Reviews

  • The Moguls aka The Amateurs (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2022) While The Amateurs didn’t make much of a splash upon release, you can go back to it today to have a look at an eclectic cast out for an amiable comic romp. The fact that it’s about small-town people getting together to make an amateur pornographic movie isn’t much of an obstacle for prudish audiences—while this is technically an R-rated film, it features nothing worse than some mild language (albeit fewer swearwords than you’d expect), lingerie and a bit of rear nudity. The treatment of the topic often feels like older people tittering at a risqué subject more than anything else, but that’s the kind of film it wants to be—an American The Full Monty, Kinky Boots or Calendar Girls. That’s perhaps not such a surprise considering the respectable cast it managed to get together: Headlined by Jeff Bridges, it also features notables such as William Fichner, Tim Blake Nelson, Joe Pantoliano, Ted Danson, Lauren Graham and Jeanne Tripplehorn in supporting roles. Sharp-eyed viewers will even spot Judy Greer in a regrettably short role. The big joke of the film is that none of the main characters are attractive enough to disrobe, and there’s slim pickings in casting an erotic film in a small town. Much of the humour comes from the clash between plans and reality, with Bridges’ character narrating but not adding that much to it. The Amateurs has to navigate a tightrope act between being suggestive but not vulgar, as well as finding a way to give something to its characters despite setbacks along the way. It generally manages to make it to the finishing line, although the ensemble nature of the film makes it difficult to focus all that long on each of the dozen subplots all going on at once. No one will reasonably claim that this is a forgotten gem, but it plays reasonably well if you’re in the right frame of mind and don’t expect too much from the result. The cast and small-town atmosphere can be interesting even if more dirty-minded viewers will be left unsatisfied.

  • Stage: The Culinary Internship (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2022) There’s a fascinating 2011 non-fiction book called The Sorcerer’s Apprentices, by Lisa Abend, that peers behind the scenes of the legendary haute-cuisine restaurant el Bulli and concludes that, for all of the restaurant’s aura of high-tech molecular cuisine innovation and envelope-pushing, none of it would be possible without the small army of stagiaires jumping at the chance to do backbreaking manual work in exchange for a great entry on their resumés. Things had not changed by 2019, as Stage: The Culinary Internship follows the thirty stagiaires of similarly high-class high-innovation restaurant Mugaritz. A few members of the class are selected and followed through their experience, first preparing and serving the meals, then (if they’re selected) coming up with ideas for the next season of meals. A variety of fates await our stagiaires, from being selected for the prestigious Research and Development follow-up, to quitting the stage midway through. The documentary crew clearly had ample access and authorization to shoot during a lengthy period in Mugaritz, as we go into the kitchen and the dining room, peeking at the process through which courses are designed and following the stagiaires as they perform the required menial work to keep “one of the best restaurants in the world” smoothly running. Director Abby Ainsworth’s Stage: The Culinary Internship is not great filmmaking (there isn’t much style to be found here, even if the courses look great), but it’s absorbing viewing for anyone even slightly interested in the highest end of cuisine. Sure, the chefs get the headlines—but spare a thought for the stagiaires who make it all possible.

  • Cats and Peachtopia (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, March 2022) There’s now an entire sub-genre of Chinese-made family animated films, and I’m not sure that North American audiences are even aware of them. Now, it’s true that many can be disappointing—it takes some effort to match the level of the slickest western productions, whether you’re talking visual detail, character design or storytelling quality. The good news is that Cats and Peachtopia, from Light Chaser Animation Studios, gets most of the way there… but it still lacks a few crucial things to be entirely successful. The story revolves around a young apartment cat’s escape in the wild, on a quest to find his disappeared mother at a possibly mythical “Peachtopia” where cats live in peace, abundance and harmony. Visually, it’s got most of the visual density and detail that top animated movies can now manage. It’s a bit stiff on the animation front and some of the more demanding scenes clearly reach technical limits, but Cats and Peachtopia is a film that, most of the time, looks like it belongs with the western standard. Where things don’t quite work as well is in the character design—with the cats too often looking like furry blobs. Then there’s the script: Awkward tonal transitions (beginning with the first musical number), a story that seems to engage with a heavy theme of grief, but then throws in a megalomaniac artist as antagonist, and multiple rough transitions that don’t make the experience completely smooth. Oh, at least it’s better than the 2019 version of Cats—it’s cute enough for younger audiences, with enough polish to keep adults not-too-bored. But even in exceeding expectations, Cats and Peachtopia still has some ground to cover before reaching the level of its competitors. I’m glad I saw it—but then again, I’m a cat owner.

  • Birdy (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2022) I did not expect to be quite so sucked into Birdy, because any concise description of the film is liable to be misleading. While it is a drama about two wounded Vietnam veterans trying to overcome their trauma, don’t go into the film expecting a traditional structure where two young men are drafted, sent to Vietnam, and then get back. Birdy spends almost no time in Vietnam at all, instead focusing on the childhood of the two main characters and how that influences their attempt at recovery after their tour of duty. A young (and buff) Nicholas Cage stars as a soldier with head trauma, while Matthew Modine has a more challenging role as an eccentric bird-lover who ends up in a psychiatric ward in a mute state, seemingly imitating a bird. The script flashes back all over the place as one man tries to get the other to snap out of his condition before Army bureaucracy locks him up forever. Two thirds of the film are spent in 1960s working-class Philadelphia, as the two teenagers become friends and support each other through formative experiences. There’s a fair bit of humour and eccentricity here, helping tie up the grimmer post-war framing device. Even the very last shot of the film is a joke playing on overly glum expectations. Allan Parker’s direction keeps things interesting even through a full two hours and some uncomfortable material about obsession and madness, making Birdy still feel quite unlike most other comparable films.

  • Corrina, Corrina (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2022) It’s hard to be that critical of Corrina, Corrina when its heart is such in a right place—a nice fairytale of a 1950s white widower hiring a black nanny, then falling for her despite prejudices crossing racial, class and social lines. You get Ray Liotta as a rather likable protagonist, for once (a musical composer, even!), as well as a great-looking Whoopi Goldberg as the sweet yet sharp-talking romantic interest. It’s easily watchable, even when it runs across very familiar plot threads. Writer-director Jessie Nelson isn’t interested in a realistic drama, though: the sets are brightly lit as if in a nostalgic fantasy, the characters seem predetermined to be together and the script allows itself just enough expressions of prejudice to get the point across and nothing more upsetting. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it underscores the limits of feel-good anti-racism film often seen throughout Hollywood history in which white filmmakers make inclusive statements that don’t seem to fully engage with the subjacent problems and set up a comforting fantasy for their white audiences. It’s hard to be against that kind of material, but it’s important to acknowledge, especially in light of better movies since the 1980s, how limited it can be. That doesn’t make Corrina, Corrina a bad film, but watching it today only underscores who differently we would approach similar material nearly three decades later.

  • Playmobil: The Movie (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2022) In many ways, Playmobil: The Movie is the film we feared we’d get with The Lego Film: a competent but flavourless feature-length toy commercial wrapped in formulaic storytelling techniques. I’ll quickly add, so that there can be no confusion about my loyalties, that my household (both as a boy and as a father) remains a Lego one—the lone Playmobil firetruck being neglected in favour of the endlessly rebuildable Lego bricks. I’ve always found the Playmobil dolls to be grotesque abominations stuck between realism and symbolism while reaching neither. The film doesn’t do much to improve my assessment: awkwardly put together along toy lines and recipes from screenwriter manuals, it’s sometimes weirdly atonal (killing off the parents in the opening five minutes? Really?), intensely predictable, lazy in its themes and messages, weak in its jokes and meandering even as it should move faster. Sure, you can get a few chuckles out of Daniel Radcliffe voicing a suave British-accented spy, or in some of the many, many attempts at humour. But that doesn’t make the film any better in the aggregate: the useless live-action framing device isn’t saved by its musical number, and the whole thing feels like an unwieldy attempt to sell toys without doing much more than reaching for family-friendly clichés. Playmobil: The Movie is watchable without being memorable except as “That movie trying to sell Playmobil.”  Nicely titled, then, but otherwise not much more.

  • Amarcord (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2022) While Armacord is a bit too close to the bland neorealism of Fellini’s early career than the colourful expressionism of his later work, I’m sympathetic to this (semi-autobiographical) tale of a young man living his last year in a small Italian town before forever leaving for the big city. There’s fondness in the way the village is shown in its small quirks over the course of a year—its eccentric inhabitants, limited perspective and life under the fascist regime of mid-1930s Italy. My favourite sequence is probably the one going over the teen protagonists’ sexual fantasies while limited to their small-town surrounding: it’s funny, a bit crude, but surprisingly cute—at least if you’ve been a male teenager. While I don’t like Amarcord as much as some of the most exuberant latter-day Fellini in his non-realistic verve, it does feel a bit tighter, a bit more cohesive than his other films of that period. Its appeal will be closely linked to how much viewers want to spend time in a 1930s small Italian town… and then leave.

  • Bound for Glory (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2022) By all rights, Bound for Glory should have been more interesting. As an (admittedly very fictionalized) biography of Woody Guthrie, a very interesting figure at the intersection of American history, labour activism and entertainment, it’s clearly given the big-budget treatment. (It was reportedly the first film to use a Steadicam.)  The cast is striking even today, with David Carradine in the lead role and Randy Quaid in a supporting one. It comes with an illustrious pedigree, having been nominated and several won Academy Awards—among other honours. On paper, the one thing that gives me pause is that it’s directed by Hal Ashby, a director with more hits than misses as far as I’m concerned. (Not that this is a widely shared view—Ashby remains a favourite of New Hollywood fans… which I’m not.)  And indeed, it doesn’t take much until the brown-gray execution of Bound for Glory sucked all of my interest in the picture, with a slow pacing and cinematography taken straight from the Great Depression illustrated by the film. You can’t even try to explain the lack of interest by an overly faithful adhesion to facts, as even a cursory look at Guthrie’s biography shows numerous instances of fictionalization. I gradually become disengaged throughout the film’s gruelling two-and-a-half-hour running time, only perking up (or waking up?) once the classic “This Land Is Your Land” made its climactic appearance. Bound for Glory has a dull execution of a fascinating topic, and that makes it even more frustrating.

  • Doors (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2022) Ugh, what a disappointment. As a documented Science Fiction fan, I’m more than willing to give a chance to any new SF movie… at the cost of being far harsher on failures than someone who doesn’t care as much. The premise of Doors seems hard to mess up: what if we had an anthology film exploring the ramifications of a worldwide event—the appearance of alien “doors” throughout the world, affecting humans in various ways. You can see the possibility here for multiple angles on the same core material, for tonal shifts, and for developing an idea in audacious ways. But the result falls far short of expectations. For one thing, the framing device is lazily developed through annoying narration. Worse is the lack of coordination of the segments, each apparently going their own way in terms of visuals, door powers and thematic consistency. A low-budget execution doesn’t do Doors any favours, nor does a truly baffling visual design with hard-to-read subtitles standing in for alien communications. Perhaps worst of all is a growing sense of dissatisfaction with how writers-directors Jeff Desom, Saman Kesh and Dugan O’Neal seem to do one random thing after another, not leading to anything, not creating any kind of credible atmosphere. The ”scientists” of the film are terrible at their jobs, the high schoolers are unlikable, the podcaster is presented as an untrustworthy source of information (rather vexing considering his role in explaining the context) and nothing adds up. There’s a clear lack of conclusion to all four of the anthology segments, as they invariably end just when things turn interesting. There’s not thematic unity, no narrative drive, no sense of viewing pleasure—Doors quickly becomes an ordeal, clearly put together with people without any understanding or appreciation of the ways Science Fiction can be used for impact or thematic development. What a waste of time and effort.

  • Cromwell (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2022) As far as my embarrassingly short attention span is concerned, only two things save Cromwell from the weight of its hefty two hours and twenty-five minutes (back when that did not include five minutes’ worth of end credits)—a sense of characters dealing with epochal changes, and a central battle sequence that has endured much better than you’d expect. Otherwise, well, steel yourself for an extended history lesson painted with mud and maximalist production design. The cast is worth some attention, with Richard Harris and Alec Guiness staring at each other as they debate the changing nature of the British monarchy. Also worth noting is a very young Timothy Dalton in a supporting role. But there’s a limit to what actors can do with an overlong script, and Cromwell doesn’t take a long time to grate, as speeches upon speeches and digressions upon tangents all serve to dilute the film’s most interesting elements. A battle sequence does spice things up, but then it’s back to dark brown rooms for more soliloquies and period detail. I probably would have given this better marks had I been in the mood for a British history lesson—but at this moment, it feels like far too much too little added value. It’s amazing to consider that Cromwell’s original cut was (we’re told) around three hours and fifteen minutes. Wake me up once the 85-minute version hits.

  • The F Word aka What If (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2022) It’s not necessarily a bad thing to discover a film several years after its release. In The F-Word’s case, it means not only finding a thoroughly engaging romantic comedy after the twilight of the genre’s commercially successful years at the box-office, but also a film that captures a few actors in an earlier phase of their career, in a way that makes us appreciate them even more. Daniel Radcliffe, for instance, has now pretty much overcome the weight of his Harry Potter years and become an interesting actor in his own right—but that wasn’t necessarily as true nine years ago upon The F Word’s release. Adam Driver has accessed to stardom since them, but here he is playing the protagonist’s best friend. Zoe Kazan is bubbly and fun here, while Mackenzie Davis has also become far more recognized in the interval. It helps that The F Word, faithful to its theatrical origins, trades on sharp dialogue and likable characters. In this case—a single disillusioned man agreeing to be friends with a woman in a long-distance relationship. Whether it can work is irrelevant—this is a good-natured romantic comedy and while the film plays with its ultimate release, it’s smart enough to recognize that we want those crazy kids to end up together. It would be a stretch to call the dialogue insightful or universal, but it is fun to listen to as the characters exchange ideas on the nature of relationships and whether to take it up to the next level. There are some weird turns here (including a wholly useless side-trip to Ireland), a deliciously misleading moment toward the very end of the film, and a few choice words between sarcastic leads. But The F Word, to its credit, knows when to let go and when to reel them in—the result is a wonderfully Torontonian romantic comedy. I’m glad I saw it, even if it took me nine years.

  • Dirt Music (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2022) As much as I like novel-to-movie adaptations for how they often have more ambitious narratives than original screenplays (especially at the low end), I’m finding more and more evidence of adaptations being hampered by the creative choices made by the work they’re adapting. And that’s not mentioning when novels that have no business being adapted to the big screen nonetheless get the cinematic treatment. I have not read the novel from which Dirt Music is adapted, but I can recognize how it could be a much better work than what ended up on screen. It’s not a complete disappointment: director Gregor Jordan creates a captivating atmosphere out of its Western Australia landscape, and there are moments when it feels as if the film will finally do something with its blend of lust, jealousy, hardscrabble characters and harsh natural landscapes. But the consummation of those elements never comes. As a woman and a man go through the aftermath of their affair’s discovery, it feels as if the film is constantly on the verge of turning into a genre picture. But it never does: prisoner of its source material, unable to commit to a streamlined narrative, it loses itself in a dozen different subplots, backstories, half-hearted developments and a muddled mess that fails to adapt what feels like a subtle piece of prose. Garrett Hedlund and the always-compelling Kelly Macdonald are not bad as the leads, but they can’t fix a broken script that doesn’t know where to go. Human melodrama undermines the great nature cinematography and leaves no one happy. Now give a gun to the characters and have them shoot at each other in-between chases in the Australian outback and you’d have something worth paying attention to—not necessarily something good, mind you, but at least something with a point and a pulse.

  • How it Ends (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2022) I’ve seen quite a few movies about how it ends lately, and they’ve been of very variable quality. Australian 2013 drama These Final Hours is terrific; American 2018 thriller How It Ends was terrible; American 2021 comedy Don’t Look Up managed some poignant moments; and I could go on… But the film at hand here is the American 2021 comedy How It Ends, and while it’s an entry in the sub-genre that distinguishes itself through its quirks, that doesn’t necessarily make it all that satisfying. Real-Life couple Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein produced, wrote, directed, edited, photographed and starred in the film in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, which does much to explain its odd disconnected feeling: Even beyond its primary premise (a young woman seeking to make amends on the last day before an asteroid strikes earth), or its secondary premise (younger versions of many characters are literally present), the script goes from one episode to another in Los Angeles’ deserted streets, and their encounters are filmed at a distance. It struck me, not too far into the film, that there was a distinct lack of hugging throughout the various encounters (I’m far from a touchy-feely kind of person, but I would be hugging everyone and anyone on the last day of humanity). Here, people stare at each other from their social distancing bubble and leave with scarcely more than a wave goodbye. All of this reinforces the unreality of the film, which does not contribute to its success. While the film wants to be funny and poignant, it just ends up being pedestrian (in a very literal way, but also in the bland way it’s photographed and directed) and leaves most of its potential on the table, unused and abandoned. Having younger versions of the protagonist and a few other characters being present for dialogue feels like an intriguing idea that doesn’t have anywhere to go, and having a few known names in supporting roles (Helen Hunt, Colin Hanks, Charlie Day, Fred Armsen, Olivia Wilde, Finn Wolfhard, Whitney Cumings, etc.—although I’ll watch Tawny Newsome in anything) feels like friends making favours within the Thirty-Miles Zone more than purposeful casting. I’m open to the idea that the film’s gentle, off-beat humour is incompatible with mine, but that doesn’t do much to excuse the film’s more substantial problems at the script level or a cheap, disappointing execution. It feels like the kind of project a few friends put together out of boredom during the pandemic, and while that’s not a bad thing, I would have liked to see something better come out of it. As it stands, How it Ends is a disappointing entry in the last-day-on-Earth subgenre, distinctive but not in a good way, and limited in its emotional impact despite ample opportunities to do better.

  • The Little Rascals (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2022) In the land of movies made for kids, no amount of excess is considered enough. Big broad jokes, stereotypes and contrivances? Bring them on. But the question remains: Is The Little Rascals truly a kid’s movie? Adapted from a series of shorts dating back to the 1920–1940s (and sometimes outright re-using gags from those earlier films), there’s a really good case that this is a kid’s film aimed at adults and older audiences who remember early incarnations of The Little Rascals. The clichés and stereotypes used here are clearly from a previous generation, and the film’s insistence in showcasing the cuteness and innocence of its kids’ characters seems squarely dedicated to adult audiences so that they can drag their kids in. Coupled with the overdone sweetness of the result, it usually feels as if The Little Rascals is trying far too hard. It does have its strengths, though: director Penelope Spheeris gets some good footage out of a cast largely made of kids, and manages to capture a nostalgic atmosphere uncomplicated by realism or complexity. That doesn’t make The Little Rascals any less grating and annoying—it makes it intentionally grating and annoying. Everyone will gauge their tolerance for such material—head for the exits if the first minutes don’t work.

  • The Mitchells vs the Machines (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Netflix Streaming, March 2022) Two movies released in short succession make a trend, and so in-between Ron’s Gone Wrong and The Mitchells vs the Machines, we have two animated family films that derive much of their inspiration from how customer technology can be used in terrible ways. (Few will miss the irony of both films being made widely accessible through streaming platforms.)  This one goes hard in its family-friendly nightmare, as an Apple-ish company releases android-like devices that then proceed to enslave humans out of jealous spite. By plot contrivance, the only humans who escape capture are the dysfunctional Mitchell family on a road trip from the Midwest to the West Coast. The best hint that the film is going to be better than expected comes early in the opening credits, as Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are listed as producers: while they didn’t direct or write the film, the result reflects the sure-handed touch that they brought to Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The Lego Movie: fast pace, semi-absurdist humour, comic self-awareness and a core of humanity at the heart of it, this time focusing on a father/daughter relationship. I can’t say that I agree with all of the creative choices here (some of the visual design is… grotesque), but the film amply exceeds expectations and keeps delivering until the end. Visually, Sony Pictures Animation manages a quirky blend of traditional CGI, indie-type cutesy drawing and, in the third act, some vapourwave aesthetics—pushing the enveloped of CGI family films much like they did with Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse. Likable characters and media-literate comedy help make the film a success despite some familiar elements, another proof that execution counts far more than premise. Now let’s see if the tech-dubious attitude makes it to other family movies.