Reviews

  • Kaijû daisensô [Invasion of the Astro-Monster] (1965)

    Kaijû daisensô [Invasion of the Astro-Monster] (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) I’m not really a big fan of classic Japanese kaiju films: a little goes a long way on these things. But they’re fun to revisit once in a while, and the appeal of the later entries of the Toho filmography isn’t so much the tone (which steadily declines toward kid-friendly plotting), but the colour cinematography, the increasingly large menagerie of monsters, and the increasingly demented plotting that builds upon every dumb thing in the series to lead to some seriously crazy material later on. In Invasion of the Astro-Monster, for instance, we have aliens coming to Earth to borrow monsters for help against their own problems, then mind-controlling the monsters to attack Earth after having themselves a good laugh at the expense of the earthlings’ gullibility. The crazy plot, of course, doesn’t make much of a difference when director Ishirō Honda gets down to those scenes justifying the existence of the film: the building-stomping sequences featuring the man in the suit. Owing to budget and production speed issues, the effects here are inconsistent — sometime recycled from earlier films, sometimes made on the cheap, sometime innovating with bigger stomping feet and more detailed miniatures. Alas, this was also the film in which Godzilla did a victory dance, clearly marking the series’ intention to go for much younger and less sophisticated audiences. None of this really makes me look any more fondly on the Toho kaiju films—but it does make Invasion of the Astro-Monster an interesting-enough film to watch—although jumping all around the series chronology in my viewing order isn’t doing me any favours.

  • Cameraperson (2016)

    Cameraperson (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) There are a few schools of thought about documentary filmmaking, and one topic that gets brought up is the role of the narrator — many documentaries eschew explicit narration, preferring the images, talking heads and documentary footage make a stronger case than a narrator ever could. It sometimes works… but not always. As a professional documentary cinematographer (one whose images you probably saw in acclaimed films such as Citizenfour and Captain Mike Across America), you can expect Kirsten Johnson to place the raw image above all, and that’s indeed the approach she takes in Cameraperson, digging through years of footage to assemble what’s described as a “autobiographical collage.”  The point here is to present both a scrapbook of experiences, a meditation on being the person holding the camera, an essay on the relationship between filmmakers and film subjects, and plenty of other things in-between. The price to pay, however, is a near-complete lack of guideposts. Absent any narration, or even hints as to why footage is included and why it’s placed at that specific point in the film’s running time, Cameraperson leans heavily on the “make up your own meaning” school of film-viewing, often to the point of infuriation. There are highlights and set-pieces, but the film flies across countries and eras and personal meaning, sometimes presenting Johnson’s life and other times the footage she shot for other filmmakers. It’s not a film made for casual viewing — you have to invest some energy trying to figure it out, and even then, you’ll never be sure to have the intended take, for there is no intended take. As such, it’s a documentary film that requires a change of pace from how we usually see other documentaries, usually so intent on making their points that they leave nothing to chance or interpretation. I can’t say I liked Cameraperson all that much — it often feels like a whirlwind of sequences with no grounding, and that’s not necessarily my forte. But it does eventually (perhaps too late) emerge as something interesting in its own distinct fashion, leading us to ask questions about the very nature of documentaries and what the camera shows or chooses not to show.

  • Movie Crazy (1932)

    Movie Crazy (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Even a second-tier Harold Lloyd comedy is still a worthwhile watch, and while Movie Crazy never gets the attention that Lloyd’s silent classics do, it’s probably the best of his sound movies, and it offers a fascinating look at circa-1930 filmmaking to boot. The plot, or rather the excuse on which to hang the comic sequences, is all about a young man coming to Hollywood to seek fame and fortune. But while that plot would serve for countless 1930s comedies, only Lloyd could orchestrate some of the set-pieces here. Highlights here include disrupting a movie set and studio offices, destroying a convertible car’s retracting top, a screen test that plays around with early-sound technology and, in the film’s highlight, wreaking absolute havoc at a formal event with a magician’s suit. For film history buffs, a supplemental attraction is in offering a generous look (even if fictionalized) at how Hollywood sets worked by the early 1930s. But the jokes are the point, as always, with Lloyd’s affable personality building up a considerable reservoir of trust and likability. Movie Crazy may not be among his best, but it offers an interesting portrait of the artist trying to remain relevant in an industry that had moved away from the silent films, where he was used to full control of visual comedy.

  • Love on Repeat aka Stuck out of love (2019)

    Love on Repeat aka Stuck out of love (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) Time loop movies have the potential to be transcendental, funny, horrifying or uplifting. But they can also be used as engines for lower-common denominator movies like Love on Repeat. Produced within the segment of the film industry that cranks out bland romantic comedies for TV channels, this is low-end low-effort low-budget moviemaking at its basest. The actors really aren’t the best, the direction is utilitarian, the staging is bland and once you get over the time-loop thing, its biggest claim to originality is to take place in nondescript Gunthrie, Oklahoma. But, of course, you can’t avoid the time-loop thing as it describes how a young woman feeling aimless in her life, job and relationship gets to relive the same day over and over again. We know what she’s going to get out of it when she finds true love and contentment, but the film will rerun through the same day for a while until she gets it. On most aspects, director Peter Foldy’s Love on Repeat is a clearly substandard affair — there’s nothing profound or witty here, nothing all that memorable nor surprising either. (You can watch the trailer and get most of it, including the ending we’ve been expecting.)  Still, when you grade it on a curve and compare it to other movies made for Lifetime, Love on Repeat does look a lot better. It’s more interesting on a purely entertainment level than most of the even-blander, even-more-nondescript romcoms in that space, and the lead actors (Jen Lilley and Andrew Lawrence) are good enough to win us over by the end. Still, don’t go in there expecting much — on an absolute scale, it barely struggles to reach mediocrity.

  • Harlan County U.S.A. (1976)

    Harlan County U.S.A. (1976)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) I’m a happily unionized worker and it bothers me that unions have become marginalized in North American society — surely it’s not that difficult to figure out that labour and owners have opposing objectives, and that organized labour is an essential counterweight to management power. I strongly suspect that part of the reason why union membership trends downward is that the great labour victories of the past have largely been forgotten and their gains taken for granted. In this light, documentaries such as Harlan County U.S.A. remain just as important now than upon release, as filmmaker Barbara Kopple documents an ongoing miners’ strike in Kentucky. It’s a rough affair — not only does the strike carry on for months, depriving miners of income, but the company hired goons to roughen up both the miners and the documentary crew. Guns are seen, gunshots are heard and eventually a miner is shot and dies. This is all presented cinema-vérité style, with archival footage and interviews within the community to provide additional context. The result is very effective, and documents a past struggle that’s far more universal than being a strike at a specific mine. Harlan County U.S.A. remains a landmark even today — it won an Oscar upon release, was added to the National Film Archive in 2010 and continues to resonate through a slick Criterion edition. The images may be raw and rough, but the message still carries through.

  • I Am Alfred Hitchcock (2021)

    I Am Alfred Hitchcock (2021)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) It’s nothing short of fascinating to see the public discourse on Alfred Hitchcock shifting in real time. His place among the great cinema auteurs is unquestionable, but recent years have seen a slew of allegations (some of them admittedly disputable) about his behaviour, allegations that do appear to confirm tendencies, rumours, quotes and outright visual evidence from one film to another. Hitchcock was, to put it simply, not so admirable on set or in dealing with his leading actresses — immensely controlling, outright remaking actresses into his portrait of an ideal woman, maybe even (if we’re to believe the worst accounts) an outright sexual abuser. It adds a lot to his portrait to know about these things, especially in an era where past behaviour is finally recognized as unacceptable and not just boys-of-the-time material. This being said, don’t expect such a radical re-imagining of Hitchcock in I Am Alfred Hitchcock. As with other films in the “I Am” series of documentaries, this one is largely sympathetic to its subject during its fast-forward view of his life and career that polishes the legend. While there is some acknowledgement of his issues, much of the film is an appreciation from directors, actors, relatives, and commentators (including TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz). Hitchcock’s penchant for self-promotion gets quite a mention, but the focus is often on his best-known films. The result is very much an introduction to the character — there’s not a lot of depth here, although it’s slightly more critical than other films of the series about more recent figures where friends and family take centre-stage. Hitchcock is long dead, his relatives aren’t numerous and the historical perspective allows for more distance. Still, if you want more, you will have to look elsewhere — and if you want the dirt, you’ll have to go back to the salacious The Girl (2012) in which Hitchcock is portrayed as a stalker-movie villain.

  • Boy Meets Girl (1938)

    Boy Meets Girl (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) I have a fondness for Hollywood movies satirizing Hollywood, but the ones from the 1930s will always have a special place in my heart — Hollywood was still giddy about itself back then, and a bunch of urbane screenwriters were still having fun selling the Dream Factory to the rest of America. Boy Meets Girl (while not strictly meeting the definition of Hollywood-spoofing-Hollywood, being an adaptation of a Broadway play) is one of the better such films of the era, thanks to its witty dialogue, jaded-but-not-cynical approach and having James Cagney in the lead role. Our two protagonists are screenwriters trying to keep their studio job while helping out a pregnant woman, and the film’s stage-bound origins can best be deduced by the number of sequences set in the studio executive’s office. The chaotic humour here is as fast as Cagney’s ability to rattle off dialogue, and the best moments of the film are impromptu improv sessions in which Cagney and his writing partner (Pat O’Brien, gamely keeping up) create new—if repetitive—variations on the old “boy meets girl” story. It’s all in good fun, with a fake over-the-top trailer clearly showing the film’s satirical bend. Marie Wilson is nothing short of adorable as the pregnant young woman that the protagonists are trying to help — and, more importantly, the beacon of sanity that makes the manic energy of the rest of the film mean something. Even acknowledging that I’m an easy audience for this kind of material, Boy Meets Girl is still a lot of fun to watch.

  • S.O.B. (1981)

    S.O.B. (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) I’m not saying that Hollywood is a terrible place, but I am saying that you don’t see signers writing diss songs about their record labels, and you don’t see authors write tell-all novels (much) about the publishing world. But movies from writers and directors complaining about Hollywood? Ho boy, I hope you’ve got a week of free time because they keep piling up. One semi-classic case in point is Blake Edwards’ S.O.B., which follows a movie producer (played by Richard Mulligan) left suicidal by a spectacular flop. His comeback solution is to reshoot his ailing film as a soft-core musical featuring his glamorous wife in the nude. The meta-joke here is that he is based on Edwards, and the actress is played by Julie Andrews, who was Edwards’ wife and also had a squeaky-clean image. When she does appear nude, it’s as much a shock for audiences as for the film’s characters. S.O.B. is surprisingly mean-spirited, and it’s a measure of how much it’s intended as an insider’s critique that it focuses on a producer rather than the more public-facing actors or directors. Hollywood here is depicted as an uncaring, mercenary community of back-stabbers who don’t really care about others except for their success. It’s biting, which is made even worse by the matter-of-fact way in which it’s portrayed. The film got very mixed reviews upon release (with its script nominated for both an Oscar and a Razzie), but has aged quite well as a period piece that still has something to say. While not outright funny throughout, S.O.B. is decently amusing and finds its place somewhere alongside The Player and many other examples of Hollywood acidly commenting upon itself.

  • The Feminine Touch (1941)

    The Feminine Touch (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) One of my favourite kinds of comedy, especially in the Classic Hollywood era, if when the entire premise of the film causes characters to act in counter-natural ways. The Feminine Touch has that as a driving principle: the idea that an academic working on a book about jealousy would be blithely unable to be jealous, even despite ample provocations from his wife. The story does get more complex when other characters are introduced with non-mutual infatuations for other characters. Notable players here include Don Ameche as a comic/romantic lead playing the academic author, Rosalind Russell as his scheming wife trying to get a reaction out of him, Van Heflin as a romantic pretender, and Kay Francis as the fourth point in this romantic quadrangle. While The Feminine Touch is more charming and amusing than outright funny, it does culminate into a rather spectacular scuffle between the leads, and that’s a nice capper to an entertaining film. There’s a pretty good bit involving Van Heflin sporting an uncharacteristic beard and wolfish attitude. The material here is better than usual for a romantic comedy, and if you’re a fan of any of those actors (if not all four of them, because this is a seriously good cast), then The Feminine Touch is a can’t miss.

  • Behind Office Doors (1931)

    Behind Office Doors (1931)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) So, what did happen Behind Office Doors in the early 1930s? Unsurprisingly, more or less the same as ninety years later, as this Pre-Code drama follows the story of a competent woman letting a man take all the credit for her work, in-between some workplace hanky-panky, quite a bit of unreciprocated lust and succession shenanigans — the office environment of the 1930s being surprisingly understandable to 2020s denizens. Mary Astor stars as the protagonist of the tale and bears the brunt of the systemic sexism of the time — albeit not without a fight and earning considerable sympathy from audiences. There’s a fascinating dichotomy at play in Behind Office Doors (as in many of the 1930s films trying to discuss inequality between the sexes): a clear acknowledgement that this is wrong for the woman, on the one hand, while fully playing into the inevitability of it happening and very little consequence for those men who take advantage of that system (usually romantically or should I say, “romantically”). So, if you’re expecting our female lead to become the company’s girl boss in the end, temper your expectations — she gets the man who gets the company, and that’s the extent of the final triumph. Astor is good, but the other actors (including the male leads) are stuck in dull, unlikable characters. The Pre-Code nature of the film is elusive — the dialogue is slightly spicier, and while the film does get to acknowledge the loutishness of the males, it doesn’t really demonstrate it. Behind Office Doors is interesting if your expectations are in check, but it’s not really a shining beacon of Pre-Code romantic comedy.

  • The Brothers Rico (1957)

    The Brothers Rico (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) As the 1940s moved into the 1950s, there was a not-so-subtle shift in film noir — the glumness of the post-WW2 years was slowly being replaced by an awareness of the pervasiveness of organized crime. High-profile congressional investigations created a mythology of gangsters that was quickly capitalized upon by Hollywood. That’s how film noir shifted slightly from smoking private investigators looking into cases of murder that revealed corruption, to a variety of tales involving the mob versus ordinary citizens. In more outlying cases, noir became cinema-verité inspired by real events, with people tut-tutting how crime did not pay. The Brothers Rico feels as if it’s at the junction between noir and crime thrillers — it’s about a retired mob accountant helping his brother get out of the country all the while avoiding going back to a life of crime as he tries to adopt a child. Director Phil Karlson wasn’t a great stylist, but he could move plot pieces with efficiency and, thanks to him, the film works its way to a slow boil that helps explain the interventionist arc of the protagonist. The clearest difference between the chosen tone of this family-versus-mob thriller versus more typical film noir is found in the somewhat upbeat conclusion, in which the protagonist is allowed to go back to a normal life after dipping back into illicit activities. Top-tier noirs are known for the ineluctable nature of fate, but The Brothers Rico plays it audience-friendly. Not a complaint — but it explains why The Brothers Rico, while enjoyable, is not often mentioned as part of the classics.

  • Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)

    Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) It’s amusing that the then-modern Dracula A.D. 1972 is now retro-dated even in its title, but let’s not underestimate both the concept of letting Dracula loose in then-hip times, and the fun of being able to travel back to the 1970s thanks to a film meant to be cutting-edge. The intention from Hammer Studios was to update their series of Dracula movies by moving it to the present and reboot the franchise. It sort-of-worked in that Dracula (Christopher Lee) here infamously meets hippies, and that it helped launch another film in Hammer’s Dracula series: The Satanic Rites of Dracula. Alas, that next film ended up being the nail in the series. But time has generally been kind to Dracula A.D. 1972: What was then a cash-grabbing novelty courting young viewers is now about as exotic as a Victorian-era Hammer horror movie, the kind of film that would feel like a period homage if it was done today. It’s still very basic when it comes to plot — don’t expect much here in terms of filmmaking quality or story refinements. Nearly all of its interest comes from the early-1970s atmosphere and the dislocation of seeing a Victorian monster rampaging through post-Swinging Sixties London. But that’s more than good enough.

  • Some Came Running (1958)

    Some Came Running (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) For a rather low-key drama, it’s interesting to see how often Some Came Running comes up in classic film discussions. The facts are that this is a film directed by Vincente Minelli and adapted from a doorstop best-selling novel, that it starred Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine, that good chunks of it were shot on location in a small middle-America town and that it was an example of widescreen colour cinematography at a time when Hollywood dramas usually went for black-and-white Academy ratio. That last factor does help explain the film’s longevity, as it remains more accessible on modern widescreen colour displays than many of its contemporaries. The story is small-potato stuff, as a writer-turned-veteran (Sinatra) returns to his hometown after a long absence, with a loose woman (MacLaine) in tow, and reunites with his brother (Arthur Kennedy), later befriending a likable gambler (Martin). While the original novel is reportedly 1,200 pages long, this stripped-down adaptation fits everything in slightly more than two hours and seems almost lackadaisical in its drive to the ending. But a host of reasons explain why the film stuck in the popular imagination. For one thing, it got five Academy Award nominations (including MacLaine’s first). It was the first screen pairing of Sinatra and Martin, prefiguring the Brat Pack series of movies they’d do together. Its location shooting comes complete with wild tales of fans mobbing Sinatra, wild nights of partying with Martin, and made such an impression that you can still tour Madison, Indiana to see the shooting locations. Minelli’s widescreen colour direction was much admired among fellow directors. None of this really improves the middle-of-the-road impression left by Some Came Running, but sometimes it’s instructive to realize why a film endures… especially if it doesn’t have to do with its quality.

    (Second viewing, On Cable TV, August 2021) It’s almost a subgenre of American cinema: the small-town drama –usually adapted from a novel– in which a prodigal son returns after some time spent away, usually in the military or in a big city that has changed him forever, and how he realizes he can’t come back home. (On the flip side, you have the Hallmark romantic Christmas comedy in which the prodigal daughter returns home, rekindles a past romance with a local hunk, and realizes she can stay home forever.)  Some Came Running is both exemplary and distinctive in how it clearly plays with the building blocks of the genre, but brings a few unusual things along – such as having Shirley MacLaine as a floozy accompanying the protagonist, or how the protagonist rolls up the military aspect, the writerly aspect and the spent-time-in-a-big-city aspect into one character. Frank Sinatra is quite good in the lead role, with a smaller-than-expected part for fellow rat-packer Tony Martin. The small-town aspect is convincingly portrayed (TCM has a lovely companion piece detailing the mayhem caused when Sinatra and Martin stopped into Madison, Indiana for a few weeks of shooting), but the film itself often feels like a collage of elements not necessarily fitting together: by the time even local gangsters get involved, it’s as if the narrative has grown bored with the whole “can’t come home again” theme and reached for more exciting genre elements as trick shots. Some Came Running is watchable without being particularly memorable, but then again, it’s in good company in its subgenre.

  • La vie d’Adèle [Blue is the Warmest Color] (2013)

    La vie d’Adèle [Blue is the Warmest Color] (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, May 2021) I did try to watch La vie d’Adèle a few years ago, lured in by the promise of an award-winning movie that also included significant adult content. Alas, I couldn’t make it to the end — even the lure of plentiful sex and nudity couldn’t compensate for the endless three-hour running time and deathly slow pacing. Writer-director Abdellatif Kechiche’s film, adapted from a French graphic novel, follows a young woman through tumultuous years at the end of her teenage years and the beginning of her twenties. It’s largely a story about her relationship with another woman, but not entirely — as the running time suggests, there’s plenty of room for tangents and details, even if the overall plot complexity of La vie d’Adèle could have comfortably fit in half its running time. Much was made of the film’s incredibly graphic lesbian scenes, but in the context of the film, they play as yet another boring directorial indulgence that keeps the narrative standing still. Considering that this is not the first Kechiche film that I bounced off from (I couldn’t make it very long in Vénus noire, another interminable drama far less interesting than its premise), it’s fair to say that he’s working on a kind of cinema that’s not to my liking in general: a kind of naturalistic, observant, mediative drama that I find trivial in most cases and actively irritating in the worst. I’ll grant that he’s clearly no amateur—he knows what he’s doing, and gets his desired effects—if nothing else, the performances he gets from Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos are exceptional. But goodness gracious is La vie d’Adèle boring. I made it to the end thanks to a liberal use of a second screen, and I’m not eager to come anywhere close to it ever again.

  • The Return (2020)

    The Return (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2021) At first, The Return looks like a fairly traditional haunted-house thing — as a young man returns to his childhood home to clean it out after his father’s death and bizarre things start happening to him and the two women who accompany him (one is his girlfriend; you won’t be surprised to learn that the other wants to be. ). There’s plenty of spookiness to go around, and if the scary beats aren’t exactly new, writer-director B J Verot makes decent use of a small budget in creating an atmosphere. Then there’s the last-act genre shift into Science Fiction (which can be safely predicted by the fact that the protagonist is brilliant, his parents were scientists and there’s a whiteboard filled with equations earlier in the film) that either feels daring or redundant depending on your tolerance for genre-blending. It’s not quite a case of genre rug-pulling considering that the SF bits are announced well in advance, and the horror intention of The Return doesn’t really let up. Still, it does give an impression of a film that blends its elements to puree without considering if they actually go well together. There’s a more serious charge to be made about the film’s languid pacing that pushes back nearly everything interesting in the last act (perhaps out of a misguided attempt to keep the genre twist for as long as possible). The bigger problem with a Science Fictional twist is that it opens up the story into possibilities that seem under-exploited. If you’re going to throw time travel in your haunted house story (and The Return is far from the first to go there), then the possibilities of the story multiply, and so do the promising story points left unused. While The Return does have a slight low-budget horror appeal, it’s ultimately disappointing in how it chooses to develop its early moments. Not terrible, but not that good and ultimately a bit bland because of its slowness, despite an unusual side jump into SF.