Reviews

  • Jessica (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) If your idea of a good time is to hang out in a small Sicilian village with Maurice Chevalier being your guide as a young attractive American woman arrives to upset nearly everyone, well, there’s Jessica for you to watch.   But be forewarned: the film is almost obscure for good reasons: it’s far duller and longer than expected, doesn’t quite know what to do with its assets and plays out in a way that fails to engage. Chevalier himself was in his seventies by the time the film was shot – far too old to play a romantic lead, and so safely neutered as an elderly priest able to pick up an instrument, directly address the audience and be his own one-person musical segment. Angie Dickinson is cute as an attractive America earning lust and jealousy alike. But the film’s attractions (once you factor in the Italian scenery) pretty much stop there, because its development is laborious and there’s seldom any strong attachment to the material being shown. Jessica is practically unknown today, and the sorry state in which TCM (infrequently) shows it is indicative of the lack of attention it has attracted since its release. At best you’ll see Chevalier in another a late-career role as romantic facilitator, but even his considerable charm can’t do much to save the rest of the production.

  • Final Analysis (1992)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2022) Don’t be surprised to experience a strong and repeated sense of deja vu during the now-obscure Final Analysis, especially if you’ve already seen many 1990s erotic thrillers. Clearly in the same mould as Basic Instinct (released roughly at the same time, so not a copycat case), this thriller features a psychologist (Richard Gere) with poor impulse control when it comes to sleeping with patients, a disturbed woman who ends up being a femme fatale (Kim Basinger) and a younger woman (Uma Thurman) who may be sympathetic to one or the other. You may be thinking that you’ve already seen all of those elements before in slightly different combinations and you’d be right – watching Final Analysis is like rediscovering a forgotten film that somehow feels redundant. The plot is squarely in-line with the later series of erotic thrillers launched in the wake of the far-more-successful Basic Instinct – featuring things like a psychologist character too smart for his own good, yet easily manipulated. You can see the Hitchcockian influence, but also the way it anticipated a long string of prestige thrillers throughout the following decade. I didn’t hate it – even though it felt intensely predictable down to the personas of the actors involved, that very predictability also made it comforting to watch. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be that surprised to learn that the largely forgotten Final Analysis really came from a very similar parallel universe in which Hollywood history played out in slightly different yet similar ways.

  • The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2022) There’s a fascinating intersection of two separate micro-trends at play in the low-budget Canadian thriller The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, plus two celebrities to headline the cast. The first of those trends was a steady descent into ever-more-shocking horror throughout the mean 1970s – gone was classic Hollywood, and the movies were getting increasingly bloodthirsty even when featuring nice protagonists. The second micro-trend was a brief flash of interest for Quebexploitation genre films produced for the American market by Quebec-based producers. (In this case, Astral Films, early adopters of the Canadian federal tax breaks that led to a brief “Tax Shelter films” period.)  That second micro-trend is largely forgotten today in the rest of the world – Scanners and other Cronenberg films may endure as the subgenre’s most celebrated achievement, but Canadian TV channels wanting to show “classic” films often dip into the 1970s Quebexsploitation corpus to meet CanCon requirements. So that explains how The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane is still shown fifty-five years later… although –let’s not fool ourselves—the presence of a very young Jodie Foster (famously body-doubled by her sister in a late-film nude scene, eek) and none other than Martin Sheen (as a hamster-killing antagonist) in the cast does ensure that the film is still interesting today. It features a 13-year-old girl (Foster) living alone despite increasingly pointed questions from neighbours, and uncomfortable sexual advances from the film’s villain. She’s not the most likable character, but the film does force a certain sympathy for the situation by pitting her against an even worse antagonist. Clearly the kind of dark and depressing 1970s film meant to make you want a cleansing shower after watching, The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane does leave an impression, Quebexploitation or not.

  • Open (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2022) There are days where only a trashy BET-broadcast romantic drama will do. Open is nearly guaranteed to satisfy you if you’re used to the quirks and limitations of the subgenre: low-budget filmmaking that is rife with iffy acting, dubious scripting, cheap directing and explicitly saucy content. This specific film plays with the idea of open marriages, unsurprisingly concluding that they’re not workable in the long term. I wouldn’t expect anything less for BET’s audience, just as I wasn’t expecting them to skip over the near-mandatory lingerie scene. (And indeed, it comes within moments of the film’s opening.)  This amusing back-and-forth between suggestive content and traditional morality is one of the things that keeps Open alive throughout its melodramatic pace, as one of the husband’s past infidelities comes back with receipts, the wife is tempted by a past fling, and both of them start breaking the rules they established for themselves (which is what usually happens in mainstream films about open marriages). The conclusion, perhaps inevitably, is an all-around disappointment – trying to promote the idea of marital fidelity after wallowing in the opposite ratings-seeking behaviour and taking its characters way past the point of no return. But I don’t really mind: that’s the fun of those films. Essence Atkins stars as the wife, but it’s supporting players like the beautiful Marquita Goings and Jasmine Guy who become the reason to watch the film even as the contrivances and hypocrisies pile up. I’d love to sit down with novelist turned writer-director-producer Cas Sigers-Beedles to ask about the production constraints, the thematic intentions, whether there’s some ironic distance built in the script and how it is to put together such films on what must be a tiny budget and a breakneck pace. The result is frankly recognizable as substandard made-for-TV material – but Open is a lot of fun in the right frame of mind, and it is the kind of movie that got me to start systematically watching all of the BET original films I haven’t yet seen: they’re flawed in interesting ways, which almost feels like a breath of fresh air compared to slick Hollywood mega-productions that fail in very predictable ways.

  • Island of Love (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) If ever you find yourself squinting in amazement at a hitherto-unknown film’s cast and wonder why you’ve never heard of it, the answer (depressingly enough) is likely to be the same no matter the circumstances: it’s probably not a good movie. And even if it does begin on a promising note, it will degenerate later on. So it is that the first sequence of Island of Love, even if clunky, does suggest a much better film to come: Here we have Robert Preston playing close to his Music Man persona by incarnating a con man, Tony Randall as his long-suffering writer friend, Walter Matthau playing a crime boss with some kind of curious speech impairment (flanked by four yes-men) and the splendid Betty Bruce as a gangster moll thrust in front of the spotlight. But what initially feels like a clunky but promising showbiz crime comedy unexplainably takes a turn for much duller pastures at the end of the first act. Soon enough, nearly all of our characters find themselves on a small Greek island where the rest of the story plays out in an abundance of dull clichés and contrived coincidences. Preston is rarely less than compelling, and the supporting cast is interesting in many ways – but nothing quite gels, as the film squanders its initial promise and settles for something quite generic. Too bad – but if ever you come across Island of Love and start saying, “Wow, what a cast!” remember why it’s increasingly obscure.

  • Gunman’s Walk (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) The 1950s were a rich period for westerns and as the decade drew to a close, films in that genre had to find something to distinguish themselves. It was a decade where more movies were shot in colour, where the role of Native Americans was being redefined ever so slightly, where having a cowboy with a gun wasn’t enough to sustain a narrative for a more demanding audience. Gunman’s Walk may not be that good of a film, but it fits in that trend in fitting a family drama in a western context, and is more nuanced about its native characters than most westerns of a few years earlier. Much of the story revolves around a hard patriarch (a good late performance from a mustachioed Van Heflin) having to contend with two very different sons: an overly aggressive and racist one (Tab Hunter, playing against type) and a more refined one who doesn’t fit his idea of what an heir should be like. One cattle drive later, there are multiple complications: One son falling for a half-Native woman (Kathryn Grant, looking great), the other accused of killing the woman’s brother. The tangled drama is enough to keep audiences interested even if they don’t like westerns, and give everyone in the cast a few good sequences to play. Gunman’s Walk remains a western, but one that’s not intolerable (if sometimes a bit dull) to modern audiences.

  • Babam ve Oglum [My Father and My Son] (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Youtube Streaming, April 2022) A common failure mode of using best-of movie lists as mandatory viewing guides is the presumption that every film on the list is an utter masterpiece. That way lies disappointment and madness – a far better approach is to see the best-of lists as samplers where every pick has some kind of baseline quality. Seeing My Father and My Son pop up on lists such as the IMDB 250 creates expectations that the film probably can’t match – even ignoring that IMDB is a favourite battleground for Turkish viewers wanting to manipulate rankings to boost or bomb specific films. The film begins with a melodramatic bang, as a man tries to get his pregnant wife to a hospital, but is left to his own devices due to the 1980 coup and suffers fatal consequences. The rest of the film, alas, doesn’t quite go as hard as the opening, as the father, years later once out of prison, goes back to the family farm in rural Turkey in order to make sure that his son finds a home given his own fatal disease. There’s dynamism to the film’s execution by writer-director Çağan Irmak, especially when it focuses on the young boy’s imagination and translates flights of fancy into fantastic visions given form. This more comic material eventually meshes with the more tragedy of a father trying to reconcile with his estranged family before his own death, and integrating his son in their lives. It’s not a bad film: the glimpse in a place that most of us will never know – a Turkish family farm—is often evocative, and there’s some very emotional content later on as the boy learns to say goodbye to his father. Is it necessarily a top-250 film of all time? I can’t answer that for you. But its presence on the list will, at least, open up an entire national cinema – if you like My Father and My Son, there are plenty of similar films just waiting for you.

  • Carrie Fisher: Wishful Drinking (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) There’s a telling moment, early in Carrie Fisher’s one-woman show Wishful Drinking, in which Fisher states that it’s by taking ownership of one’s flaws – here by laughing at them – that you get to master them, and the show itself is an incredible illustration of that idea. Walking barefoot on a stage made to look like a living room (but with some surprising multimedia refinements that become obvious over the course of the show), Fisher delivers a surprisingly hilarious take on her own life as the daughter of a pop-culture royalty couple (and associated tangle of complications), as someone with textbook mental health issues, as a much-divorced alcoholic and, by the way, as pop-culture icon Princess Leia. It’s clearly a comedy show, and even the most enthusiastic viewers may squirm a bit in hearing Fisher boil down painful moments into one-liners. But they’re great one-liners – Fisher’s underappreciated career as a writer (as novelist, but also most notably as a script doctor) shines through here, and it’s not rare to hear a very quotable line in the middle of her autobiographical patter. There’s a strong “gosh, look at those weird Hollywood people” quality to the show, as she acknowledges the sheer weirdness of her life when compared to the more usual yardsticks used by her audience. (And let’s acknowledge the valuable contribution of cute audience member “Nicole,” plucked from the front row to become a minor participant in the show.)  Fisher herself is a lot of fun here, and the film goes hand-and-glove with Bright Lights, the documentary chronicling her complex relationship with her mother Debbie Reynolds completed just before their near-simultaneous deaths. The highlight of this one is probably the “Hollywood inbreeding 101” number, in which we go through a complex web of marriages and births to determine whether two young people wanting to date are, in fact, related. Only in Hollywood, suggests (erroneously) Fisher – but that’s the nature of the documentary. Wishful Drinking is absorbing viewing, frequently hilarious even as it handles heart-wrenching material. A must-see for any Fisher fans, and a great show for anyone else – don’t worry, Fisher will provide the context required to make sense of it all.

  • K-Shop (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2022) Perhaps the most noteworthy thing about K-Shop is how much it feels like a short film that states its point early on, then just keeps going out of inertia. Largely set in a kebab restaurant in a British city where violent drunks come out at night, K-Shop quickly takes on a few social issues and pushes them into horror. Our protagonist is shattered when his father, the restaurant owner, is killed by drunken hooligans, and soon vows revenge. Horror movie-grade revenge, that is: not simply content to kill, he has to butcher, cook and serve his victim to the other drunks invading his restaurant every night. The film could have ended with a shot of carved-up kebab meat – but then it keeps going for another hour, not really adding much to an already trite idea. While writer-director Dan Pringle doesn’t do that badly in the earlier part of the film and later on in executing his premise with some skills that go beyond its narrative emptiness, K-Shop feels increasingly pointless even as the sadistic murders pile up – going from vigilantism to cannibalism is not the most surprising progression, and even K-Shop’s anger at the United Kingdom’s binge-drinking culture isn’t quite enough to set the result apart from its biggest flaws.

  • The Forever Purge (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) There’s this weird see-saw at play throughout the Purge series in that every new instalment becomes increasingly more politically and cinematographically ambitious, even as the law of diminishing returns makes the results feel increasingly redundant. I suspect that if fifth (!) instalment The Forever Purge had shown up without its predecessors, we would be having a different conversation. But it doesn’t: progressing in time past The Purge: Election Year, this entry shows what every viewer of the first film had pointed out: how do you contain the violence of the Purge to a mere twenty-four hours? Wouldn’t a spillover be inevitable? Here it is – the Purge film for the post-Capitol coup attempt era, despite having been completed a year before. Not that this is the only element in which the series has reflected the increasing violence inherent in the contemporary American political discourse – this first full-fledged Purge sequel since 2016 takes place in the American southwest, not only lending a neo-western atmosphere to the proceedings, but squarely engaging with the hateful rhetoric aimed at Hispanic immigration. As far as the series goes, The Forever Purge does keep the uncomfortable, downright ugly feeling of previous films: it’s a blunt social horror film built on a belief that hell is others. At least the special effects have caught up to the ambitions of the story: this instalment contains a few wide-scale shots conveying the large-scale destruction of the situation, and escalates the situation into a national crisis. There may or may not be a sequel, and I don’t care all that much: I’m not sure there’s all that much left in the tank of this series from a conceptual level. This isn’t a series built on the thrill of executing its premise in impressive moments: I would defy even fans of the series to remember specific action sequences that stick in mind, other than a lasting impression of general mayhem. But this fifth instalment feels like it manages, even against all odds, to keep its head above water as something of marginal interest: that’s more than I would have predicted at any point in the series so far.

  • Little Italy (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2022) As far as food-based romantic comedies go, Little Italy shouldn’t be mistaken for the lower-grade stuff made for TV – it’s not great art, but’s a bit spicier, more ambitious and more successful than its Hallmark channel equivalents. The increased budget shows, both in narrative structure (complete with an opening sequence presenting our protagonist as kids), the pedigree of the director (Donald Petrie, who has a few big-budgeted romantic comedies on his filmography) and in the grade of actors: Hayden Christensen, Emma Roberts and Danny Aiello aren’t the biggest stars around, but they are recognizable name actors, and they help make the film just that much better. (It’s also rated R for some language and racy content – a significant difference!)  Set in Toronto’s Little Italy, the film follows a young woman as she comes back from a culinary apprenticeship in London and rediscovers what happened to the neighbourhood during her years away: A feud has split the local pizzeria scene, her best friend as a kid has become an attractive man. The rest of Little Italy is familiar (all the way to, yes, a chase to the airport). But it’s the execution that makes it likable, whether it’s some saucy dialogue, likable character moments or the immersion in Toronto’s colourful multicultural matrix – even if the film doesn’t bother hiding its cultural stereotypes. It’s not much (and looking at the scathing reviews earned by the film, it’s clear that critics were comparing it to mainstream fare rather than the made-for-TV romantic comedies) but there’s a quasi-nostalgic throwback to Little Italy, which feels as if it could have been made ten or fifteen years earlier. I don’t necessarily think it’s that great, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

  • The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, on Cable TV, April 2022) After something like half a dozen (or more) examples of the form, I have come to the conclusion that there’s a surprisingly specific genre I don’t care for: the 1980s family fantasy film, of which The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter can be considered a late example. Such films are, perhaps by definition, fated to be less than satisfying – taking on the task of creating expansive fantastic visions with the limited tools of the time, inevitably compromising on narrative in order to deliver what was possible on their budget. (Today’s successors usually go to computer animation from the get-go.)  German production The NeverEnding Story II, even from the start, seems less ambitious than even its predecessor – it doesn’t aim for family entertainment as much as wowing the younger ones, and it’s an open question as to whether this can be as effective for its intended age group today, considering that even Saturday morning cartoons offer better fantasy visions. I liked elements of the villainess’s characterization, but that’s roughly it as far as impressions go – much of The NeverEnding Story II feels bland and forgettable, further fuelling my contention that I have issues with the genre itself.

  • Stromboli (Terra di Dio) (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) Do I really need to restate how much I don’t care for Italian neorealism? But here is Stromboli to remind me of how much I really don’t care for it. It speaks volumes that I watched the film not for its genre as much as for its star Ingrid Bergman – and that Bergman’s character spends much of the film being exasperated at being stuck in an uninteresting fishing village. That intention certainly translates to the viewer stuck alongside her: when will the volcano in the backdrop of the village finally erupt so that everyone will be put out of their misery? Handled by writer-director-producer Roberto Rossellini, Stromboli is not a bad movie – but it will try the patience of anyone not necessarily attuned to the specifics of Italian neorealism. The story around the film is more interesting than the film itself (and accordingly, consumes far more space on the film’s Wikipedia page than its plot summary) – it’s the film that brought Bergman and Rossellini together for a well-publicized affair (while they were both married to other people) that led to Bergman being called no less than “a powerful influence for evil” on the US Senate floor (not one of that legislative body’s finest moments) and the effective eclipse of her Hollywood career for half a decade. Talking about Stromboli is a discussion about American prejudice and censorship circa-1950s – far more interesting than the content of the film, even if the volcano does add a bit of spice to the neorealism. But what else could we expect?

  • The Last Mark (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) I understand that finding good movie premises that are suitable to be executed under the typical constraints of a low-budget Canadian production is hard. I also understand that a guy with a gun is dramatically interesting, and so hitman movies can be appealing for budgets barely big enough to include a catering table. But it takes more than a guy with a gun and a girl in distress to make a compelling film. The Last Mark may or may not be a case in point. For one thing, I’m really happy that the film avoids the “retiring hitman who travels to a small town and realizes that the hit is on him” plot line that’s been recently overused in Canadian low-budget films. On the other hand, it doesn’t really rise much above it with “Retired hitman refuses last contract, plans on rescuing his victim instead.”  Much of the story takes place between the hitman and the girl he locks up in an effort not to kill her, with additional thrills coming from those even-worse-hitmen trying to tie up that loose end. It’s in execution, however, that The Last Mark proves most limited. Taking place in rural surroundings, it’s a dreary and dimly lit affair in low-rent bars, cheap hotel rooms, rusting cars and small houses. Clichés may be batted away (no, he’s not his victim’s father, we’re repeatedly told) but they’re still played with, and the quality of the execution, whether we’re talking about the humdrum script or Reem Morsi’s direction or any of the performances. The Last Mark is better than bad, but nowhere near good enough to be worth recommending. It just feels… present, without many more qualifiers. Or I simply may have overdosed on Canadian hitman thrillers.

  • Designed with Love (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2022) When is a made-for-TV romantic comedy featuring a food truck not a food romantic comedy? When the food truck is converted into a mobile fashion boutique, of course, allowing the characters to feature in a fashion romantic comedy. Wholly different subgenres! No, I’m kidding: no matter whether our heroine is a gifted chef or fashion designer, Designed with Love goes over well-trodden territory when it comes to Hallmark-off-brand romantic comedies. There’s a wish-fulfillment fantasy aspect to it all, with the work of a fashion designer outrageously simplified for feel-good effect, cause and effect being compressed in a span of a few in-universe days, and on-the-nose dialogue challenging actors to remain believable despite not portraying reality. (I did like Zarrin Darnell-Martin in her “girlfriend” role a lot better than lead actress Kelly Van der Burg, for instance, but the second of her three scenes is a lamentable example of plot-driven dialogue that no one would ever say this bluntly.)  There are contrivances, plot cheats and fake deadlines, but that’s the way those movies often go, and it’s amusing to see that the same oversized plot instruments are in use no matter if the lead character is an artist, writer, cook or designer. The surprise is that Designed with Love, when compared to other similar films, is a bit better than usual. Director Bill Corcoran crams a lot in 85 minutes, and the central romantic relationship is slightly more credible than usual. I specifically liked how the male lead (played by Benjamin Sutherland) isn’t this flawless prince charming from the get-go – he’s clearly a brilliant but quirky man with serious commitment issues and unconventional looks. While the film does get him to a happy ending, it’s not as easy a process as in other movies where the male lead is a generic placeholder for an ideal mate. The film has a few more ideas than usual for its class of film, and Elise Bauman gets a decent supporting role even if -sigh- the point of the character seems to be receiving a **!makeover!** (gosh, girls!) from the heroine. All in all, though, I’ve seen much worse, and could even muster a bit of interest for the character’s per-ordained fate by the end of the film. Designed with Love is made to formula, sure, but just sufficiently off to be interesting.