Reviews

  • Breaking Surface (2020)

    Breaking Surface (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) As with many thrillers taking place in a confined space, there’s a lean and mean quality to Nordic thriller Breaking Surface that helps it overcome a few plausibility issues. Featuring two half-sisters venturing underwater for fun, the film soon turns serious when one of them is trapped underwater by falling boulders, leaving the other one to find a way to free her. Complications quickly accumulate, trapping our heroines into a situation that seems increasingly merciless. The cold cinematography is chilling enough, but it gets worse, as one sister does her best to find help in a place indifferent to human lives. As pure a human-vs-nature story as we’ve seen lately, Breaking Surface gets to an almost unbearable level of suspense early in its third act. Upon reflection, many of the complications don’t make much sense, are contrived for impact and can’t avoid the supposedly trained characters acting in silly ways. But there won’t be many chances for reflection, as the film gets increasingly tense, forgiving a rather loose and leisurely opening act when the plot really gets going. Writer-Director Joachim Hedén can certainly keep the tension going, and his stark, almost monochrome cinematography does help in grounding the action — even if it makes it a bit too dispassionate at times. Still, Breaking Surface is quite an interesting effort — and the perfect film for a hot summer evening.

  • Zombie High (1987)

    Zombie High (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) When you think about it, the best mind-bender when programming a weekend-long zombie movie marathon is to throw in a zombie film that isn’t. So it is that when the local horror channel delivered a slew of zombie movies over three days, Zombie High found itself on the schedule… despite not having much to do with zombies. The effect is frankly refreshing. Taken by itself, however, it’s not that much of a movie. Featuring a boarding school student (played by the very cute but clearly twentysomething Virginia Madsen) who discovers that the faculty of her new school is extracting the vital essence of her fellow students in order to remain forever young, it’s a film that’s not quite horrific and yet not really comic. If I correctly understand Zombie High’s production history, this is essentially an overblown film school student project that somehow snagged Madsen and a few other actors to produce something that was commercially viable in the 1980s video market. As a result, don’t necessarily expect something finely controlled — the script is maybe halfway to satisfaction, the technical credentials are rough even for the 1980s B-movie market and there are so many missed opportunities along the way that the thing becomes more frustrating than entertaining. There are a few surprises—including, why not, a car chase—but when everything is mixed together, it often feels like two or three movies thrown together. But at least Zombie High wasn’t about zombies… so that made it a bit of a surprise. Your context may feel different.

  • Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite (2020)

    Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) In tackling a film like Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite, it’s useful to recalibrate. It’s a talking-animals film for kids, obviously, but it’s also a franchise entry. One imagines Warner Brothers Home Entertainment executives, looking for a decently lucrative prospect, looking over the list of homegrown intellectual properties and noticing that Cats & Dogs 2: The Revenge of Kitty Galore was nearly ten years old, didn’t require heavy narrative continuity, and (to belabour the point) was an easy sell as a kids’ movie with talking animals. The rest is mechanical in today’s home entertainment market: low budget, formula-based script and actors less important than fast special effects. All made to satisfy a streaming maw clamouring for new content to keep the kids occupied. Even with those expectations, however, Paws Unite isn’t much to bark about. It does have the decency to acknowledge in its promising animated opening sequence the gap between sequels in pointing out how the past decade has been incredibly quiet for the animal agents of their spy organization. The rest of director Sean McNamara’s film, however, isn’t as clever: Soon enough, the true production values take over, bringing along its limp narrative, half-amusing lines, perfunctory special effects and merely adequate actors. It’s not intolerable — there’s enough juice even on the film’s carefully engineered mediocrity that the film gets a few grins along the way. But Cats & Dogs 3: Paws Unite is really the most perfunctory film imaginable — not bad enough to dismiss, not good enough to praise.

  • Three Christs (2017)

    Three Christs (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) It’s almost de rigueur to expect much from a film featuring Richard Gere, Peter Dinklage and Walton Goggins. Even the topic is intriguing, as a psychiatrist sets out to bring three mental patients in a room, each believing that they are Jesus Christ, just to see what would happen. If that’s familiar to you, it’s because Three Christs is based on a true experiment from the 1960s, and it goes for a dramatic recreation of the book later written by the psychiatrist on the topic. (A very loose adaptation, even featuring a suicide that never happened in real life.)  Alas, all of those elements don’t quite end up in an interesting package. Filled with limp scenes, familiar elements seemingly taken from better movies, a meandering narrative, obvious attempts at synthetic emotions and numerous lulls, Three Christs would be a mediocre movie with or without the wasted talents of its lead actors. By the time the film sacrifices one of its characters from a rooftop in order to make an incredibly familiar point about institutional overreach, well, it’s as if Three Christ works overtime to ensure that it’s catering to expectations, but not out of conviction. The period setting is nice but it doesn’t bring much. It’s difficult to remain interested in Three Christs the longer it goes on — and it goes on for quite a while later than it should.

  • I Heart Huckabees (2004)

    I Heart Huckabees (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) It took me a while (ahem, seventeen years) to circle back to I Heart Huckabees — writer-director David E. Russell has a filmography that’s all over the place, but there’s almost always something interesting in what he brings to the screen, and since I’d seen nearly everything else of his, why not this one? As it turns out, there’s a lot to like in the result. Featuring the offbeat concept of existential detectives following their clients to give them the answer about their lives, it’s a comedy with quirky ideas and plenty of opportunities for its ensemble past to shine. While Jason Schwarztman is nominally the protagonist, it’s hard to resist a cast with anchors such as Lily Tomlin, Dustin Hoffman, Jude Law, Mark Wahlberg, Isabelle Huppert and Naomi Watts, and that’s not even mentioning smaller pre-stardom roles for people such as Isla Fisher and Richard Jenkins, Jonah Hill’s screen debut, and cameos from veterans Tippi Hedren and Talia Shire. Still, the star here is the script, playfully blending philosophical ideas with life-crisis drama to create something far more interesting and amusing than the norm. One imagines that the film could have been even more absurdist, but what’s on-screen is fun enough to be satisfying. Even seventeen years later, there’s a unique quality to I Heart Huckabees that’s still distinctive and refreshing. It’s enough to make you wonder why more movies don’t delve as enthusiastically in philosophical comedy.

  • Bloodthirsty (2020)

    Bloodthirsty (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) Canadian werewolf drama Bloodthirsty is perhaps most noteworthy for what it doesn’t do rather than what it does — updating the mythos to new uses and metaphors rather than reheating the same tropes. Our heroine is a pop signer in the doldrums of coming up with a follow-up to her smash first album, and heading to a remote recording studio to work with a reclusive producer with a dark past. But she’s got problems going beyond the sophomore slump: strange dreams plague her, her parentage is unclear, her girlfriend is worried and her producer may have killed a woman a few years before. It’s a good thing she doesn’t know about all of those missing hitchhikers! Werewolf transformation is here presented as a feminist tale of self-empowerment, artistic expression and achieving one’s true freedom (in-line with a recent trend of excusing violence as long as it’s from the right underdogs). Rather stylishly directed by Amelia Moses, Bloodthirsty is an intimate but decently intriguing tale, perhaps a bit slow-paced, especially knowing what’s sure to come. There aren’t that many surprises here, so this is largely for the pleasure of execution than for the plot itself. As a slightly different take, it’s not bad — but it’s hard to avoid thinking that the film holds back on achieving its premise, that it keeps its lead characters too far away (especially for an intimate piece) and that it wastes its supporting characters as well. Bloodthirsty is also glum to a fault and surprisingly on-the-nose when the characters talk to each other. But then again — would it be a real Canadian genre film if it achieved its objectives?

  • Bookworm and the Beast (2021)

    Bookworm and the Beast (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) For the record, I don’t necessarily think that Hallmark-channel-type romantic comedies are a sub-form of cinema — but they do operate according to a very specific formula, and they have to be evaluated accordingly. This being said, there are also better and worse examples of the formula, and Bookworm and the Beast definitely falls toward the lower end of the scale. My expectations may have run a bit too high — I’m naturally sympathetic to anything with “bookworm” in the title, and the idea of making a protagonist out of a small-town bibliophilic is a good way to get me to watch the result. But it’s in the execution that the film falls apart and falls apart badly. Much of it goes back to the characters: As is the norm with those films, the heroine is blander than beautiful (an element dictated by the viewership, I suspect — since these films are not being designed for male-gaze consumption, a too-gorgeous heroine is wasted at best, and repellent at worst), the male lead has this not-too-bad-boy scruffy look, as he’s playing this big-city hunk with rough edges. (His family name is also Biest, just to further highlight that nothing will be subtle here.)  But there are limits. Here, the heroine is almost instantly forgettable, with literary relevance being an afterthought and handled through safe common references. (A Jane Austen fan? NO WAY!) But the male lead is even worse, playing an ultra-capitalist social media addict. Neither of them are particularly likable, and without likability as a foundation, Bookworm and the Beast can’t hold together. So, when this thoroughly urban romantic interest keeps hanging around the bucolic small town, we don’t believe it. When social media stuff is used as a magic device, we don’t believe it. And when the male lead fails to browbeat the local café into an acquisition, then runs over the female lead’s dad badly enough to send him to the hospital for a week-long coma, then blackmails the female lead into holding back the video she took of the incident, nothing makes sense in this film anymore. No one even remotely behaves like normal people, and the veneer of fantasy that hangs over those films is stripped bare, leaving everything feeling ridiculous. By the time writer-director Brandon Ho eventually makes his way to a bookstore to remind us that there’s some kind of literary hook to this thing, it’s too late — we still dislike the character and the male lead’s predictable defrosting is never believable and there’s so much clumsiness to the literary references (somehow, there’s someone who’s never heard of the premise of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde) that makes everything feel false and manipulated and obnoxious. The cinematography and direction are practically undetectable from a stylistic standpoint — they’re a pure delivery service for the plot. There are ample reviews on this site to show that I’m not necessarily opposed to the Hallmark romantic comedy formula, but Bookworm and the Beast is nowhere near an enjoyable example of the form.

  • Short Circuit 2 (1988)

    Short Circuit 2 (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, In French, June 2021) I remember seeing Short Circuit 2 as a teenager and not liking it very much, strongly objecting to the French dub voice of one character, but being somewhat amazed that I recognized quite a bit of Toronto in the result. Decades later, second impressions can be amazingly consistent: It’s still not a particularly good movie, the French dub voice is still irritating and Toronto is almost as big a character as any of the human or robotic ones. If you’ve seen the first Short Circuit, you already know what to expect: Here’s book-smart and street-dumb Johnny Five, a robot designed for war whose sentience was an unexpected feature. In this sequel, Fisher Stevens is the only actor returning on-screen, as he (a Caucasian actor) plays the genial engineer (of Indian ethnicity) of Johnny Five. In this instalment, his attempts to sell robotic toys require some assembly-line assistance from Johnny Five, but bringing an information-hungry robot in the big city is a recipe for trouble, especially as subplots regarding romance (cribbing from Cyrano de Bergerac) and diamond heists are brought into the mix. Clearly designed for kids, Short Circuit 2 only marginally exceeds mediocrity: The 1980s puppeteering work required to transform a robot into a likable character is still impressive and finds its apex late in the film, as we’re outraged that Johnny Five gets severely damaged by the antagonists. In French, though, the chosen voice of Johnny Five almost completely destroys whatever sympathy we may have: high-pitched, ingratiating, with distinctive exasperating intonations that I could remember decades later. I suspect it’s not quite as annoying in English. On the other hand, I can’t help but love the obvious use of Toronto as a filming location for an American metropolis. Short Circuit 2 makes no attempt whatsoever at hiding where it is, with numerous local landmarks, businesses, transit vehicles and even a boat clearly marked as being from Toronto. It often gets weird, but never as weird as recognizing the seat of Ontario’s legislature, Queen’s Park, being used as a backdrop to an American citizenship ceremony. Wow. Still, the film amply justifies its existence simply for the extended sequence set in front and inside the much-lamented landmark Word’s Biggest Bookstore, of which I have some extensive and fond memories. In other words, very little of what I do like about Short Circuit 2 can be found in the screenplay — it’s all about watching the background shots and being amazed at how late-1980s Toronto was captured so brazenly on celluloid. And that, now more than when I first saw the film, is what’s worth remembering about it.

  • On—drakon [I Am Dragon] (2015)

    On—drakon [I Am Dragon] (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) I’m normally a sympathetic audience when it comes to films that go for visual impact. I am Dragon, from Russia, heads into a fantastic past in order to deliver a romance between human girl and dragon boy, spending far more time on images than on words. The story is threadbare enough to bring to mind the Twilight series — once again, a teenage girl falling for a bad boy with a monstrous identity, and the rest of the film adjusting in consequence. Director Indar Dzhendubaev is clearly more interested in the visual aspects of the film — the 110 minutes running time would be about half its length if it focused on efficient storytelling, as something like twenty of those minutes would simply be slow-motion footage run at normal speed. To be fair, the images are frequently excellent: The dragon’s lair (set inside the skyscraper-sized skeleton of a long-dead dragon ancestor) is magnificent, and the film occasionally pops with far more colours than you’d expect from the snowbound opening. There’s a sumptuous quality to the near-omnipresent special effects, and the craft in which the images are presented can be impressive. Alas, little of I Am Dragon is supported by an interesting script. You could write the plot summary on a napkin, which is not necessarily a problem. The lack of narrative tension, on the other hand, is a bigger problem — there are very few surprises here (with even the plot turns being predictable), and the film becomes both more predictable and less suspenseful as it goes on. The last fifteen minutes of the film are pretty much foregone and don’t end on anything feeling like a climax. The romance is particularly disappointing in that there are very few stakes for the heroine: she likes dragon-boy more than human-boy, but human-boy is so devoid of any qualities, good or even bad, that it doesn’t feel like much of a choice. Overstaying its welcome by at least an hour, I Am Dragon is the kind of film where you find yourself muttering to speed it up: we all know what’s going to happen next, so let’s get on with it. But it doesn’t, and since the visual aspect of the film also gets less impressive throughout the third act, the weak ending dissipates much of the film’s impact. A shorter length, snappier pacing and a surprise or two toward the end would have helped tremendously. It still looks good… but much of it feels wasted.

  • Tod aus der Tiefe [Death Water] (2009)

    Tod aus der Tiefe [Death Water] (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) There are touches of zombie movies and techno-thriller in Death Water that make for a promising, but not particularly fulfilling result. Readers of techno-thrillers will certainly recognize much of the set-up, as an oil-drilling platform uncovers a long-dormant life form that makes a snack of modern biology. The counter having been started for the End of the World as we Know It, that takes care of the overall plotting of the film. The rest follows disaster-movie conventions, as we are introduced to a number of characters with personal problems (the no-good ex-husband, the careerist woman, the hotshot driven scientist, etc.) that will be magnified by the impending catastrophe. Some of Death Water’s initial moments feel like a zombie movie, as a mysterious illness suddenly affects residents of a coastal city, overwhelming hospitals with people behaving strangely. As scientists argue with the mayor that beaches must be closed, we move closer to Jaws, but then three characters lock themselves up in a submarine to jury-rig a world-saving solution and, incidentally, save one of the characters’ daughters. (She should logically be dead but, you know: plot contrivances.)  Director Hans Horn’s Death Water only works intermittently, and seeing it on a channel usually dedicated to horror films may have set weird expectations for a film that keeps going back and forth between thriller and horror modes. (It eventually ends up firmly in horror territory, as the very last scene clarifies.)  The result is not uninteresting, but much of it has to do with the unusual North Sea atmosphere rather than intrinsic interest in the characters or the plotting. Not much distinguishes Death Water from many other Hollywood horror thrillers except for the quality of its special effects, and that’s not necessarily a compliment.

  • They Met in Bombay (1941)

    They Met in Bombay (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) There’s a wild genre shift midway through They Met in Bombay, as a jewel-theft caper turns into a military adventure in the early days of WW2’s Asian front. Clark Gable and Rosalind Russel initially play two thieves working independently to steal a well-known diamond from a rich heiress — him pretending to be a detective, her playing an aristocrat. The theft of the diamond only takes a few minutes, after which the double-crosses, escapes and even more dangerous situations start. Both Gable and Russell are very likable—but then again, the film doesn’t have merely a caper in mind. Soon enough, the war catches up to them and they’re forced into even more dangerous deceptions just to stay alive. Peter Lorre inexplicably shows up in overdone makeup as a Chinese ship captain, and then the film is off to a roaring war adventure with accidental heroism being a major driving force. It’s noteworthy that since the United States had not entered the war at the time of the film’s conception, production and release, Gable plays a Canadian who assumes a British officer’s identity, joining up with the Winnipeg Grenadiers (a real-life unit that was destroyed while fighting later in 1941) along the way. The zigs and zags of the plot are surprising if you’re going cold into the film, and they do transform the film into something quite different from what it had been. Considering the highly moralistic nature of the film’s conclusion (in which duty to country in the face of wartime adversity is far more important than the illicit acquisition of material baubles), you can interpret They Met in Bombay as a specific example of a larger-scale transformation of Hollywood films around 1941 or 1942, away from the Depression-escapism capers of the 1930s and into the wartime propaganda of the next few years.

  • Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)

    Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Disney Streaming, June 2021) It’s hard to avoid noticing that, in between Big Hero 6, Moana, Mulan and now Raya and the Last Dragon, Disney has put some emphasis on the Asian market over the past few years. What’s more, the past, oh, ten years have seen a shift in how Disney approaches its celebrated princesses: past films have been celebrated for being more diverse (The Princess and the Frog onward), with its princesses less likely to be linked to male romantic interests (Frozen onward). Now that the formula-breaking movies are done, the more interesting material is coming out: what do you do for an encore, and what happens once the breathless marketing coup is done? Raya and the Last Dragon finds Disney a bit less self-conscious and a bit less under the microscope. This time around, we’re in southeast Asia, with a blend of influences suggesting an atmosphere without necessarily pointing to something specific. Our heroine, Raya, is definitely a princess (being the daughter of the local leader), but she precipitates an apocalypse by her action as a girl, and then the story moves forward to a grittier(ish) setting with her as a teenager. Some of the familiar Disney Animation elements are back — a cute animal sidekick combining elements of pillbugs and hedgehogs (much cuter in the film than it sounds), an action-filled quest, exceptional visuals, and characters reflecting their voice actresses, such as a dragon character that couldn’t have been voiced by anyone but Awkwafina. Other elements are newer: the narrative widely opens the door to a same-sex romance in a sequel and there’s quite a bit of grimness in the implied backstory of the time-skip. Alas, Raya does fall apart slightly in the execution. The film doesn’t feel as polished and tight as other Disney movies, almost as if the zigs and zags of the production hadn’t been completely patched by the time the film was finished (as strongest evidence, I offer the five tribes: two of them lavishly used but three others merely present as an afterthought). The climax isn’t quite as strong as I’d hoped, and I have a feeling that some aspects of the film (Awkwafina, mostly) will date faster than its immediate cohort. Still, I’m not unhappy with the result: As a film courting the Asian market, it’s significantly more interesting and less self-contradictory than Mulan. It’s a beauty to watch, and I like how it takes a few chances even if they don’t always pay off. Ultimately, Disney Animation Studio films are not really meant to be watched as they are to be re-watched, sometimes trans-generationally. Their lineage carries a heavy burden, but there’s a good chance that Raya will endure nicely.

  • The Old Dark House (1963)

    The Old Dark House (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) I don’t think that The Old Dark House is a perfect representation of the stiff-lipped macabre British black comedy, but it’s certainly a fine example of it. Adapted from a 1932 film I’m now curious to see, it’s an unusual collaboration between American director William Castle and the British production company Hammer films. As such, it does have an unusual tone — halfway between the showy flourishes of Castle’s other productions and the restraint of British black comedies. The story has to do with an American car salesman ending up in the middle of an isolated British estate and a murderous family feud, as the inhabitants of the mansion must return to the house every night or forfeit their inheritance. The Old Dark House gets wild with lurid murders, hidden identities, secret killers and unlikely coincidences-that-aren’t. It’s not the most memorable Castle film, but it does carry some of his endearing showmanship, coupled with a dreary atmosphere and some droll delivery. It’s not quite the film that it could have been, but it’s odd enough to be worth a quick look. At less than 86 minutes, The Old Dark House moves faster than you’d expect and doesn’t quite overstay its welcome. There’s something fun in the atmosphere of an isolated mansion in which people are being murdered one after another, and even if the results don’t come close to its full potential, it’s amusing enough even with average execution.

  • High School Confidential! (1958)

    High School Confidential! (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) The newly coined concept of the teenager was a deeply scary thing in 1950s America, and Hollywood made bank by reminding audiences of the young menace now living with them. In High School Confidential!, we go deep undercover in a “typical” high school as our protagonist (Russ Tamblyn, unforgettable) deals drugs, talks back to adults and has an interest in recreational sex. Narcotics are quickly designated as the scourge of the nation, and the plot gradually shifts into a crime thriller as it wraps up the narrative. It’s what lies aside of the main story, however, that’s most interesting. Specifically, the screenwriter’s idea of teenage slang and lingo is so dated as to appear parodic to modern audiences. The opening lines are so, so good that you just want to revel in that dialogue for a long time. It calms down shortly afterwards, although there’s an amazing bit of beat poetry later on that almost justifies the film by itself (“Tomorrow is dragsville, cats. Tomorrow is a king-sized drag.”). The other thing worth noting is Mamie van Doren’s performance as a sex-crazed older woman with designs on the protagonist, considerably amping up the film’s exploitation score. It’s all very enjoyable, although on a second degree unattainable to audiences who first saw this in theatres: the moralistic value of the story becomes very, very obvious by the time the film wraps up, and it feels curiously naïve in the way it both exploits teenage rebellion while (professing to) being repulsed by it. I still stand by my assertion that the dialogue is the finest thing about High School Confidential! : some people can dig Shakespearian soliloquies all day long, but give me a load of those hep-cats jazzing and I’ll be a happy square until dawn.

  • Rammbock [Berlin Undead aka Siege of the Dead] (2010)

    Rammbock [Berlin Undead aka Siege of the Dead] (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, June 2021) Oh no! There’s a zombie apocalypse in Berlin and, well, that’s pretty much all the plot that you really need to know about Berlin Undead, a rather ordinary take on the zombie apocalypse that has the sole distinction of being set in Eastern Berlin. The script’s big idea is that is zombies are created by a virus that can be activated by strong emotions, which makes for a convenient plot point when one character finds out that his girlfriend has dumped him for another man. At a bare 63 minutes, director Marvin Kren’s Berlin Undead doesn’t exactly overstay its welcome, but it is so similar to other zombie films that there’s not much in terms of set-pieces or distinctive characters. At best, it eventually claws its way to adequacy — something fun for zombie fans, but slightly annoying to those who have overdosed on other, better zombie movies.