Reviews

  • The Turkey Bowl (2019)

    The Turkey Bowl (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) There’s a straightforward earnestness to The Turkey Bowl that compensates for a multitude of sins, perhaps the biggest one being that the script seems made of three familiar formulas thrown in a blender. You’ve got the young urban professional of humble origins getting a few second thoughts as his marriage to an upper-class fiancée approaches. You’ve got the return to a Midwestern town complete with the old flames, old friends, old rivals and old home with old bedroom intact. Finally, you’ve got the football game subplot, a fifteen-year-later attempt to recapture glory whose outcome is never once in doubt. Shot and set in Oklahoma, The Turkey Bowl often gives the impression of having been conceived there as well: There’s a notable lower-budget lack of polish to the result, whether it’s the dull cinematography, merely adequate actors, or slack editing. It’s not a bad film, but it’s a wholly average one, with very little to strike out as being distinctive one way or another. The formulaic nature of the plot means a few things: it allows casual watchers to drop in and out of the film to go make themselves a sandwich without fear of losing much of the plot, and, more importantly, it offers a lot of comfort to viewers. In that way, it’s not too dissimilar to a Hallmark channel romance: we know how it’s going to end, we know how it’s going to get there and there’s little active participation involved. There is certainly a public for this kind of thing, and every those who would turn their noses up to such populist filmmaking have to admit that it works even if it doesn’t exceed any expectations. Writer-director Greg Coolidge does just fine with what he has in hand, and there’s plenty of merit in turning in a good-enough movie. The Turkey Bowl may play best in a situation reminiscent of its title: A thanksgiving afternoon filler, with the family resting from a heavy turkey lunch and not wanting anything too challenging to interrupt the digestion.

  • The Pirate (1948)

    The Pirate (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) Gene Kelly and Judy Garland worked together five times through the ebb and flow of their careers (She helped him on his first film; he helped her on her last MGM picture,) but you can argue that The Pirate was the most ambitious of their movies, and perhaps the beginning of the end for her. Little of the film’s troubled production shows on-screen, as we’re taken to a fantasy version of the pirate-era Caribbean, as a lothario actor (Kelly) is convinced to play the pirate and charms a young woman (Garland) in the process. Many musical numbers ensue, and since this is an Arthur Freed production, the quality is about as high as any musical of the era. Bright colour cinematography helps a lot, but the costumes and sets show where the film’s budget was spent. Kelly is having fun aping the Fairbanks and Barrymores of silent serials, his role enabling him to play the athletic dancer, the romantic singer (“Niña” is quite funny) and the entertaining swashbuckler—this is his movie, and it’s fun to hear the relish through which he tears through his better-than-average dialogue. He also gets to sneak in a bit of ballet. Garland is actually quite nice here, and I say this as someone who usually considers Garland a liability to most of her movies—but in The Pirate she looks healthier than many of her later films, sings well, dances well, emotes well and even looks stunning in a number with her hair down. The bit in which she spends a scene throwing most of the scenery decorations at Kelly’s character is one of the many highlights of the film. Elsewhere in the film, I now understand the fuss about the similarities between “Be a Clown” and Singin’ in the Rain’s “Make Them Laugh.” But the number that everyone has to watch is the dancing sequence featuring Kelly and the Nicholas brothers—a high-energy production in which Kelly barely manages to keep up with the spring-loaded energy of the brothers. The Pirate starts well, has a bit of a mid-movie lull but comes back strong—there are better movies in Kelly’s filmography, but it’s still quite a fun musical. I suppose I’m getting to be knowledgeable about MGM musicals by now, because I had a really good time reading about The Pirate after watching the film and finding out how its commercial failure led to 1949’s Easter Parade.

  • The Kissing Bandit (1948)

    The Kissing Bandit (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) Movie history is not kind to The Kissing Bandit: It’s recognized by Wikipedia as “one of the least successful musicals in MGM history,” and “an acknowledged low-point in the careers of Frank Sinatra and Kathryn Grayson.” Is it such a terrible film, though? Of course not. While almost obscure these days, it’s quite entertaining to watch if you’re a fan of Technicolor MGM musical. Gorgeously shot against California mountains with very colourful costumes, the film clearly doesn’t take itself too seriously. The premise alone does a lot of mileage out of blending Robin Hood with Zorro as a Boston-educated young man comes back to 19th-century California to take over his father’s inn, only to discover that he’s expected to step into his father’s true occupation: leader of a masked gang, otherwise known as “the Kissing Bandit” for his habit of, well, kissing female victims. That premise wouldn’t fly today for obvious reasons, but even then—the film seems determined to minimize any unpleasant connotations this may have: our hero spends nearly all of the film shying away from any kissing, and the film spares no means (opening titles joke, comic sound effects, overacting) to let us know that this is a big broad comedy and nothing bad is ever going to happen. A young Sinatra with relatively long hair does well in the lead role, while Grayson is simply lovely as the governor’s daughter. Still, I’m burying the lead here because the single best reason to watch the film as far as I’m concerned is a single number toward the end of the film that has two of my biggest MGM crushes, Ann Miller and Cyd Charisse, in billowing dresses dancing a number with none other than Ricardo Montalban—whew! Let’s not argue that The Kissing Bandit is a great film—it has trouble with tone, and the rather promising opening act somehow doesn’t quite lead to a satisfying middle before the film picks up again toward the end. But it’s fun, funny and offers some great Hollywood stars doing some singing and dancing. Its relative obscurity may even mean that even fans of the era haven’t seen it yet.

  • The Greasy Strangler (2016)

    The Greasy Strangler (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) There are a few horror subgenres that seldom work well for me, and The Greasy Stranger seems intent on combining two of them. For one thing, it’s a horror/comedy, which often ends up making me wonder why I’m supposed to laugh at horrible people doing terrible things. Then there’s the aesthetics, which (as the title suggests) wallows in an oily mixture of grime and awkwardness. (If movies smelled, I wouldn’t want to see this one.) The story has to do with a serial-murdering father, his son and the woman that comes between them. Taking liberally from the deadpan Midwestern-gothic style of movies like Napoleon Dynamite and the ultra-gore of video nasties, The Greasy Strangler is a film that, on paper, looks sure to irritate any possible indulgence out of me. While I’m still not too fond of the final result, even I have to admit that the film occasionally works better than I thought. There’s an over-the-top nature to the result that sands off the edge of the gore, while the humour does get understandable after a while. The serial killer bit (slathered in grease, popping eyes out via strangulation, cleaning himself in a car wash) is overdone to the point of being almost funnier than gross. The Greasy Strangler is really not a movie for everyone and it certainly relies on that specificity in how it builds its story. It holds nothing back either in gratuitous nudity (male and female), gross moments and overall lack of morality. I was ultimately defeated by the too-nihilistic ending, but for the longest time, the film played better than I thought. Still, this is more of a one-time joke than a kind of film I’d like to see more often.

  • House (1985)

    House (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) I may need to watch House a second time, because what I got from it was not at all what I was told I would get from it. Various sources say it’s a horror comedy, and, on paper, it’s got a few things that I should love: a writer protagonist, a haunted house, and plenty of gooey 1980s special effects. But in practice? It feels dull, featureless, repetitive and ordinary—just about the base level of what a haunted house film should be, except without any wit or humour. The integration of Vietnam War trauma into genre horror is intriguing but falls flat, and much of the family drama seems overly serious for what’s supposed to be lighthearted. I don’t know—maybe I just wasn’t in the mood for House. Maybe I’ll have another look at some other time. Until then, though, I can’t recommend it.

  • Bell Book and Candle (1958)

    Bell Book and Candle (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) The ridiculously charming Bell Book and Candle combines a few of my favourite things: James Steward, Jack Lemmon, witches, cats and a supernatural romantic comedy. Pairing-wise, there is a nice contrast between Kim Novak’s glamorous sophistication and Stewart’s down-to-Earth affability, and the film doesn’t skip an occasion of making good use of it. Lemmon (and Ernie Kovacs) brings more overt comedy in the film’s subplot. Even the cat has a role to play—and it all takes place in Manhattan’s Beatnik-central Greenwich Village. Shot in very enjoyable Technicolor, Bell Book and Candle is both a fairly standard romantic comedy and a very cute one. [November 2024: Let it be recorded that, inspired by this film, I tried for months to get my cat to stand on my shoulders. I occasionally succeeded, which is not bad given the nature of my cat. The pandemic was weird.]

  • A Woman Rebels (1936)

    A Woman Rebels (1936)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) If there is no Katharine Hepburn biography titled A Woman Rebels, then it’s a missed opportunity for the ages. The film of that name is so very much a 1930s Hepburn film, featuring her headstrong personality and embracing surprisingly feminist themes roughly three decades before everyone else. In Victorian England, a woman shows her independence by raising a child out of wedlock, and by becoming an activist for women’s causes -an ideal role for the iconoclastic Hepburn. Often blunt but nonetheless fascinating, A Woman Rebels is an illustration of just how good Hepburn was in the 1930s—a mesmerizing beauty, a ferocious screen presence and a canny performer. Alas, the film flopped and led to a near-career-death experience for Hepburn, who took years to get back on top as box-office performer. File this one under “the future knew better.” Also worth noting: Van Heflin in his film debut. While A Woman Rebels is not that good of a film (a bit fuzzy, a bit jumbled, a bit overlong), Hepburn easily overpowers those flaws to make the film worth watching, especially for her fans or anyone interested in film progressivism.

  • Easy to Wed (1946)

    Easy to Wed (1946)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) Considering that Libeled Lady is one of the great comedies of the 1930s, I wasn’t sure that a decade-later remake could be all that good. But Easy to Wed turns out to be one of those remakes under the form of a musical comedy, and a much more farcical tone thanks to actors going for laughs over fidelity to the first film. Van Johnson, Esther Williams and Lucille Ball sing and strut their stuff (in and under water, in Williams’ predictable case) to end up making something so pleasantly different from the original that it becomes its own thing. As a bonus, you can see in Ball’s scene-stealing performance the kernels of her later Lucy character. If you like musicals, Easy to Wed is not a bad remake—but be sure to see Libeled Lady for a better movie.

  • The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)

    The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (TubiTV Streaming, September 2020) Films like The Kentucky Fried Movie are best appreciated as portents of better things to come. The number and later pedigree of people involved in its production is incredible—sophomore feature film from John Landis, first movie script by the legendary Zucker-Abrams-Zucker trio, appearances by George Lazenby, Henry Gibson and Donald Sutherland… all in semi-related comedy sketches relying on a lot of sudden crudity, silliness and bare breasts. The problem, though, is that if The Kentucky Fried Movie is amusing, it’s not quite as frequently funny—there’s a sense that it’s all juvenile and not quite ready for prime time, even as it does its best to get laughs. What may be funnier now than it was upon release is the deluge of references to a variety of 1970s pop-culture, politics and sports: either watch the film with Wikipedia in hand, or enjoy the even stranger sense of jokes flying over your heads. The Kentucky Fried Movie would have many inheritors—it’s an early prototype of a style of comedy that would become Airplane! and Top Secret! and The Naked Gun, but it’s not quite cooked yet. (It’s still funnier than any of the spoof movies of the 2000s, though.)

  • The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

    The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Youtube Streaming, September 2020) This may count as my second viewing of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, except that my first viewing, decades ago, left me with disconnected, confused memories. Not that this second viewing is any different because this film really feels as if it’s a mashup of about six different movies thrown in a blender, with the protagonist somehow inheriting the characteristics of all six leads. Buckaroo Banzai, after all, is a physicist, neurosurgeon, test pilot, and rock star whose various specialties (and equally diverse collaborators) are ideally suited to detecting and countering an alien invasion of Earth. Filled with non sequiturs, outrageous contrivances, deadpan humour and bizarre combinations of tossed-off awesomeness, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is a cult classic in the purest sense: It’s going to be incomprehensible to most, and beloved by a few. I’m firmly but not obsessively in the second camp—this is brilliant, off-beat stuff, the likes of which only the 1980s were capable of producing. Peter Welles is unflappable in the lead role, while Jeff Goldblum is hilarious as a supporting player, and John Lithgow chews all the scenery he can find in what feels like an audition for 3rd Rock From the Sun. Even its dearest fans will tell you that The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension has the flaws of its qualities: that it’s ridiculously undisciplined and that at least another script rewrite to bring it all into focus would have produced wonders. But when it works (or rather, if it works), then it really works. The biggest surprise, frankly, is why there hasn’t been a remake since then—this strikes me as the ideal fixer-upper; the best Doc Savage film ever made under another name. Even thirty-five years later, we still stare at it in awe.

  • Nashville (1975)

    Nashville (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Kanopy Streaming, September 2020) I don’t think I’ll ever love a movie from writer-director Robert Altman (well, maybe The Player), but I can certainly admire a few of them, like Nashville. Of course, Nashville is The Big One for Altman—the one most often referred to as the purest incarnation of his themes and methods, the one selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry, the one with perhaps the biggest scope and cast. It follows no less than 24 characters over five days in Nashville, in between many music performances and one political convention. Equally fascinated with music and politics, Nashville is a messy, unclean film: everything is improvised, everyone has shaggy hair, everywhere you look shows America at its most 1970s. (There’s a very real time-capsule element to this film.) This is Altman at his most Altmanesque, with overlapping dialogue, accidental cinematography, improvised narrative, grainy images and a mixture of artistic and political. It’s not, at 160 minutes, a breezy watch: the need to keep track of who’s everyone and what they’re doing can give brain cells a workout by itself. It’s not, to be blunt, my kind of film: I like cinema to be tight, focused, overengineered and deliberate. But as a demonstration of what’s possible at the antithesis of what I like, Nashville is eloquent enough. Not easy to like, but easy to respect.

  • Black Hand (1950)

    Black Hand (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) In retrospect, it’s amazing that legendary singer-dancer-choreographer Gene Kelly would take a few months in the middle of his most productive years as a musical star to play the lead dramatic role in Black Hand, a very serious film noir about the Italian Mob in New York City. I mean, sure, he’s pretty good at it—but isn’t it a waste? He’s certainly not the weak link in this competent but hardly inspired gangster film: Director Richard Thorpe delivers a perfunctory product, slightly more stylish than similar 1930s urban crime films but not by much. Despite being produced by MGM, it often feels more Warners—not everything is polished to a sheen, and it really embraces the urban gangster theme. On the other hand, Black Hand does feel too long even at 92 minutes. Kelly would play plenty of dramatic roles before the end of his career, but this was the first and perhaps the hardest edged of them all.

  • River of No Return (1954)

    River of No Return (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) It took a lot to combine Robert Mitchum, Marilyn Monroe and director Otto Preminger on the set of a colour widescreen Western shot in Canada. But was it worth it? Watching River of No Return and then reading about its eventful production history suggest that a film about the making of the film would be more interesting than the film itself. While not strictly a failure, this is a movie that seems oddly conceived, awkwardly executed and barely worth the trouble. Mitchum stars as a taciturn farmer who’s robbed and forced to race to town on a raging river, alongside an estranged son and a saloon singer (Monroe). A very 1950s script doesn’t make things better, considering that it includes a near-rape scene between “hero” and “heroine” and a retrograde portrayal of Native Americans. Technical aspects have not aged well, with obvious differences between studio footage and on-location shooting (which is the kind of thing you learn to tolerate from period films, except this one tries to be an action movie). In the end, River of No Return barely claws its way to mediocrity, which is a far deal less than what we could expect from the talent involved. If you’re even remotely familiar with Mitchum, Monroe and Preminger, then the feeling that all three are out of their urban environment persists throughout River of No Return—and reading about the troubled production of the film only reinforces the idea that there was no way this was going to turn out to be a good movie. As a Mitchum fan, I’m not impressed; as someone who’s not a Monroe fan, I am still disappointed; and as a Preminger fan, I understand why he walked away from the film in post-production.

  • Un divan à Tunis [Arab Blues] (2019)

    Un divan à Tunis [Arab Blues] (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) Only one word was needed to get me watching Un divan à Tunis: Golshifteh. The delightful Golshifteh Farahani, specifically—an actress of Iranian origin (now exiled due to her playing in films that the government did not approve) living in France who’s been catching my eye since 2010’s Body of Lies. While she’s been in various films on both sides of the Atlantic since then, Un divan à Tunis gives us the opportunity to see her in a comic leading role, as a Tunisian-born psychiatrist who returns home from France with the intention of setting up a psychoanalytic practice of her own. Much of the comedy consists of seeing this very liberal and educated woman encounter various prejudices and try to improve people’s lives despite many obstacles. As many Tunisian cinephiles have commented, this is ideologically far more of a French film than a Tunisian one—although the local colour of the film is strong and the sense of place of Tunis is charming. As for Farahani, she is wonderful in a film designed as a showcase—funny, attractive, clever and sensible. (Even her terrific hair gets a subplot of its own, as an ill-advised haircut gets immediately nixed in favour of a better curly alternative.) I like the actress a lot—she’s better than the material—but if Un divan à Tunis is not meant to be particularly deep or nuanced, it’s quite a bit of fun by itself.

  • Spies in Disguise (2019)

    Spies in Disguise (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) While hardly the best or most original animated film in recent memory, BlueSky’s latest (and possibly last) offering Spies in Disguise is a pleasant, fast-paced, funny and likable family film. Will Smith is in fine form as he voices a top-secret agent who gets transformed into a pigeon and must investigate who framed him against his own clandestine agency—with Tom Holland awkwardly voicing a nebbish teen science genius. There’s a good blend of action and comedy here, with the two creating sparks when the inherently ridiculous concept of a human transformed into a pigeon goes poking against the most serious tropes of spy fiction. Clearly funnier to younger members of the audience without necessarily losing their adult chaperones, Spies in Disguise often plays it safe with its pacifist message, broad physical comedy and bright colourful visuals. But, hey, it works—I can’t imagine anyone being angry at this film…, but then again, I can’t imagine anyone older than ten really loving it. But that’s fine—We’re not expecting the world out of Spies in Disguise, just being entertained for an hour and a half.