Reviews

  • At Eternity’s Gate (2018)

    At Eternity’s Gate (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) I’m frankly more annoyed than amazed about At Eternity’s Gate and its take on Vincent Van Gogh’s life. I can certainly recognize the irresistible impulse that led to the film being made — hard for Willem Defoe to resist playing the famously tortured painter, hard for Oscar Isaac and Mads Mikkelsen not to join the production, hard for writer-director Julian Schnabel not to get a chance to play with cinematography in the key of Van Gogh’s perception of the world. Alas, the result is not necessarily pleasant. I have mild issues about how the film puts forth a new theory about Van Gogh’s death (that it wasn’t suicide) — but then again, I’m wearying of seeing even artistic misinformation in movies. I eventually got over my dislike of the way the film handled English-speaking Van Gogh next to other French-speaking characters. (Van Vogh was Dutch, so it makes sense to have a language barrier there.)  I have much bigger issues with the way the film is directed, with a nausea-inducing handheld camera in nearly every single shot, and cinematography that sometimes goes for subjective perception effect. At some point, I just wanted the film to calm down for a few minutes and deliver something like a biopic before going on yet another shakycam flight of fancy. It doesn’t help, I suppose, that I have recent and favourable memories of Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh in Lust for Life — to the point where I was wondering why At Eternity’s Gate was even necessary. The one person I can’t fault is Defoe — he’s really not bad as Van Gogh, with his screen personas being unusually well-suited to eccentric roles like this one. Still, I grew more and more vexed at the film’s excesses and unnecessary deviations from a straight-ahead film. Dafoe’s performance is good enough that it did not need Schnabel’s added fillips.

  • Neon Maniacs (1986)

    Neon Maniacs (1986)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) I often say that when it comes to horror film, I have a marked preference for supernatural monsters rather than knife-wielding slasher psychos, but director Joseph Mangine’s Neon Maniacs seems determined to ask — what about monsters that act like slasher psychos? Well, my answer won’t surprise anyone — down with psycho slashers no matter if they’re supernatural or not. In this case, our twelve maniacs are mutated monster from under the Golden Gate bridge who take it upon themselves to terrorize a high-school student who can’t get anyone to take her seriously when she reports the menace. Plenty of gore effects follow their rampage through San Francisco. If you’ve seen enough 1980s teenage horror movies, there won’t be anything new or fresh her to keep you interested — it’s the same formula, and it’s about as effective. (Which is to say: not very.)  Despite a title that promises bright colours, the dark muddy cinematography is also in-line with the norm at the time, which doesn’t make the result any more pleasant to watch unless you’re going for that VHS aesthetic. I can’t imagine very many scenarios in which a viewing of Neon Maniacs is recommended or even preferable to anything else. But then again that’s my default position on just about every slasher horror movie ever made.

  • Count Your Blessings (1959)

    Count Your Blessings (1959)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) Idiot plotting has always been a staple of Hollywood screenwriting and audiences have accepted some famously stupid stuff over the years, but there’s always a point where enough-is-enough, and Count Your Blessings is a particularly egregious example of the form. Presented as a Technicolor romantic comedy, it features an Englishwoman who gets swept off her feel by a charming Frenchman during WW2, only for her to get married and impregnated in the mere days before he returns to the front. That’s wild enough, but not unusual for movies of that era. But wait, because after that he doesn’t return to her for nine years, pretexting various military engagements around the world. By the time he comes back to meet his nine-year-old son, nearly every viewer will scream at the heroine to get away from him as soon as possible. It’s the world’s least surprising plot development when he’s revealed to be a womanizer, keeping several mistresses thanks to the family fortune. The heroine finally decides at some point to divorce, but what would have been a happy ending soon sours when their adorable nine-year-old poppet somehow manages to get them back together, at which point the film concludes on a note of horror rather than happy romance. The plotting is bad enough, but the execution somehow makes it even worse: Deborah Kerr doesn’t seem particularly pleased with romantic counterpart Rossano Brazzi, and the film’s stultified directing makes everything feel slow, artificial and contrived. Maurice Chevalier barely escapes with his dignity intact as the “wise” old uncle providing advice to the couple — but we know that his character was probably even worse during his youth. I frankly watched the film only because I’m a Chevalier completist, but this is a low point in his filmography despite his fine performance with bad material. Not every Classic Hollywood film was a hit — there are plenty of duds as well, and Count Your Blessings is unquestionably one of them.

  • Altered (2006)

    Altered (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) I’ve seen so many generic horror films lately that by the time one shows up with a mildly interesting element, I’m liable to be perhaps a bit too generous about the result. So it is that Altered plays with familiar science fiction horror elements (aliens on earth abducting rural-area people, mind-controlling body implants, alien invasion, etc.) but remixes them into something less rarely seen. Which is to say: our rural rednecks manage, after a few years of trying, to capture one of those aliens, tie it to a table and torture it for revenge. Of course, it’s not that simple, not when some of them have been implanted with a mind-controlling device that makes them into a puppet of the alien if they step too close… For one thing, this premise manages to keep the action in a single location for a surprisingly long time, always helpful for a low-budget film. For another, it’s a premise rife with potential for those fans of body horror — as much as I’m not a big fan of gore, Altered is never as audacious as when it plays with the idea of people self-removing their mind control implants, or an alien puppeteering a character well past the point of unrecoverable body harm. Parts of the film are nausea-inducing, but the science-fictional device of a tortured alien does make it easier to stomach (ahem) than a strictly realistic approach. In other words, Altered stands a cut above most generic horror movies for most of its running time. Unfortunately, a disappointing ending doesn’t quite manage to cap off everything with a strong climax — which is really weird, as one final visual basically begged itself after a running theme in the film’s dialogue. (Ah, why be coy? In a horror film where the characters can’t kill the monster for fear of causing an invasion, anything less than a final shot of a sky filled with descending saucers is a disappointment.)  The success of the film may be a bit easier to understand once you realize that it’s directed by Eduardo Sánchez, one of the co-directors of the infamous Blair Witch Project. Better-than average premise and execution do make up for something worth a look for horror fans and those who want just a slightly different spin on the alien abduction mythology.

  • The Harder They Fall (1956)

    The Harder They Fall (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) Even if The Harder They Fall doesn’t feature guns, femmes fatales, violent crime or private investigators, there is absolutely no doubt that it is a film noir, and that’s part of why it remains so interesting. Let’s see: Humphrey Bogart (in his last movie before his death), boxing (and the violence of it), corruption both of the system (in showing a series of fixed matches meant to promote an incompetent boxer) and of the individual (in having the protagonist help create the deception), organized crime (touch your nose and grab your ear), great black-and-white cinematography, and a hard-nosed tone suggesting that the real world is much seedier than most movies. Bogart doesn’t play a man of action, but as a former sports columnist his character understands better than most the darkness that lies behind the façade of boxing, especially when he’s asked to create the illusion of a heavyweight contender from a big but unskilled Argentinian. There’s an elusive but solid narrative drive to the results, helped along with a wealth of credible details. The Harder They Fall has aged amazingly well in becoming a time capsule of mid-1950s boxing corruption — the numerous exterior shots featuring Bogart walking down the streets of Manhattan are almost worth watching the movie by themselves. If you do a bit of research on the film’s boxing figures, you’ll find out that at least two roles are essentially two boxers playing themselves — something that audiences would have known in 1956 but not in 2021. Still, there’s no denying the effectiveness of the result even today—Director Mark Robson keeps things moving, and the boxing scenes are still surprisingly effective. I’ve seen quite a few boxing movies, but few are as scathing about the sport as The Harder They Fall — and few are as interesting either.

  • I Do, I Do, I Do (2015)

    I Do, I Do, I Do (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) How bizarre — I Do, I Do, I Do is the third time-loop romantic comedy I’ve seen in less than six months (after the really good high-end Palm Springs and the average low-budget Love on Repeat) and at this point, I’m beyond being annoyed at the riffs on the same theme — I’m now actively seeking them out. I do, I do, I do is most similar to Love on Repeat in that it must also be managed within a low-budget and the Hallmark Channel’s ideal of romantic comedies — but it’s better than average in how it takes advantage of its premise within its narrow subgenre. After a rather lengthy setup in which our heroine, her cuter sister, her overeager fiancé and his fiancé’s brother are introduced and shipped off to an isolated resort for a prestige wedding, the time loop starts and lets the heroine voice her doubts about the marriage as she keeps getting married over and over again. (Amusingly enough, the film does its best to avoid the question of the wedding night.)  Fortunately, her fiancé’s brother is there to present a better match, teach her to swim and dance over several days, and “talk a thousand hours” to prove that he’s a better choice. There’s an amusing collision between daytime romantic comedy tropes and time-loop conventions here, as long as you’re able to keep a healthy detachment from questions of consent and ethics when one romantic partner knows a lot more about the other than the other. This is supposed to be a romantic fantasy, after all, and if you want to see this as the saccharine twin of Palm Springs despite having come out five years earlier, then I certainly won’t stop you. Still, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the film’s ability to marry the idea of a time-loop (a great low-budget kind of fantasy!) with themes of wedding jitters and the wish to “do it over.” (Don’t bother looking for a science-fictional explanation for the time loop — it’s a protagonist-centred moral/romantic kind of fantasy.)  I Do, I Do, I Do goes a bit fast and loose on credibility in the third act, but what’s learning Italian from audiobooks and being fuzzy on marrying the brother right after rejecting the fiancée when there’s a happy ending to wrap up? It’s not a great movie, but director Ron Oliver executes Nancey Silvers’ above-average script with professionalism and the result is more interesting than most other movies of its sub-genre, and it makes for an interesting addition to the time-loop romance movie collection.

  • Needle (2010)

    Needle (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) There is a modest spark of interest in Needle’s premise, as an ancient artifact (a box in which you can insert a picture of a victim) helps wreak havoc among a group of college-age friends. There’s just enough intriguing historical background and supernatural shenanigans to take the film one notch above the usual college slasher. Alas, that’s where Needle stops — once you get over those elements, as the film so clearly does, there’s nothing else in execution than a lame serial murder mystery. To be fair, the film does manage some acceptable technical credentials, which aren’t inconsequential for a low-budget Australian film. As a result, it can be watched… but that’s where the praise stops for writer-director John V. Soto. Ben Mendelsohn shows up in a supporting role, but doesn’t get the chance to do much. Otherwise, Needle is cookie-cutter horror for the younger adult audience, not particularly distinctive once the exposition stops.

  • Picnic (1955)

    Picnic (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) William Holden plays a slightly off-brand version of his persona in Picnic, as a hobo who walks into a small Midwestern town to ask for a job from an old college friend… but sees everything turn sour when his friend’s paramour falls for him instead. Much of the film’s atmosphere depends on how credibly it can portray a small Kansas town in the waning summertime, and Picnic actually does well there — much of the film’s middle act revolves around happenings at a Labour Day country fair and there’s a strong sense of atmosphere throughout the film as it plays out the “stranger comes to town” narrative. Holden is too old to play a twentysomething drifter with a strong attachment to a college friend, but his shirtless scenes bring all the girls to the yard (but especially Kim Novak, in an early role) and his star quality sustains much of the film. I did like Susan Strasberg, but it’s not clear if I like the actress or the tomboyish nerd she plays. On the other hand, I definitely dislike the shrewish character played by Rosalind Russell but the actress is magnificent here and never more so as when her characters deliver a merciless verbal bombardment to the protagonist. Picnic is a small-scale kind of drama, a bit overwrought by today’s standards but still interesting to watch in its own way. The final aerial shot is evocative (and novel enough for the time), but much of the film can be used as an exemplar for the way Midwestern America thought of itself in the mid-1950s, creating an artificial utopia belied by the unfulfilled desires of its characters.

  • Train (2008)

    Train (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Young American teenagers go backpacking in Eastern Europe and—why, yes, they all get tortured grotesquely, how did you know? Riffing off ultra-familiar clichés, Train really does itself no favours by hopping on roughly a dozen wagons’ worth of stale material at once. The teenagers (well, twentysomething teenagers) are not particularly likable even if some of them do wrestling: the portents of their impending doom are so strident that it’s a wonder they don’t put their fingers in their ears, and once the torture gets started, the film instantly switches from familiarity to obnoxiousness. It’s easy to be exasperated by ultra-violent nihilistic gore when it’s in the service of material as useless as Train: it exposes the immaturity of the project and its lack of ideas or, for that matter, humanity. Exactly no one will be surprised to find out that the lone girl in the group (Thora Birch, maybe slumming) becomes the final girl of the group. Grasping at anything nice to say about the result, the least we can say is that writer-director Gideon Raff is capable of churning out a slick studio-grade production, but that comes to mind only because I’ve seen two MST3K-grade piles of garbage this week alone, so my expectations have been calibrated. The irony is that the project reportedly started out as a remake of 1980’s Terror Train, which would have been a semi-intriguing idea… except that it instead went all-in on the worst of the horror genre trends of the late 2000s (i.e.: torture horror) and instantly became forgettable.

  • Daybreak (1993)

    Daybreak (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) I will forever defend the unique way in which science fiction should be used as commentary on current issues, but that intention only works when the parallels are not as blatant as the ones in Daybreak. Adapted from a theatrical play, it’s a blatant message movie based on AIDS-era proselytism that has really not aged particularly well even when seen at the tail end of a real-life global pandemic. The wafer-thin story takes us in a dystopian future where a deadly sexually-transmitted disease has led the government to suspend civil liberties (yawn) and create camps where sick people are tattooed (yawn) and segregated (yawn) and left to die (yawn) even as the general population is kept in the dark (mega yawn) about it all. Essentially playing to the most caricatural fears of a naïve audience, Daybreak does itself no favours with its AIDS-meets-Holocaust approach, even as it has characters realizing minutes after the audience all that the film has on its mind (which isn’t much). Made for HBO but, to my knowledge, not often rebroadcast (indeed, the version I saw was the French dub, which does not depend on HBO’s choices of what to unearth from their archives), Daybreak is blunt-force allegory artlessly set two decades in the future. Everything in the film is about the disease concentration camps, with very little care put in credible world-building to allow the metaphor to take wings. It quickly becomes obnoxious, and that’s even despite one of Cuba Gooding Jr.’s most interesting dramatic roles. Even the finale is disappointing, putting a damning cap on an already-shaky execution. There’s a laziness to the way Daybreak is put together that deflates whatever power it may have as a dystopian cautionary tale. Much better could have been possible on the same topic, had just a bit more imagination gone into it.

  • The Last Chase (1981)

    The Last Chase (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) Dumb ideas, cheap plotting and shoddy filmmaking come together in The Last Chase to create a film that would probably be practically unknown today if it wasn’t for Canadian Content guidelines requiring Canadian Cable channels to run a certain percentage of home-made content per week in order to keep their broadcast license. Despite proposing a fast car as a poke in the eye of dystopian red-white-and-blue fascism, The Last Chase is very much a Canadian production, complete with barely-disguised Toronto Subway cars and no less a Canadian media personality like Moses Znaimer in a minor role. Lee Majors counts as a casting coup as the former race-car driver protagonist, moping around two decades later as the evil freedom-crushing government of the day has reacted to a global pandemic by taking away all cars. (Yes, it’s about as stupid as it sounds.)  Officially an advocate for public transit but secretly putting together his racecar for a heroic drive from oppressed Boston to freedom-loving California, Majors does have a certain presence on-screen and makes the film just a bit more tolerable to watch. The Last Chase is certainly not a film to approach as serious science fiction: Every single world-building element seems to come from a strikingly reactionary rant, ignoring basic tenets of reality in order to build its feverish paranoic vision of an oppressive government taking away… gasoline! AND CARS! (The funniest moments of the film, at least if you’re watching critically, are when this supposedly all-powerful, all-oppressive government can’t muster anything land-based beyond a golf cart to follow a fast car. Yeah… I don’t think the screenwriters cared much about how oppressive governments really work.)  The production values are threadbare, adequately reflecting the nothing-makes-sense nature of the script. By the time the state mobilizes a fighter jet to pursue the windshield-less “racecar” all the way to California (there’s apparently nothing between Boston and California but desert), we’re well into MST3K so-bad-it’s-funny territory, except the funny one-liners. I’m not necessarily against CanCon requirements, but when the CRTC gets around to asking me for advice, I hope I’ll have forgotten all about The Last Chase.

  • Wagons East (1994)

    Wagons East (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) If the silly comedy Wagons East is known for anything, it’s for being John Candy’s last film (he died toward the end of the production) and for being one of the worst-reviewed films of 1994. While I won’t necessarily disagree with the documented notion that it’s a bad film, I will take a contrarian stance and claim that the result is perhaps a bit more interesting than most would recognize. The premise, while built for laughs, does have something intriguing — the film spends its opening minutes showing the misery of late-nineteenth-century life on the American western frontier, with coarseness and violence being the currency of the land. One by one, our motley crew of characters comes to realize how badly the reality of western life has fallen short of their expectations and, before long, they realize that there’s only one real solution: go back east. This rejection of the western myth is not particularly common in American cinema, and it’s that thematic thread that kept me interested in the film despite its pratfalls, dumb jokes, offensive stereotypes and lowest-common denominator humour. There’s a powerful thematic engine at the core of Wagons East that’s let down by the clownish execution, but it’s there nonetheless. It’s interesting to see, for instance, that the characters rejecting the frontier to go back to the civilized east are largely characters that are portrayed as modern — civilized, urbane, peaceful and not constrained to heteronormativity. Of course, Wagons East (being a John Candy film) doesn’t push that notion all that further: the level of the jokes goes down significantly, and so the gay character is played ad nauseam as campy even during his moment of triumph as a sharpshooter. Even then, it’s also interesting to see another marginalized group not treated so badly — despite the caricatural approach to the Native American characters, they’re ultimately portrayed (again, for laughs, but still) as reasonable and practical. Wagons East may be more interesting than you’d expect, but that, of course, doesn’t really excuse its juvenile comedy, Candy’s mugging for the camera (although he’s quite effective at it) or its disjointed episodic structure. But unlike many Candy vehicles, there’s a great premise begging for better execution here — something that could have become, in other hands and with other actors, a mordant take on the western genre.

  • No Sudden Move (2021)

    No Sudden Move (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) Everyone and anyone that has complained about the disappearance of the middle-budget thriller from Hollywood screens should be comforted by No Sudden Move. Of course, it’s not exactly coming out of the blue — Steven Soderbergh has a well-established history of taking on projects that would be considered risky by other directors, and his profile must have helped in enlisting the impressive cast assembled here. Let’s see… Don Cheadle (looking older but no less charming), Benicio del Toro, David Harbour, Jon Hamm, Brendan Fraser (heavier and interesting), Julia Fox (looking great in a tennis outfit), Matt Damon (in a remarkable elderly-statesman kind of role) and Ray Liotta! Still, the real star here is the twisty screenplay from veteran screenwriter Ed Solomon, which marries a tight and convoluted neo-noir narrative with broader social concerns and quite a bit of style. While Soderbergh can’t help himself from distracting gimmicks such as the showy use of a wide-angle lens (MOM! Soderbergh’s shooting movies on his iPhone again!) and the lower-end budget of the film shows in the use of dilapidated Detroit locations that don’t fit the period setting, No Sudden Move is a welcome throwback to the days of intricate plot-intensive ensemble films that challenge audiences to keep up with their full attention. While I don’t think the script is perfect (a bit more levity could have helped — the film is often tight-lipped to the point of obscurity), it’s quite a bit better than the dumbed-down pap that often passes as A-grade studio output.

  • Bug (1975)

    Bug (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) The ghost of legendary writer-director-producer-huckster William Castle hovers cannily over 1975’s Bug — the final film he oversaw as a writer and producer, although directing duties fell to Jeannot Szwarc. The mercenary intent couldn’t be more obvious here, as the film is based on the fear of insects and does whatever it can to press that button over and over again. Fear of cockroaches? Not enough. How about fire-creating cockroaches unearthed from the underground thanks to an earthquake? No, better yet: By the time the film ends, we have sentient flying pyromaniac cockroaches! Thanks to the inches-big bugs playing the fire-starting roaches, the film is suitably gross (albeit not quite as much as Squirm) but there isn’t much more to it — the mad-scientist shtick is ridiculous, and the film doesn’t quite know what to do to take advantage of its own potential. It almost goes without saying that the whole killer-bug thing is badly handled and never believable, almost as if everyone involved in the film from Castle on down relied on the idea of bugs being scary and disgusting as being equivalent to doing the work in making them scary and disgusting. The paradox may be that however dull Bug is in execution, it’s still striking enough in bits and pieces and individual images (such as the woman set on fire in her kitchen) to be somewhat memorable even if the film itself isn’t so good. Why am I hearing a showman’s cackle from beyond the grave?

  • Madame de… [The Earrings of Madam de…] (1953)

    Madame de… [The Earrings of Madam de…] (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) A familiar story told in an off-beat fashion, Madame de… takes us to late-nineteenth-century Paris for a complex tale of a woman, her distant husband and her lover. It all takes place through the intriguing device of earrings making their way from one character to another through unlikely devices and ironic transactions. Lavishly photographed with impressive sets and some impressive costumes, it’s a romance with more than an ironic twist, with plenty of plot machinations from writer-director Max Ophüls to keep things interesting. The dialogue is often a joy to hear as it pokes and prods at the heart of the story. As a romance, it’s more performative than emotive — it’s interesting to watch, but it’s not as if we’re meant to identify with the characters. Still, Madame de… has an intricate way of telling a familiar story, with layers of complexity (visual and narrative) adding interest to something that could have been much more conventional.