaches new levels of blandness. Intermittent flashes of interest merely make us long for a better version of the film, as what ends up on screen is a mix of third-rate actors, terrible special effects, cost-cutting tricks and unremarkable directing from David Wu. I suppose that the result could have been worse, so at least there’s that. But otherwise: Webs is better left untouched.

  • Hour of the Gun (1967)

    Hour of the Gun (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) Hollywood’s determination to make an endless number of movies about the O.K. Corral gunfight is no match for my determination to not care about any of them (well, maybe except for Tombstone). In Hour of the Gun, we find ourselves once again at the Corral — but taking a slightly different direction, the film begins with the shootout, then follows the aftermath of the events as the Clanton gang is run down. Much of the films’ interest comes from featuring James Garner as Wyatt Earp and Jason Robards as Doc Holliday — as a capable duo of actors, they can hold our interest longer than the script. Otherwise, much of Hour of the Gun feels like a feature-film length epilogue to another story, and one that’s powered more by American West mythology than intrinsic storytelling qualities. I’m sure that within a few decades, machine learning will be good enough that we’ll be able to point a moviemaking engine to the dozen O.K. Corral movies and generate a mash-up combining the best elements of all. That will probably be more interesting than watching the source movies themselves.

  • Pan-Americana (1945)

    Pan-Americana (1945)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) American WW2 propaganda movies took many forms, and one of them could even be to exemplify the FDR administration’s “Good Neighbor” policies, which promoted friendship with Latin American nations. What this means in the context of a rather silly romantic comedy is that the protagonists of Pan-Americana follow a beauty contest featuring the lovely ladies of Mexico and southward — and that the film is crammed with Latin music and dance. Veteran writer-director-producer John H. Auer’s intention proves nobler than his execution — clichés and stereotypes abound in this film, clearly playing on American prejudices about what south-of-the-border beauties could look like. As a low-budget effort largely shot on Hollywood soundstages, Pan-Americana never could have been shot in colour and that’s regrettable given the costumes and musical numbers featured here. Still, the stereotypes are not mean-spirited, and the film can boast of some better-than-average repartee between the antagonistically romantic couples. Furthermore, let’s not minimize the unique appeal of the music — few movies were focused on Latin American performers at the time, and it manages to capture some entertainers rarely seen elsewhere in Hollywood history. While few will claim that Pan-Americana is a great film, it does offer something special compared to other movies of the time and gets at least a footnote entry for that alone. (Reaching for a dual-bill companion, the best I can do are the Latin American birds of the animated Disney film The Three Caballeros.)

  • Never Too Late (2020)

    Never Too Late (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) The premise of Never Too late should feel familiar, because it plays into the recent trend of movies that exist to give aging actors one more entry in their filmographies as elderly men of action asked once again to ply their special skills. In this case, we have James Cromwell playing a Vietnam-era operative now shuffled to a retirement home for veterans, where he meets fellow men of action and starts planning to break out of the locked-up facility—for love! It’s supposed to be a comedy and often is, but it does have its share of dark moments as well — especially the segment in which the protagonist is sedated into a coma in order to prevent further escape attempts. Shot and set in South Australia, the film does remain accessible throughout — albeit some of it being downright American in its elder abuse. Despite amusing monikers of “geezer comedies,” it’s a good thing that movies can accommodate plots and protagonists at all ages — and for all of its comic content, Never Too Late is clearly aiming for older audiences rather than playing up the comedy for younger viewers. It does make the viewing easy enough despite some rough patches, and does make for a fine late-career entry in Cromwell’s filmography.

  • The Hoodlum Saint (1946)

    The Hoodlum Saint (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) Contemporary reviews of The Hoodlum Saint greeted the film with some suspicion — after all, both headliners William Powell and Esther Williams here play characters that noticeably part from their usual screen persona, in a story that’s not fun and games. Williams never sets foot in water — she plays a rather conventional love interest as a foil for Powell’s character — who’s an amoral conman who occasionally sees the light of doing good. Again, it’s not one of his usual roles: he’s a bit too cold, too hard, too criminal for it to qualify as a role fit for Powell’s persona. (Meanwhile, more contemporary viewers may be surprised by Angela Lansbury playing a nightclub singer who turns evil in the last act.) The story itself spans more than a decade as our two leads meet, fall for each other, see their paths diverse and then converge again. It takes us from the aftermath of The Great War all the way to the early 1930s, with an interesting portrayal of exuberant financial speculation in the lead-up to the Great Crash of 1929. Some of the plotting gets arbitrary and melodramatic, but the finale puts all of the pieces back in place. The Hoodlum Saint is not a terrible film: there’s usually something interesting going on, and Powell as a conman without his usual suaveness makes for a darkly compelling variation. Even in a conventional role, Williams proves herself to be more than an aqua-musical bathing beauty, while Lansbury gets a few good moments. But you can see the limits of the film and why it dangerously toys with expectations along the way. It probably plays better today than it did then, but it’s still not quite as good as it could have been.

  • Human Desire (1954)

    Human Desire (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) Fritz Lang directed what seems like a dozen film noirs and I’m slowly making my way through them. Human Desire is roughly up to the quality level of his other ones. It certainly plays with some of the big guns of the genre: a dangerous psychopath (Broderick Crawford in fine gruff form), a hero who struggles with temptation (Glenn Ford, bland but likable) and the femme fatale who orchestrates mayhem to her benefit (Gloria Graham, quite good). The stylistic interest of the film largely comes from a focus on railroads and trains that provide much of the visual and auditory motifs. There aren’t many wholesome characters to be found here, but in-keeping with noir standards, that’s the way we like it. Much of the rest is about as bland as the title. Human Desire is not necessarily a great noir, but it is a representative one — clearly in that tradition and satisfying to those who like the subgenre.

  • The Golden Mask aka South of Algiers (1953)

    The Golden Mask aka South of Algiers (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) This obscure Van Heflin vehicle is perhaps most amusing for a plot summary — archeologist finds precious relics and is pursued by villains—that could (and has) fuelled dozens of big-spectacle action movies. Alas, this specific take on the high concept is a somewhat dull affair, with Heflin spending most of his time looking intensely at ruins. He tepidly avoids the bad guys, keeps the mask, and romances the girl — all familiar elements executed without much excitement. Given those lacklustre adventure elements, perhaps the best reason to watch the film today is a relatively restrained depiction of pre-revolution Algiers in the early 1950s, shot in colour with plenty of location footage. (Alas, the surest mark of the film’s obscurity is the terrible state of the copy shown on TCM — faded, blurry and clearly in need of restoration.)  The setting is unusual enough — although, inevitably, the movie’s inherent colonialism is frequently irritating. The Golden Mask is not a terrible film, but even Van Heflin fans will have trouble deciding whether the viewing time was worth it.