Reviews

  • Breezy (1973)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) There are dozens of ways Clint Eastwood’s intergenerational romance Breezy should not have worked. Building a film on the idea of a teenager falling in love with a fifty-something man is already a tricky proposal: any hint of leering, deviance, or wish-fulfillment would have made the film a reprehensible object of derision. As it stands, Breezy is still awkward and suspicious, but it has enough of a patina of good execution to keep it from careening out of control. Historically, this was Clint Eastwood’s third film as a director (he doesn’t star in it) and an occasion to provide classic Hollywood actor Richard Holden with a solid late-career role. As a bitter, divorced fifty-something, his character is brought back from the brink of cynicism by the influence of a precocious seventeen-year-old hippie. While the subject matter sounds and occasionally feels like the kinds of things that older Hollywood executives would enjoy seeing on-screen, much of the film has the decency to be about the problems inherent in such a lopsided relationship. The film is at its strongest when the older man is very conscious of how doomed their affair is—alas, Breezy ultimately settles for a wholly unconvincing ending precipitated by some limp dialogue. Some will be reassured that the film was, even in the early wild and woolly 1970s, not a success and has drawn mixed critical reactions up until today. The best I can say about it is that it doesn’t humiliate itself nor feels unacceptably exploitative. But that’s not necessarily an endorsement: Breezy stinks of the worst aspects of the early-1970s and constantly feels one moment away from a much worse film. That it keeps it together long enough to have a few moments of dramatic interest is probably the best that the film could hope for.

  • Nobody (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) There’s much to be said about a genre piece cleverly playing to its core audience. Action comedy Nobody is clearly designed for fans, whether it’s about the premise, the details of its story or the way the action sequences are put together. The film never misses an opportunity to play with the power chords of action filmmaking, delivers just enough of a twist on a familiar premise to be interesting, and manages to provide strong entertainment value on a limited budget. The multi-talented Bob Odenkirk, who has hovered on the edge of stardom for a long time, gets a plum role here as an ex-operative (an “auditor” for a shadowy government agency) who is accidentally brought back from suburban retirement to bone-crushing action against villains of various stripes. The psychological twist here is that he’s not constrained to get back to violence—he simply re-embraces the attraction of that lifestyle that he only suppressed for so long. As a random home burglary revives his bloodthirstiness, director Ilya Naishuller apes the John Wick series (which shares the same screenwriter and producer) for inspiration on how to build action sequences: Clean crisp direction finding a good balance between strong editing and credibly letting the actors sell the choreography of the fights. To that able execution, Nobody adds quirks designed to get the fans whooping it up: One-liners carefully delivered and an inordinate fondness for using slow songs as counterpoint to the action sequences are two of the most obvious elements of how this is an action movie for action movie fans—a good way to wait for the next John Wick volume while presenting a new protagonist. It’s an enjoyable watch throughout—from a repetitively frustrating opening to a conclusion that promises sequels to come. It may not be particularly profound, but Nobody is one of the best action films of 2021 and it knows exactly what it is.

  • Meurtres à Marie-Galante (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2022) One underappreciated strength of the murder-mystery genre is how it’s ideally suited to exploring an unusual setting. Beyond the expected elements of a murder, a criminal and an investigator, authors are free to tailor the plot to the specifics of the setting in which they’re telling the story, whether it’s a high-finance corporation, a space station or, in the case of Meurtres à Marie-Galante, a picturesque island near Guadeloupe. Under French administration, it’s a good and unusual “local” destination for French filmmakers to use in order to present an exotic location without travelling to another country. They certainly make the most out of the gorgeous setting—despite what feels like a low production budget, the film benefits from the natural landscapes and an opportunity to present a murder mystery in the Caribbean. This leads to some great casting choices, perhaps the best being Pascal Légitimus as a mainland policeman going back to his native island to write a book, but is immediately swept up by a mysterious murder. His most immediate colleague on the island has reasons to dislike him, and local politics and history soon inform the investigation. Meurtres à Marie-Galante is not that slick of a film, but it’s rather wonderful to watch in the middle of January: unusual faces, great accents, terrific local details, gorgeous sunny beaches and a decent-enough story have all it takes to make this a pleasant watch, especially if you go in with low expectations.

  • Stars Fell on Alabama (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) By now, the Hallmark Channel romantic comedy formula is not only famous enough to have been dissected in thorough detail, it’s being imitated across an entire swath of low-budget films all going for that same market audience. I keep waiting for the genre to become self-aware and poking fun at itself, but that may have to wait a while. Until then, we get exercises like Stars Fell on Alabama that play with subgenre convention without quite giving in to them entirely. Here, our male lead is a Hollywood agent who, in order to impress the Alabama locals during a class reunion, brings back a Hollywood starlet to town and pretends that she’s his girlfriend—something made more difficult by a local ex-flame still having an interest, and the superstar ex-boyfriend of the starlet not being happy about the paparazzi shots coming out of Alabama. You can see an inversion of clichés in Stars Fell on Alabama, but it’s half-hearted at best—the local ex-flame barely has one scene to make her case before going back to her local husband, while the rest of the film clearly settles into the “fake-it-till-you-fall-for-it” subgenre rather than wholly committing to the small-city romance angle. The low production values and slapdash script are most obvious in an awkward prologue set in Los Angeles—fortunately, things get more credible and interesting once the film settles in Alabama. Stars Fell on Alabama doesn’t amount to much, with a very obvious conclusion handled in the most obvious way possible, but it’s generally watchable and not offensive at all. Its portrait of small-town Alabama (while shot in South Carolina) is more affectionate than you’d expect (although, once again: target audience) and gets a couple of passable leads in James Maslow and Ciara Hanna. The supporting characters are usually more fun to watch as the film monster-trucks predictably from beginning to end. Not good, but not terrible either if your expectations stay low. But it’s certainly not the film that will make fun of other films like it.

  • Mr. Jones (1993)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, January 2022) If you often find professional movie reviewers obsessing over a specific film’s reason to exist, there’s a good reason for that. Knowing about Hollywood’s greenlighting process means that there are dozens more film proposals than finished films, and something always tilts the balance toward what shows up on screen. Usually money, but more often money with added purpose. By the time Mr. Jones was filming in 1991, Richard Gere (who co-produced the film) was arriving at the top of his superstardom following well-regarded performances in Pretty Woman and Internal Affairs—it’s natural for actors with that level of clout to start looking for acting showcases. He certainly gets one here, as a protagonist with bipolar disorder that gives him the chance to go from one emotional extreme to another in the same scene. In director Mike Figgis’ hands, the film turns into a slickly overproduced romantic drama that keeps the focus on Gere at all times, whether he’s going through several emotional states, cajoling a foreman, rushing an orchestra, romancing his psychiatrist or threatening to jump off a building. It’s a showy performance that overshadows a script built on contrivances and nice Hollywood sentiments—the romance between patient and doctor means that Mr. Jones could be subtitled “Medical Malpractice: The Movie,” and the pat overemotional ending rings hollow during the entire end credits. Still, credit should go to Gere: it’s a terrific performance and it does much to make us forget about the rest of the film. It exists to showcase Gere, and it does just that.

  • Ripoux contre ripoux (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2022) I was very dubious that Ripoux contre ripoux would be interesting, considering the unlikely success of the first film in the series, Les Ripoux, in making audiences sympathize with a pair of crooked cops shaking out their neighbourhood for cash and favours. How can you make a fun sequel to that? (Aside from the obvious problem of the previous film’s conclusion—which this one cheerfully ignores.)  Well, the solution, as the opening act of the sequel, is to have them fall from grace (after an act of honesty, ironically enough) and be replaced by even worse crooked cops that set out to squeeze the neighbourhood for all it’s worth. That leads the oppressed neighbourhood shop owners to head to the rural retreat of our horse-raising protagonists to beg them to come back and get rid of their replacements. No, it’s not quite as neat or original as the first film, but Ripoux contre Ripoux still manages to extend the dubious charm of the previous film—Thierry Lhermitte and especially Philippe Noiret are in fine form as the crooked cops asked to prevent an even greater evil from taking over, even when their allies prove fickle and their allegiances uncertain. The sense of neighbourhood is muddled somewhat by the protagonists’ temporary exile, but the film does roar back to a better tempo during its last half as the action returns to Paris. It’s more of the same, but pleasantly so—while I still have substantial moral qualms about making heroes out of crooked cops, there’s still some charm to the series and its lead actors.

  • The Last Gangster (1937)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) As the story goes, Edward G. Robinson was getting tired of playing gangsters but was remodeling his house and needed the money. An offer from MGM (rather than his usual Warner Brothers) later—voilà, one more gangster role in The Last Gangster, albeit one that greatly benefited from Robinson’s experience in lending depth to what could have been a caricature. More significantly, it offers a singular film in which Robinson, in his prime, plays an ascendant James Stewart—two recognizable actors going at each other with their own styles. Stewart is quite good (even with an unusual moustache) as an urbane, compassionate newspaperman who rivals Robinson’s gangster for the affection of his ex-wife and son. It all escalates, providing Robinson with a few showcase sequences and a heroic guns-blazing finale with an even worse criminal. Executed by the professional standards of the time, The Last Gangster is not quite as grandiose as its title suggests, but it’s a nice actor’s showcase and the best opportunity to see two screen legends on opposite sides. (They’d later reunite on Cheyenne Autumn, but not as direct opponents.)

  • Ray Donovan: The Movie (2022)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) I watched just enough of the first season of Ray Donovan to be interested in the film epilogue, but clearly not enough to get the most out of it. Meant as a crash-conclusion to the series after it was unceremoniously cut short, Ray Donovan: The Movie focuses its plotting on the melodramatic family matters that got me to stop watching the series in the first place—Donovan as a Hollywood fixer is interesting, but Donovan as a man stuck between the criminal activities of his father and his highly dysfunctional family is far more ordinary. But the series made its choices seasons ago, driving Donovan cross-country back to the less sunny skies of New York City and Boston, and keeping the tension high between father and son. As this movie begins, flashbacks quickly get viewers up to speed as to the deaths, betrayals and fat stack of valuable paper driving the final confrontation. There’s both a framing device in which Donovan discusses killing his father with a therapist, and a series of flashbacks to the 1980s to explain how and why there’s such an enmity between the two. Liev Schreiber is his usual dependable self as Donovan-fils, while Jon Voight is still suitably slimy as the aged Donovan-père. The film is clearly meant for series viewers, though: little time is spent reintroducing characters or plotlines, and the stakes of the rather glum film are clearly aligned with the series rather than pump things up for broader audiences. While there’s an attempt to upgrade the directing to a feature-film quality, the results are still very much aligned with that’s commonly seen on cable TV. In other words (and unlike similar spinoff The Many Saints of Newark, riffing off The Sopranos), there’s no real reason to check out Ray Donovan: The Movie unless you’re a confirmed fan of the show looking for closure: the highlights are few, the stakes are minimal if you’re not already invested in the characters and the presentation is humdrum at best. Fans of the show will feel differently and that’s fine—everything benefits from closure even if it’s not the graceful last season the show-runners initially wanted.

  • The Cross of Lorraine (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) The first draft of history usually resembles but is not identical to the more definitive version, and so there’s a constant sense of underlying weirdness to the way the French Résistance is portrayed in The Cross of Lorraine. It’s not just about seeing Gene Kelly (clearly a Francophile even at this early stage of his career) in a straight dramatic role as a Frenchman who suffers from a crisis of courage but ultimately chooses to fight against the Nazis—it’s about the portrayal of Vichy France and the burgeoning Resistance even as it was going on. By the time The Cross of Lorraine was released, let alone produced, there was no D-Day to draw upon and no oral histories of partisans fighting the Nazis. If the film feels like a piece of propaganda high on ideals and low on details, it’s because no one knew what la resistance was doing at the time: this was aimed at the American home front as a way to shore up support for the war effort, not as a serious historical examination of what was going on. So, if The Cross of Lorraine feels quite different from what you’ve seen elsewhere about France’s WW2 occupation, there’s a good reason for that, and it’s one of the factors why the film feels more interesting than it should. Not that it doesn’t have a few intrinsic qualities of its own: besides a rather good turn from Kelly, it also features small roles for Hume Cronyn and Peter Lorre and competent technical credentials thanks to MGM’s usually high standards. Still, for modern audiences, the propagandist aspect of The Cross of Lorraine takes the first spot, as is the film’s ignorance of the tropes that would come to dominate any representation of La Résistance in later years.

  • Speedy (1928)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) Travel back to another time and place with Speedy—a Harold Lloyd production featuring his “Glasses” character as a well-meaning young man trying to save the last horse-pulled transit car in Manhattan from being put out of service by an unscrupulous tycoon. (He’s not doing this out of a simple good heart: there’s a girl involved.)  Lloyd’s last theatrical silent film shows the filmmaker with a competent ability to put together a fast-paced silent comedy. A number of highlights pepper the film, whether it’s the opening sequences demonstrating how much of a baseball nut the protagonist can be (all the way to rearranging a pastry display to update a game score for his co-workers), a trip to Luna Park, a pair of thrilling high-speed vehicle chases, and a big street brawl—Speedy isn’t always as well-regarded as other Lloyd films, but it still packs a few laughs or two: a Babe Ruth cameo, a cute turn from Ann Christy as the love interest, and perhaps, best of all, an incredible depiction of late 1920 Manhattan. As a silent film send-off to the memorable Lloyd and his bespectacled character, it’s a lot more fun than I expected and it ranks high on the list of silent movies that still pack some entertainment value today.

  • Retfærdighedens ryttere [Riders of Justice] (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) The problem with films that deliberately try to upset you is that, well, they either don’t work, or they do succeed at upsetting you. There’s an early series of hints in Riders of Justice that the film is about cosmic coincidences in the vein of films that seek some kind of statement about the universe. Well, ignore that hint to your peril, because this is not a film about fine-tuned algorithms and fail-proof analyses. It’s about human obsession with finding links where there are none, and the rather vexing consequences when people make the wrong decisions. Anchored by a typically solid performance from Mads Mikkelsen, Riders of Justice nonetheless does not want to be the kind of revenge thriller that it initially suggests. Rather than avenge the death of the protagonist’s wife, this thriller has its characters create more problems for themselves by seeking connections where there are none, and taking action on people who don’t turn out to be all that innocent. Resolutely unwilling to play by the rules of Hollywood, it ends up like a film that nearly has something to say but seems determined to meander along the way. In messing with expectations, it doesn’t feel like a tight film—a damaging quality for a thriller. If, indeed, it’s meant to be a thriller, because for all of the gunplay and violence, there’s a feeling that Riders of Justice is really more interested in doing its own things, even if it leaves viewers unsatisfied and shrugging.

  • Bachman (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2022) Most people will know Randy Bachman as the Bachman in Bachman-Turner Overdrive (“You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet,” “Takin’ Care of Business,” etc.), but I felt a closer connection to him as the host of the CBC retrospective music show Vinyl Tap, which accompanied many of my Saturday evening drives with its thematic selections of classic rock music. But there’s a lot more to him than a band and a radio show, as retrospective biography Bachman clearly shows. Bachman, a next-level guitarist, was part of more bands than most people own cars, never lost his passion for music and had a relatively tumultuous life despite a quiet personality. Much of the documentary is made of affectionate interviews with close associates of the man rather than Bachman himself, along with historical footage, song snippets and a current-day story about Bachman putting together a new album. Highlights of his life include the way his Mormon beliefs held him back from turning into a sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll rockstar like many of his contemporaries; and the incredible 15,000-square-foot “Bachman estate” (complete with recording studio) that was the backdrop to Bachman’s most expansive years. (Alas, it’s a period that also led to his first divorce, something that the film does confront with honesty—even if it’s held back from exploring the full story by virtue of being authorized by Bachman.)  As a portrait of one of Canada’s most successful rockers, Bachman succeeds both at explaining why he was such a towering figure and at explaining what made him tick—always the consummate, quiet musician (just wait until he gives viewers a tour of his guitars) even when pushing people a bit too hard to go on tour, play music and make music. A Mormon rocker makes for an interesting blend of passions and beliefs, and much of the film’s interest is in that combination… even when we sense that there’s a lot left unsaid here, especially when it comes to the ex-wives and ex-bands. Even then, Bachman taught me much about the man-and-the-legend, and made me sad once more that Vinyl Tap is no longer being produced at the CBC.

  • The Search (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) There’s something amazing in the way cinema can reach across decades to make period-specific points with wide universal appeal. The issue that concerned socially-conscious director Fred Zinnemann in tackling The Search is intensely specific to the end of WW2—the plight of children separated from their parents during the war, and the efforts of allied forces to reunite families. Headed by the solid Montgomery Clift, the film uses real location shooting in Germany to present the bombed-out remains of the country as backdrop to a desperate time. Atmosphere and subject matter do what the rest of the film struggles a bit to achieve, which is to remain gripping: despite the universal interest of making sure a child is reunited with their parents, Zinnemann is often more about lofty values than cinematic interest (especially at this early state of his career—although he would almost always remain a very formal director than a stylish one). Oh, The Search remains watchable—but there’s something missing to take it where it should be. Still, it still has the ability to make us care about something that happened more than seventy years ago, and that’s wonderful in itself.

  • The Hand (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) One of Oliver Stone’s earliest movies as writer-director, The Hand is an oddity in his filmography in that it’s probably a supernatural thriller. I say probably, because in the usual fashion of psychological thrillers going for Todorovian ambiguity, it intentionally presents contradictory material in order to have it both ways. Michael Caine remains one of the best reasons to see the film, as he plays a comic book artist who loses one of his hands in a very contrived accident scene. That’s bad enough, but when his enemies and personal annoyances start dropping dead at the hand of a mysterious entity, we’re either dealing with our protagonist undergoing a psychotic break, or a supernatural disembodied hand going around and doing his dirty subconscious business. Even hard-core horror fans will opt for the psychological explanation… except that the ending of the film has other ideas. OR DOES IT?!? Because, as is often the case with those borderline thrillers, nothing is really expected to make sense. Still, Caine is fun to watch as a writer going crazy (he reportedly did the film for garage-building cash), and the special effects are not bad for the time and budget of the film. There’s some grand-guignol entertainment value to The Hand even if it’s not all that good, and it’s not even close to the worst film in Caine’s filmography.

  • Pal Joey (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) If you’re going to make a 1950s film about a cad of a crooner, there were no better choices than Frank Sinatra at a moment where he was ascending as the Rat Pack’s “chairman of the board.”  Even in toning down the material from the original Broadway show (where, in an uncanny parallel, the character was played by Gene Kelly), Pal Joey has him gallivanting as an incorrigible womanizer, forced to a nomadic existence because of his issues with women. The cycle begins again when he lands in San Francisco and finds himself in another singing spot… unless he can’t help himself. While Pal Joey doesn’t quite measure up to the great musicals of the decade, it’s not a bad watch by itself—largely due to the charismatic nature of Sinatra’s performance, as well as the presences of Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak in supporting roles. A few of the songs are fun or well known — “Zip” is about as burlesque as they could get away in an all-family musical, while “The Lady is a Tramp” is another take on a classic. (I still like Lena Horne’s version better.) The cad-learns-better story is familiar but handled in a way that suits what Sinatra can bring to the role, and the technical aspects of the film are not bad for a non-MGM musical—although the film deals with its dance choreography in close-up fashion rather than going for a wide multi-dancer approach. It also remains a Broadway musical in conception, limiting what movie-magic could be done with the structure and plotting. Pay Joey was an undeniable success for Sinatra (who paid for a house on the film’s proceeds and opened a restaurant of the same name) and still all wraps up into something worth a look, even if it’s probably not all that memorable as some of its musical contemporaries.