Reviews

  • Rise of the Zombies (2012)

    Rise of the Zombies (2012)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2021) Infamous mockbusters maker The Asylum takes on the zombie genre with Rise of the Zombies, a frequently inept effort that nonetheless has a few things going for it. First up, it’s explicitly set in picturesque San Francisco, focusing some of its plotting on survivors of the zombie apocalypse regrouping in Alcatraz as a defensible position. Casting-wise, it seems more ambitious than most with Danny Trejo, LeVar Burton, Mariel Hemingway and French Stewart in various (sometimes very short) roles. The plotting has one degree of cleverness more than the usual film of this type, and the ending is actually rather optimistic, which is something I want to see more often in a wasteland of gratuitously downbeat zombie films. Some of the action sequences are almost potent, and the actors seem to be attuned to the spirit of the enterprise. But none of this actually brings Rise of the Zombie to a level where I’d be comfortable recommending it — at best, it doesn’t want you to stop the film immediately, and that’s an improvement over most Asylum productions. I have issues with the way the story is structured (from the prison going outward, rather than the reverse) and the somewhat low-budget production values constantly grind against what should be much more entertaining viewing. But Rise of the Zombie is still better than its closest equivalents.

  • The Climb (2019)

    The Climb (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) I’m not a big fan of humiliation comedy — alas, that’s a prerequisite for enjoying The Climb, the story of a friendship between two men that stretches out over many years, heartbreak and personal milestones. There are several distinct chapters, many of them overusing lengthy continuous shots. Writer-director-producer-star Michael Angelo Covino clearly has a specific intention in mind here, as he sketches key moments in the lives of his two protagonists, and if you happen to be on the same wavelength — great. Otherwise, you’re going to find that the film feels as if it lasts much longer than its 95 minutes. I found The Climb unpleasant, barely amusing, self-satisfied in its cleverness and not particularly insightful considering its constant resort to wild melodrama in lieu of plotting… but that’s just me.

  • The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019)

    The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Writer-director Armando Iannucci seldom does the expected, and so his take on Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield is very much its own thing. Race-shifting the lead role to be played by the always entertaining Dev Patel, Iannucci goes for a very expressive, stylish presentation of the material distilled to a feel-good essence. There’s a framing device of sorts in having the narrator of the story address a theatrical audience and flashing back to the tale being told; there are interludes that break with conventional representation; and a silent fast-forward sequence. But such stylistic flourishes seem appropriate in a film when colours and actors such as Peter Capaldi, Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, Benedict Wong and others seem intent on upstaging each other. (To the benefit of the film, of course.)  It’s all fun to watch, utterly divorced from the intention of delivering a strictly historical take on the story. Despite not being all that familiar with the source material, I appreciated the big happy ending (the biggest surprise of the film being Iannucci being happy with happiness) and the playfulness through which it approached a literary classic. Yes, we could use a few more movies like The Personal History of David Copperfield. But not exactly like it.

  • Zombeavers (2014)

    Zombeavers (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2021) With a title like Zombeavers, we can be sure of two things: It’s not going to be high art, and the end product will never live up to its title. You can guess the plot: college-age partiers heading for an isolated cabin in the woods, suddenly attacked by zombie beavers. It’s really not meant to be anything more than that. But while the film clearly wants to (and should) be a horror/comedy blend, I wasn’t completely happy with a blend placing far too much emphasis on gory horror rather than self-aware comedy. (Also: too many gory sex “jokes.”) This intention keeps going until the rather dispiriting ending, so anyone expecting lighter fare à la Black Sheep may want to temper their expectations, because that’s not where writer-director Jordan Rubin is going. This being said, while Zombeavers comfortably misses greatness and goodness alike, it’s not a horrible film. At 78 minutes, it buys itself some indulgence — especially for viewers with low expectations settling in for some late-evening fun. It’s meant to be laughed at, and while it doesn’t quite reach all of its targets, it’s certainly not unwatchable.

  • Step Lively (1944)

    Step Lively (1944)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) As a remake to the Marx-Brothers 1938 comedy Room Service, the 1944 Frank Sinatra vehicle Step Lively was not necessarily doomed to failure. Absent the Marxes, it’s clear that the remake will not be the same kind of comedy — and Sinatra’s ability to do verbal humour isn’t the same as Groucho Marx. (Ironically, those two would later co-star in Double Dynamite seven years later.)  Fortunately, the script was heavily retooled, largely reverting to its Broadway theatrical roots, absent the specific Marx flourishes. And it works rather well — the base story is something that can more effectively be told as a low-octane charming comedy rather than an out-and-out vaudeville special, and it’s in that vein that Step Lively can best exploit the talents of pre-icon Sinatra. There is a bit of a mismatch between young Sinatra and the world-weary fast-talking role he’s meant to play, but this is tempered by modern viewers’ knowledge that Sinatra would eventually become (as “Chairman of the Board”), the kind of character he was portraying here. Some of the supporting players (notably George Murphy, Wally Brown and Alan Carney) are meant to be funnier and usually are, leaving the straight man reacting and the straightforward singing to the lead. While Step Lively won’t rock anyone’s world (well, other than Sinatra fans), it’s a pleasant enough watch and an interesting point of comparison with the zaniness of Marx-style Room Service.

  • Brasília: Life After Design (2017)

    Brasília: Life After Design (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2021) Like the city itself, Brasília: Life After Design seems to have begun with the best intentions, only to end up with something far less remarkable. Keep in mind that Brasília is a product of the Brazilian optimism of the 1960s — an entirely new city built according to an overarching plan, creating a capital out of the deserted middle of the country, with mega-construction projects and lofty goals of egalitarianism. Half a century later, documentarian Bart Simpson goes on the ground to listen to the locals as they describe how it is to live in a deliberately designed city. Alas, the execution is more laborious and muddled than you’d expect. Other than a few occasional subtitles, the entire documentary eschews context. Aside from some historical footage, much of the footage is of ordinary Brazilians going about their business. There’s a frustrating lack of contextualization, narration or overarching perspective — I have seldom so missed expert talking heads than when I was trying to extract meaning from the footage. It does not help that Life After Design presents such pedestrian material— there’s far less critical commentary about the state of Brasília half a century after its construction, and more useless minutiae than I liked. It’s simply absurd that a quick look at the Brasília Wikipedia page is more interesting than an interminable 88-minute documentary on the topic. Even watching the film itself, we’re left with more questions than answers. The film’s log-line, asking, “What is it like to live in someone else’s idea?” is remarkably banal considering that nearly all of us are living in someone else’s idea of a city, a neighbourhood or a house. There’s very little here to highlight the remarkable achievements of Brasília as a synthetic city (perhaps only matched by Canberra, arguably even my Ottawa hometown) — at best, the film seems to shrug at the utter ordinary nature of its subjects’ lives. This seems to be a prodigious waste of potential. On most metrics, Brasília-the-city is a success — in half a century, it went from a desert to the third most populous city in Brazil. It’s adding new neighbourhoods like crazy, has a remarkably good Human Development Index and presents a fascinating case study in comparing planned to organic urban growth. There is, in other words, an incredible amount of potential in a documentary about Brasília, and Life After Design barely scratches at the surface. The best thing I got out of it was an irresistible impulsion to go and learn more about the city itself.

  • Desperate Search (1952)

    Desperate Search (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) As someone with a specific interest in Hollywood movies set in Canada, I couldn’t pass up Desperate Search, especially as the log-line promised an expedition to rescue two kids lost in the wilds of the Canadian Rockies after a plane crash. Years of experience watching Classic Hollywood movies had taught me to keep my expectations in check regarding authentic on-location footage, and I was right: a look at the film’s projection history shows that the film was entirely shot on Hollywood back-lot sets, with a good chunk of stock footage and dialogue suggesting where the film was taking place. This approach was consistent with the drive within MGM at the time to produce straightforward low-budget films to supplement their typically high-gloss productions. The result, at least in Desperate Search, is a trim 71 minutes of uncomplicated thrills, featuring familiar narrative strands and unsurprising characters working their way through a few thrills of which the best is a hungry cougar. The kid actors portraying peril are not that annoying, while Howard Keel, Jane Greer and Patricia Medina make up for the adult triangle at the heart of the rescue. It’s not a movie particularly worth remembering: at best, it delivers what it sets out to do. But it does make for a telling addition to “see how Hollywood dealt with Canada” in a modern adaptation of a typical Northern story.

  • Stage Struck (1958)

    Stage Struck (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) It took me about ten minutes too long to figure out that Stage Struck was a remake of the 1933 Katharine Hepburn vehicle Morning Glory, but that’s the least of the film’s problems. No, the problem with the film is one you rarely expect — an overacting, over-articulating, falsely cheerful, badly cast (or directed) lead actress: Susan Strasberg. I get that the film is the story of an overeager girl from the sticks heading to the big city and finding out that reality doesn’t measure up to her dreams. In that context, it makes perfect sense for the character to be exuberant, annoyingly upbeat and pretentiously mannered… at least at first. Similarly, you don’t need to point out that Hepburn was doing even more overacting back in 1933: that was the acting style at the time, and she made it work for herself. The problem with Strasberg is that she stays at eleven out of ten on the theatricality scale during the entire film, well after reality should have brought her down to earth. What a wasted opportunity, and an inexplicable lack of directorial judgment from Sidney Lumet, who would go on to direct several much-lauded films. It’s all the more regrettable, given how the rest of the film (filmed in colour on location) offers a rather wonderful look at Broadway circa 1958 in its grittiness and vitality. Henry Fonda is on hand as an older producer who, inevitably, falls in love with the half-as-young woman; other notables include Christopher Plummer as a writer (his first film) and Joan Greenwood as an acting rival. Stage Struck itself would be fine if it wasn’t for the way Strasberg uses highly stylized theatrical acting in an otherwise normal film — she stands out in a bad way and actively harms the rest of the film.

  • Le sens de l’humour [A Sense of Humour] (2011)

    Le sens de l’humour [A Sense of Humour] (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) One of the defining characteristics of French-Canadian society is its fondness for comedians — stand-up comedians, stage comedians, TV comedians or movie comedians, with a considerable amount of crossover between the four. The prototypical French-Canadian blockbuster often features one or two familiar comedians, plus a premise riffing off suspense tropes with a comic attitude. Le sens de l’humour is clearly in that vein, as it stars comic superstars Louis José Houde, Michel Côté and Benoit Brière in a film where a strong thriller premise is played for laughs. Here, two touring stage comedians (House and Côté) make fun of someone they shouldn’t during a show… and find themselves kidnapped by a serial killer eager for comedy lessons. Quite a bit of the film’s middle act delves into a meta-deconstruction of humour itself, as the stand-ups try to teach likability and humour principles to someone strikingly inept at it. There’s more, of course — the third act is all about absolving the “serial killer,” introducing a bigger threat and somehow defusing it while not having the rest of the film teetering into a more serious vein. Parts of it certainly work — the three leads have rapport, and the smaller-scale set-pieces can be funny. What doesn’t work quite as well is the conclusion, which has trouble resolving all of the impossible subplots it has created for itself. But those issues scarcely mattered at the film’s release: Le sens de l’humour was the second highest-grossing French-Canadian film of 2011, coming very closely behind Starbucks (which was remade in Hollywood as Delivery Man) — another lighthearted film featuring a well-known comedian.

  • Teenagers from Outer Space (1959)

    Teenagers from Outer Space (1959)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) It’s almost mandatory to make fun of Teenagers from Outer Space. After all, laughter is a response to trauma, and this is a truly wretched film from a technical point of view: bad special effects, worse actors, nonsensical screenplay and shoddy production values are only some of the highlights of this attempt to create an alien-invasion film out of a woefully inadequate budget and jack-of-all-trade involvement of multi-multi-multi-hyphenate filmmaker Tom Graeff. And the result is rather endearing in its ineptness — there’s something about how over-the-top clumsy the film is that’s almost disarming. Many others agree—the film was a featured viewing for MST3K, and its passage in the public domain led it to be propagated everywhere—including within the Destroy all Humans videogame, where it was appropriately displayed as a drive-in movie. It may not be a glorious legacy, but it is a legacy — what other 1959 film produced for a five-figure budget do you remember as of 2021?

  • The Invisible Boy (1957)

    The Invisible Boy (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Hollywood history is littered with projects that beg explanations as to how they came to be. This is particularly true in the Science Fiction genre, whose subtleties are often downplayed or ignored by those who think the genre is an excuse to do whatever they want without rigour. (True practitioners of SF know that the genre derives its power from following some demanding rules, but I digress.)  So it is that The Invisible Boy is a particularly wretched example of 1950s Science Fiction in which various buzzwords were thrown together without much care toward plausibility. Director Herman Hoffman executes the material with competence, but the script itself is a jumble. Here, a lonely boy sits down at a supercomputer, is gifted with superintelligence, builds a robot (Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet, sent back in time to the 1960s), flies on a kite, is turned invisible and discovers that the supercomputer is plotting world domination. No, it’s not a comedy. What’s most remarkable is the inclusion of an increasingly dark AI plot within a kid’s film. None of it makes any sense, but at a mirror into the techno-fears of 1957, The Invisible Boy pretty much suggests that very little has changed more than sixty years later. I’m frankly not sure I’d recommend the film for casual viewing, though — it may be fascinating to SF and science historians, but an ordeal otherwise.

  • Under the Scares (2010)

    Under the Scares (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Are you thinking about making a horror film? Don’t. No, don’t let ever-cheaper digital production means convince you otherwise. Don’t let a long history of cheap horror films striking box-office gold tempt you. Don’t think that a passion for the genre is in any way a palliative for a lack of knowledge or experience in filmmaking. And if you need another kick in the pants to convince you, have a look at Under the Scares to dissuade you. The irony, obviously, is that this is a documentary film meant to inspire horror filmmakers: writer-director Steve Villeneuve (who had and has since worked in Canadian horror) goes around interviewing low-budget horror luminaries, gathering hard-won lessons and providing tips for anyone intending to follow in their footsteps. What I liked best about the film is that it’s remarkably candid about how hard it is to make a low-budget film. It goes into near-excruciating detail about what awaits budding directors — lack of budget, flaky cast and crew, indifferent distributors, muddy sound, and overexposed market among them. Think of the film as providing tough-love therapy to an audience that could use a bit of discouragement. If ever, despite what Under the Scares has to say, you decide to still go forward… congratulations, you just passed the test.

  • Child’s Play (1972)

    Child’s Play (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2021) A decade and a half before Chucky’s introduction, there was a Child’s Play movie that had nothing to do with killer dolls, and everything to do with… hmmm, that’s actually a good question: What is Child’s Play about? It’s clearly about a boarding school for boys in which two senior teachers (James Mason as the hated one, Robert Preston as the loved one) have it out for each other. It’s also certainly about mysterious escalating events in which the hated teacher is tormented and maybe the loved one has something to do with it. But while it initially appears to maybe involve the supernatural, the ending apparently tells us that it’s not — but director Sydney Lumet maintains the ambiguity as if even he hadn’t made up his mind. Almost no one escapes from Child’s Play with their dignities intact: this is often derided as Lumet’s worst film (which isn’t that much of a dishonour considering the rest of his filmography), but he does manage to imbue something of an atmosphere by exploiting the dark gloominess of a boarding school and amplifying it with kids who clearly aren’t all right. Mason is clearly the least-disappointing one here, imbuing his character with his usual, polished blend of dignity and menace. Preston merely does OK with the role he’s given and the rest of the players are rather inconsequential. (Beau Bridges is just… there in comparison to the two veteran actors.)  In a historical context, Child’s Play feels like an attempt to ride the paranormal possession train launched by Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen, except without the genre familiarity to do anything with that intention. Which isn’t outlandish, considering that the film is adapted from a Broadway play and Broadway playwrights have seldom been acknowledged as being particularly comfortable with paranormal horror.

  • Extinction (2015)

    Extinction (2015)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2021) Let’s face facts: I have watched too many zombie movies. They don’t surprise me any more, they don’t interest me any more, they don’t even make me happy any more. Their painfully generic nature is made worse by dozens of unimaginative filmmakers simply doing more of the same without any self-awareness or wit. At a first glance, Extinction does seem to offer something different, with a glacial northern setting made of gray-blue snow and ice. While purists will argue that zombies, absent heat-generating mechanisms, would simply freeze solid in the winter, the pragmatist in me knows that this kind of logic holds no sway in horror screenwriters’ brains — they want snow zombies and they will get snow zombies. So, Extinction’s other “invention” is a different kind of not-quite-undead zombie led by sound rather than sight. But again: This changes nothing. This is still a post-apocalyptic tale of a small community of survivors being attacked by zombies, killing many of them but being nearly wiped out along the way and this is somehow portrayed as a victory despite the ever-dwindling number of humans kicking around. It’s the same old thing with a not-so-fresh coat of white paint, and I’ve had my fill of it. Writer-director Miguel Ángel Vivas can’t do much that’s either new or effective here: even the attempt at characterization comes across as slowing down the film. I wish I could use Extinction as an excuse to let go of zombie films and never look back, but who am I kidding: I’ll still watch more of them and hope for the best.

  • Salaam Bombay! (1988)

    Salaam Bombay! (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Part of film education is going through good movies that you don’t like, and that’s a lot how I feel about Salaam Bombay! Despite its cheerful title and sun-drenched cinematography, not a whole lot about this film is fun or uplifting. It’s all about kids struggling to survive on the streets of the Indian metropolis, turning to crime and debauchery in order to scrounge the bare necessities of life. Clearly influenced by a neo-realistic approach, it’s utterly unsentimental in how it presents its characters and where it ends up. Salaam Bombay! was the debut feature film for writer-director Mira Nair and it’s an incredibly self-assured film — clearly in the tradition of earlier works of Indian neorealism, but distinctively hers as well. Still, I would be going too far by suggesting that I enjoyed watching it: I’m no big fan of neorealism in the first place, and the unrelenting grimness of the plot didn’t help. But I have this vaguely heretical notion that I don’t have to like a film to recognize its quality, and while Salaam Bombay! will never feature on any of my own lists of favourite films, it’s easy to understand how and why it was critically acclaimed back then, and why it’s still very highly regarded today.