Reviews

  • Nose to Tail (2018)

    Nose to Tail (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) Movies taking a look at the pressure-cooker environment of a restaurant aren’t exactly a new concept and neither are character studies of toxic masculinity, but that doesn’t mean that Nose to Tail, which combines the two, isn’t worth a look. Set in Toronto, the film works because it compresses its action to a single day in the life of a former hotshot chef who’s struggling to keep his restaurant running. The food is good, as everyone keeps telling him, but his costs are unsustainable and his temper makes it difficult to sustain his relationships — all kinds of relationships. He hopes to be able to fix the money issue by feeding a group of investors, but the temper thing… well, there’s no cure for that. Aaron Abrams looks like a roughed-up Bradley Cooper (something that the similarities with Cooper’s Burnt bring to mind), but he does pretty well at the genius jerk archetype. Not to spoil much, but the film does get one thing right: people don’t change overnight. Much of the movie thus becomes a demolition derby, as the protagonist’s karma comes crashing down on him in short order, obliterating what he thought was his life. (Don’t ask what’s coming after, because the protagonist doesn’t have a shred of regret.)  It’s familiar and darkly funny the moment you understand that the protagonist is the villain of the story, and that he deserves every single setback. It helps that writer-director Jesse Zigelstein keeps this tight within the film’s 82 minutes, sending its anti-hero off from one crisis to another. The premise is nothing revolutionary, Nose to Tail’s execution is well-done. Well, maybe medium-rare.

  • Owning Mahowny (2003)

    Owning Mahowny (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, July 2021) I’m not always fond of Canadian Content (CanCon) restrictions on Canadian Cable TV channels requiring them to show a certain percentage of Canadian material if they want to keep their broadcast licenses. It certainly makes for a convenient scapegoat whenever a terrible made-in-Canada movie gets in regular rotation for a while. Of course, the pleasant flip-side of this is that CanCon often helps in keeping good but obscure Canadian movies in play long after they would have otherwise been forgotten. Seeing Owning Mahowny pop up regularly on schedules eighteen years after its release, for instance, is one of those cases where CanCon isn’t so bad. Based on a true piece of Canadiana, it’s the story of a bank vice-president who figures out a way to tap into his company’s funds in order to cover his gambling debts, only to see this “temporary” charade deepen, as he’s unable to cover his losses. Along the way, it clearly becomes a case study in a gambling addiction, as the protagonist goes bigger and bigger (becoming a “whale” for competing casinos) without quite getting any satisfaction out of it. Philip Seymour Hoffman is typically excellent in the lead role, consistently underplaying things in a way that becomes a statement by itself. Minnie Driver doesn’t get much to do as “the girlfriend” (aka the voice of reason), although seeing her in dirty-blonde straight hair with bangs is interesting in itself. John Hurt is delightful as a very amused casino manager trying to learn more about the player with deep pockets showing up in his establishment. Still, this is Hoffman’s show, and he shines brighter than the muddy 1980s-style cinematography attempting a period look. Fortunately, the film is progressively compelling: Hoffman’s character is clearly stuck in a spiral of lies and deception and there’s a perverse pleasure in seeing how far he’ll go in trying to cover up his growing debts. Among Owning Mahowny’s most interesting choices is a sequence that, in any other gambling film, would be about the flash and fun of being treated like a high-roller. Here, however, the entire thing feels like a pain for the protagonist, who would rather go on with the business of playing than being lavished with attention. Some decent screenwriting gives weight to even the minor characters and structural scenes — it makes for an absorbing film even when it doesn’t necessarily start out like one. Owning Mahowny is definitely worth a look if you’re even slightly interested by gambling movies, white-collar crime thrillers or character studies. So: score one more for CanCon victories in further exposing a home-made success.

  • Kiss Me Goodbye (1982)

    Kiss Me Goodbye (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) The “deceased spouse comes back to haunt the protagonist during their next romance” comedic trope is surprisingly common in Hollywood, and Kiss Me Goodbye’s distinction is that of taking place in the early 1980s, with younger versions of familiar actors. Here, we have Sally Field as the widow, James Caan as the ghost (an exuberant Broadway director) and Jeff Bridges as her new fiancé (an Egyptologist). It takes a while to get going, but the film does hit a comfortable second act in which a wisecracking Caan keeps intruding over the living couple’s time together, unbeknownst to him but highly present for her. There are a few nice comic moments, including one in which the living fiancé turns the tables and starts pretending to see his own ghost. The third act gets more complicated, as the deceased’s flaws are uncovered and make the living fiancé look a lot better in comparison. It’s funny to read that Caan hated the film (which contributed to his subsequent five-year hiatus away from acting) because he has seldom been looser or funnier on-screen, playing a big character who seems to be having fun with it all. In comparison, Fields and Bridges are merely up to their usual standards — good, but hardly memorable. The ending sequence is slightly overcooked, but otherwise Kiss Me Goodbye is a decent-enough comedy with some unusual material as joke fodder. Reviews haven’t been kind to the film since its release, but it’s serviceable enough for a look without high expectations.

  • Summer Holiday (1948)

    Summer Holiday (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) By the late 1940s, producer Arthur Freed has cemented his reputation as MGM’s foremost musicals producer — the leader of prestige projects for the studio, often working in colour at a time where it was uncommon. You can see some of the cockiness that comes with that status in segments of Summer Holiday, which doesn’t always neatly segregate between spoken and sung moments in the action, and clearly has the means with which to execute its ambitions. Sadly, those ambitions are pedestrian — the film covers a summer in the life of a high-school graduate, but seems intent on presenting an archetypical and rather boring vision of the American heartland. Anything interesting has to be filed off along the way — for instance, our protagonist (MGM golden boy Mickey Rooney) begins the film with an endearing cynical outlook on life that extends to questioning American values and promoting Marxism. See, that’s an interesting character. Obviously, though, this kind of thing can’t stand: before the end of Summer Holiday, he’s reformed into a capitalistic American patriot intent on marrying “the right kind of girl” (don’t worry, he already knows her) after a boozy flirtation with the wild side portrayed as a nightmare. But so was the dint of the land at the time — MGM couldn’t possibly get its teenage hero spouting off anti-establishment rhetoric and make it to the end of the film. This sour note is not exactly counterbalanced by anything else in the film — the surprisingly dull colour cinematography doesn’t help, the blurring of musical numbers with straight dialogue holds back the film from traditional musical numbers and there isn’t much worth remembering from the result. I’ve been watching much of Freed’s filmography lately, and Summer Holiday is certainly lower-tier material — it hasn’t aged all that well and feels too ordinary to be interesting.

  • Robot Holocaust (1987)

    Robot Holocaust (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) Taking a look at the muck at the very bottom of the cinematic barrel may not be fun, but it’s sometimes necessary if only to recalibrate the notion of a “bad movie.”  Despite cries and protests of movie critics and snooty cinephiles, Hollywood doesn’t churn out bad movies on a regular basis. The vast majority of what’s available in theatres is at least professionally made and watchable. There’s much, much worse out there—things like Robot Holocaust, for instance. It’s nominally a Science Fiction film in which our heroes go to rescue the father of one of their own and end up defeating a major villain. But that plot summary is the last halfway coherent element about the film, because the longer you watch, the dumber it becomes. Not that it takes much more than a few seconds to understand that this is low-budget tripe made by “filmmakers” limited by budget and competence. Issued from the infamous Charles Band production factory of terrible films and written-directed by Tim Kincaid, Robot Holocaust is perhaps a bit too obvious a target of cinephile ire — it’s one of the movies satirized in Mystery Science Theater 3000, and has thus been branded forever as a bad film. The thing is — they’re not wrong. Robot Holocaust is terrible. It’s dumb to the point of insult, badly designed, incompetently executed, and eventually becomes a pain to watch. The low-budget production values are obvious, and the script blends the worst elements of heroic fantasy with words borrowed from Science Fiction without understanding their meaning. I’m actually getting tired of the film all over again while writing about it, so that’s it for a review — bad film, worse than the worst things to show up in theatres. See it only to recalibrate and re-appreciate other films all over again.

  • Steel Trap (2007)

    Steel Trap (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2021) There are a few promising ways in which Steel Trap could have gone, from an intriguing closed-set thriller to—oh, who am I kidding? From the film’s first moments, in which seven young unpleasant people are mysteriously invited by a mysterious person to a mysterious New Year party in a mysterious building, the film plays out along very familiar lines — it’s dark, moodily directed, and uninterested in its characters until it’s time to slaughter them. Seven guests means more or less seven deaths, and that’s the structure of the film for you — whatever mystery about the killer’s identity is really irrelevant because once secret identities and past traumas get involved, it could be anyone’s name out of the hat. Apparently resurrected from overly fond memories of 1980s slashers, Steel Trap is singularly joyless and featureless in how it approaches the material. The film clearly means its ending to be a big gotcha moment, but viewers jaded by it all will just shrug in response. Writer/director Luis Cámara does manage to turn in a watchable, professional product… but it’s so painfully boring and derivative that it won’t earn any recommendations.

  • Decommissioned (2016)

    Decommissioned (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) It’s almost interesting to see how little Decommissioned does with the big plot points it picks for itself. You’d expect presidential assassinations to be Big Deals, let alone presidential assassination for which the protagonist is being set up by a high-ranking conspiracy—but the way the film goes about it continually undermines and underwhelms the material it’s working with. Tired conspiracy clichés, lame action sequences, faded cinematography, familiar plot beats and bland dialogue all contribute to the film’s lack of impact, even when it has its protagonist staring down a sniper rifle sight with the POTUS in his crosshairs. It’s true that Decommissioned isn’t aiming high by design — it is, after all, a low-budget actioneer that tries its best to stretch a limited production budget. It’s meant for the direct-to-streaming market in which you’re good as long as you come in under-budget and can cut a halfway-intriguing title/premise/trailer package to attract buyers. It stars some low-budget stalwarts as Vinnie Jones (in a cameo), Estella Warren and Michael Pare, does its best with creative direction (praise to Timothy Woodward Jr., I guess, although I would have liked to see Roel Reiné take a crack at that material) and seemingly sticks close to Los Angeles for the action. It could have been worse — and the fact that we’re discussing the mismatch of the film against its ambitions is indicative that it tries to punch above its weight. But the disconnect between the ambitious premise and the cost-effective execution is the lame script, which seems to have been written in a week and never tries to do anything but the most obvious thing at every turn. You can talk about premise and ambition and all that, but the final proof is always in the execution, and there’s no way to see Decommissioned without feeling let-down.

  • Finding Steve McQueen (2019)

    Finding Steve McQueen (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) There is, at first, an awkwardness to Finding Steve McQueen that makes it slightly unapproachable. Built with the lofty goal of telling us the real story of bank robbers who, in 1972, targeted a bank known for keeping the slush fund to Nixon’s campaign, it’s a film limited by a few artistic choices and a budget that’s not quite large enough to accommodate its intentions. The washed-out cinematography is disappointingly limited, and the film’s lone car chase only drives the point home. Even when it goes from Ohio to California, Finding Steve MaQueen’s colours don’t pop and neither does the protagonist. Fortunately, we eventually get used director Mark Steven Johnson’s choices, and that’s when the film takes off. Featuring a character obsessed with Steve McQueen, it’s a lighthearted, occasionally comedic heist film that clearly revels in its period detail. The soundtrack is an absolute banger, even if the film doesn’t quite have the budgetary envelope to do much more than hairstyles, movie marquees, pop-culture dialogue and cars to ground itself in 1972. The lighthearted tone does much to warm up the film, and some of the dialogue finds its mark. There’s an interesting supporting cast to further keep it interesting, such as William Fichner as a gang leader and Forest Whittaker as a sullen FBI agent. Still, the 1980 framing device doesn’t quite fit with the heist mechanics, and is another element that goes into the final ledger for Finding Steve McQueen: it’s one of those films that’s competent enough to be watched, but far from reaching its own stated ambitions. Either satisfying or disappointing, depending on how you look at it or the expectations you bring to it.

  • Love Affair (1994)

    Love Affair (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, July 2021) On paper, the idea of remaking 1939’s Love Affair (itself remade in 1957 as the better-remembered Cary Grant vehicle An Affair to Remember) with Warren Beatty and then-new wife Annette Benning isn’t all that awful as Hollywood ideas go. Sure, it’s recycling, but it’s recycling from earlier decades, which almost makes it affectionately reverent of Hollywood history. Further burnishing this connection to classic film history is Katharine Hepburn, here playing a canny older woman in her final film role. If you look down the cast list, you’ll find names such as Kate Capshaw, Pierce Brosnan (bearded), Garry Shandling, Harold Ramis and Rosalind Chao in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role. Still, even a good cast can’t quite save a clunky script that doesn’t update the most vexing elements of the original films, makes new mistakes of its own and can’t create dialogue equal to the original. Beatty and Benning appear self-satisfied with themselves here, but even their star coupling can’t quite translate to screen heat. A series of unlikely events is contrived to make the film happen like it does (including the engineering the entrance of Hepburn’s character) but perhaps the worst is the heavy-handed ableism that powers much of the last act of the film — something that should have been left in the past, even if it had meant not making this film at all. Not all remakes are good ideas, and this may help to explain why this Love Affair has now sunk so thoroughly in obscurity as anything but Hepburn’s final film.

  • Malevil (1981)

    Malevil (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) Fans of post-apocalyptic movies will not find anything new in Malevil — a group of survivors fending off for themselves in a world decimated by a nuclear war… yeah, we’ve seen that before. On the other hand, the film is made with a decidedly very French atmosphere, as it takes place in a small town where the few survivors were assembled in a blast-resistant castle cellar during the atomic explosions. Never mind the overly glum take on nuclear war (a rural French town is exactly the kind of place that would be largely spared by the immediate effects of a Cold War nuclear exchange — I’m not saying it wouldn’t hurt a lot from fallout, nuclear winter and overall breakdown of French infrastructure, but it would not wake up to a lunar landscape) — there is something interesting in seeing even a conventional post-apocalyptic story play out with French accents against the small-town backdrop. This difference aside, there isn’t much here that hasn’t already been seen elsewhere: questions of rebuilding and confrontations with other groups of survivors. I’m not a big fan of the ambiguous ending, where an official rescue is not really shown as an improvement (hence our smartest characters taking an alternative) but writer-director Christian de Chalonge apparently made the film quite a step more optimistic than the original novel. Malevil is not that worthwhile a movie, but it does have some flavour to go along with its stock premise.

  • Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds (2016)

    Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) On a very surface level, Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds is a documentary about the relationship between mother Debbie Reynolds, a classic Hollywood star who had the lead in 1951’s Singin’ in the Rain, and daughter Carrie Fisher, who achieved her own superstardom a generation later with 1977’s Star Wars. The documentary presents both women later in age, as they live in adjacent houses “separated by a hill.”  Even by the standards of mother/daughter relationships, theirs is complex: A mixture of codependency, affection and long-festering resentment all tempered by aging. The film does a really good job at portraying what it feels like to grow up under the spotlight for Fisher and her brother, with a movie-star mother and a music crooner father. That’s interesting by itself, and the film does a fine job at showing (or reminding) viewers about their achievements. There’s some added interest here for those interested in measuring Classic Hollywood with New Hollywood: We get a look both at Reynold’s effort to preserve Golden-Age Hollywood memorabilia, and (through Fisher’s wry humour) as honest a take as possible on the weird demands of modern fandom from the stars’ point of view. It’s probably not an accident if Fisher gets the most airtime here — that a child of a less inhibited age would be at times painfully honest about her issues, while her mother would cling, even late in life, to the decorum expected of studio stars. (Her brother Todd Fisher acts as a fact-checker at times, as he practically becomes a narrator to fill in some context.) Fisher does come across as a fun eccentric here — although we’re warned that the camera is capturing her in a manic, outgoing phase. Still, that conversation with Griffith Dunne in which both discuss how he took her virginity (!) will strike many as being incredibly, even uncomfortably forthright. Those with a better awareness of the meta-contextual history of Reynolds and Fisher will be able to fill in some of the blanks that the film merely hints at — in particular the long periods of estrangement between the two, some of it reflected in Fisher’s semi-autobiographical Postcards from the Edge or better yet her filmed one-woman show Wishful Drinking. Thanks to a mixture of interviews, historical footage, explanations and fly-on-the-wall footage, Bright Lights becomes a way to do justice to a relationship almost too extraordinary to believe. But the one thing that puts the entire result in perspective is something that is (sadly) not mentioned in the film, something that happened a few months after its theatrical premiere and two weeks prior to its TV premiere as an HBO presentation: Fisher died and then, one single day later, Reynolds died as well. Dramatic to the end, they went out adding even more credence to this portrait of their lives.

  • The Howards of Virginia (1940)

    The Howards of Virginia (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) I’m not yet completely done with Cary Grant’s filmography, but in The Howards of Virginia I’m seeing a good candidate for the title of the least interesting of his starring roles. Taking us back to revolutionary days, it features a ponytailed Grant as a farmer who gets embroiled in the War of Independence, and must deal with how it affects his family. It is both weird and appropriate to see mid-Atlantic Grant so clearly embodying the American founding myth, but his witty contemporary urbane persona is clearly not a good fit for the backwoodsman/farmer/revolutionary that the role calls for. The result feels like a misuse of Grant — he’s not bad in the role, but it’s not using his gifts to their fullest extent, and the film is wasting an actor who’s not the best for his role. To be fair, this is not a terrible film — it’s earnest in the way Americans get misty-eyed in talking about 1776 (hence me seeing on a fourth of July), but narratively sound and executed with the studio’s era customary attention to sets and costumes. I can think of much worse movies, but if you’re scrutinizing The Howards of Virginia primarily as an entry in Grant filmography, it’s squarely in the lowest tier.

  • The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)

    The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) While I tremendously enjoyed my visit to San Francisco back in 2009, I still remember thinking that the city had, in one sense, escaped from its own citizens. Unlike bigger cities (its population is a mere 875,000 people, although it easily doubles if we throw in the neighbouring areas), San Francisco has to contend harder with maintaining its own local identity when the eyes of the world (and tourists such as myself) have their own ideas about what the city should be. From what I’ve gathered over the past ten years, that tension is even worse today, with immigrants coming to work for the technology sector and inflating house prices far beyond what long-time inhabitants can afford. “Leaving San Francisco” is a worthwhile Google search and the tension between citizens forced out by rich immigrants buying in would be a splendid topic for any movie. The Last Black Man in San Francisco doesn’t directly dwell on the conflict, but it certainly shapes everything about the film. Focusing on a young man’s attempts to purchase his childhood home, it’s a depressing quixotic quest from the get-go: he doesn’t have anywhere near the four million dollars that the heritage house would cost, and his primary claim to filial authority over the house is eventually revealed to be hollow. While writer-director Joe Talbot manages to turn in a visually impressive homage to his hometown (so much so that I temporarily doubted my legitimacy in commenting upon it), I wasn’t so impressed by the film’s narrative zigs and zags. There’s a scattered quality to the result, a lack of narrative hooks and a curious lack of impact to the entire thing. It doesn’t help that the obstacles confronting our protagonist are essentially unsurmountable — he never has a chance, and the film only drags the inevitable longer. This fatalism is hard to shake even when it’s the melancholic point of the film. But I’m still ready to wager that The Last Black Man in San Francisco is most effective for viewers from San Francisco — as it should be.

  • The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee (2020)

    The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) You have to have some sympathy for entertainers who, after a lifetime of hard work, personal development and multiple projects, still end up recognized for one single thing. Paul Hogan may have had quite a varied career in Australia, but his North American legacy will forever remain playing “Crocodile” Dundee, and so The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee ends up being a meta-Hollywood comedy that sees the 80-year-old wrestle with his unescapable legacy. Hogan was old back in 2001 with the third Dundee film — he’s even older here and looks like it. Perhaps the film’s best moments are allowing a few fellow senior citizen comedians to poke fun at the passing of fame by playing “themselves” — John Cleese shows up as a maniacal ride-share driver to make ends meet; Chevy Chase as an egomaniac; Wayne Knight as a tap-dancing singer; and Olivia Newton-John as something like window dressing. Hogan’s character himself is quite unlike his own best-known character — mild, gaffe-prone, and trying to retire peacefully even as others try to bring him back, often speaking from a position of ignorance. Much of the film’s structure is cyclical, with Hogan exploring the world of 2021 and committing a series of faux pas that land him on the news as the worst person ever. That gets old quickly (especially when the gags are stretched-out and not all that funny in the first place), even as other moments in the film work relatively well. I did like Cleese’s role and some of the comical flourishes poking fun at modern Hollywood. This being said, there is something a bit awkward about a film built around an older man’s lack of comfort in the world — a film about retirement in which Hogan shows up with his first starring role in a decade. I smirked a few times at The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee and it ranks as one of the weirdest legacy sequels so far, so it’s not all that bad — but there are plenty of missed opportunities along the way for a more incisive take on aging stars and whether they should retire once and for all.

  • What’s the Matter with Helen? (1971)

    What’s the Matter with Helen? (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) It’s really hard to watch What’s the Matter with Helen? and not notice the similarities with psycho-biddy exemplar What Happened with Baby Jane? : In both cases, we’re dealing with a bloody psychodrama, featuring female protagonists intent on doing harm to each other, played by actresses past their prime years. In this case, we have two women cleared of a murder in the 1930s, moving to Los Angeles to open up a dance academy but being pursued by a dangerous stalker intent on making them pay. Considering the delicate mental state of one of the women, however, the biggest danger may not come from outside! Debbie Reynolds and Shelley Winters star, with Winters being far more memorable in her unhinged role. (Reading about the film’s production history is wild, with Winters seemingly breaking up along with her character, and some weird business about a prop knife being replaced by a real knife.)  The script is suitably macabre all the way to an often-spoiled climax. What’s the Matter with Helen? is not an exceptional film, but like many films in its subgenre, it does offer up a few treats, especially for classic Hollywood fans looking to complete their filmographies of known actresses.