Reviews

  • Leslie Caron: The Reluctant Star (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Documentaries starring elderly actors or filmmakers reflecting on their careers are essentially a subgenre by now, and they have to be approached with very specific expectations. Forget about getting the full story, let alone the true story: At their ages, with their reputations, stars sitting down to talk about their careers want a monologue rather than an interview. They will present semi-fictional takes on their lives and careers, impose later conclusions on their earlier actions and generally come out of it having delivered a performance about themselves. Leslie Caron is no exception, as her rather chaotic career is described throughout The Reluctant Star. Going between her native France, Hollywood and London, she never regained the superstardom of her first few years (it’s hard to top early years featuring An American in Paris and Gigi), but says she was happy about that… hence the title. You have to take those statements with a grain of salt, though, as she expresses frustration at being unable to act in more French films. But even as a hagiography, it’s still an interesting portrait. Caron had a very different career than her contemporaries, finding a living through lower-profile dramatic roles in three moviemaking centres but never pursuing or recapturing early stardom. She still comes across as a lively, wise presence with much to say. It’s amusing to see some of my favourite films of hers not getting much attention (namely Fanny and Father Goose), and some of her own favourites being far less known to the general public. In the end, authorized hagiography or not, it’s just a delight for The Reluctant Star to have captured her thoughts. Let print biographers tackle the inner workings of her psychology and the less-admirable aspects of her life, if any—here she describes herself in her own words, and that’s interesting enough.

  • Angel and the Badman (1947)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I am not a John Wayne fan, so I’m seeing his films more out of cinematic history duty than anything else. Angel and the Badman is best known for three very different things these days. First: it marked Wayne’s first film as a producer, meaning that we can get a better idea here of what he really wanted to do, or what he really wanted to play. Second: The film is in the public domain, which means that you can watch it from its Wikipedia page and so it remains more popular than similar westerns due to its wide availability. The third aspect is the most interesting. Rather than make a bog-standard western with the expected gunfights and horse chases, Wayne here plays in a far less action-driven, more romantic kind of western. The story of a wounded gunfighter slowly being nursed back to health by two dedicated women, Angel and the Badman doesn’t feel like a standard western and that very much works to its advantage. While Wayne doesn’t make much of a romantic protagonist (admittedly a major point against the film), it does offer a change of pace from his usual characters… or, rather, as much of a change as possible with Wayne’s limited range. Given the limitations of the lead actor, that makes Angel and the Badman more of an interesting film than a good one. But I’ll take it—My opinion of Wayne’s persona being as low as it is, anything even slightly different is usually a step up.

  • Eddie Murphy: Raw (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, February 2022) Perhaps the most striking moments of stand-up comedy concert film Eddie Murphy: Raw aren’t the comic bits themselves, but the atmosphere surrounding them. Unlike the vast majority of stand-up performances captured on video, Eddie Murphy was a superstar when he toured and shot the film. At the time, he was America’s best-known comedian by virtue of his SNL stint, well-received albums and a dynamite movie career. As a result, Raw blurs the lines between a concert movie and a recording of a comic performance. The vast, vast audience surrounding Murphy and laughing at once is a strikingly different one than the small-venue crowds at most stand-up recordings. You can feel Murphy revelling in his status as a megastar. While I’m not that fond of the cold-open scripted sketch that begins the film, the moments that follow establish, through shots of crowds and fawning fan comments (“I can’t wait to see him in those leather pants!”), just how big Murphy was at the time, and his rock-star status before he even starts his set. Fortunately, much of what follows rises up to his expected standard. I’m not that fond of the meandering last third of the film, but his material on relationships remains cutting and funny, while the moments in which he addresses his fame offer a glimpse at a very different lifestyle. The only thing funnier than the film itself is the experience of watching it as broadcast on BET—since the channel bleeps out profanity and Raw was, at the time of its release, the film containing the most profanity, much of the film’s broadcast time is one bleep after another, with some entire sentences being bleeped out at times. (Don’t worry—the nature of profanity being what it is, there’s no loss of meaning here.)  Eddie Murphy: Raw often gets mentioned in film histories for valid reasons—it remains the highest-grossing stand-up comedy concert film even made (a record unlikely to ever be broken), and an early film by Robert Townsend (director) and a few Wayans brothers (writers and producers). But even for audiences unaware of the historical context, it remains a striking portrait of a comedian at the very top of his profession, and playing to that status.

  • Cry, the Beloved Country (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I’ve been spending some time this February digging into Black Film History—Cable TV channels tacitly programmed black films all month long, and while I had a good grasp at the essentials (I also wrote an essay on the topic during the month), it was an occasion to rediscover the more obscure ones. One notable subcategory I was able to discover are the fairly rare movies featuring black leads during the 1950s—a time with few notable performers, and even fewer films featuring them in roles with deep characterization. Cry, the Beloved Country (from British producer-director Zoltan Korda, brother of naturalized British movie mogul-propagandist Alexander Korda) is a noteworthy footnote in that both lead roles are played by black actors, and no less than Canada Lee and Sidney Poitier. There’s a catch, though: the film had to go overseas to find a subject matter that would allow such a thing. Looking erringly prescient, it heads over to South Africa to talk about apartheid, looking very early on about the impact of such a policy on both white and black characters. The production history of the film is stomach-churning in itself—given apartheid, both lead actors had to pretend to the authorities that they were the director’s indentured servants to be admitted in the country, where they shot the film in near-guerilla conditions. It’s not an easy of a fun film to watch: the subject matter is difficult, and Korda doesn’t go for feel-good material. But it’s an amazing film in its own right—the last of Lee’s career, and one of Poitier’s first—thereby acting as a passing of the torch. Poitier was a self-assured presence even at that stage of his career, and there’s considerable interest watching him this early. I can’t say that I liked Cry, the Beloved Country, but it earns a spot in my version of Black Film History—and isn’t it the point to celebrate such successes?

  • George Washington Slept Here (1942)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) It’s tempting to compare George Washington Slept Here with Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House. Both films, after all, are Classic Hollywood comedies about an urbanite (played by an actor with significant comic credentials) who moves to the country and experiences numerous difficulties trying to achieve his rural dream. But the differences are obvious early on: Jack Benny is no Cary Grant, and his first scene, in which he verbally harangues his black servant, is not an endearing one at all. Spending much of the film being annoyed at the protagonist (who spends his time complaining about everything, and barely seems to like his wife) is no way to enjoy a film, and it takes just about everything—most notably a spirited turn by Charles Coburn as a secretly-destitute uncle—not to shut down the whole thing. Now, I strongly suspect that I don’t know enough about Benny’s persona to be sympathetic to it: seen cold, he just seems like a miserable, bigoted, hateful miser and that’s a very poor foundation for any comedy. George Washington Slept Here does have a few chuckles (plus a lovely Ann Sheridan), but it never quite escapes the bad first impression left by its star, nor the far better memories of the admittedly flawed Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.

  • Dawn of the Mummy (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, February 2022) Let me be clear and unrepentant when I say that I have no objection whatsoever to nudity in movies aimed at adults—sometimes, it’s the only element saving the film from loathing and dismissal. So, in the opening moments of Dawn of the Mummy, when an American photographer shows up in the Egyptian desert with two models eager to bare it all (although no farther than a bikini), you might as well enjoy it because it’s all downhill from there. After the usual shenanigans about ancient curses and such, the film takes a turn toward mummies behaving like zombies, some extreme gore and plenty of the usual monster movie scenes. Given this, the cute models and the Egyptian setting are all that distinguish writer-director Frank Agrama’s Dawn of the Mummy from many other Italian-style zombie films of the early 1980s. Considering that I happen to loathe that subgenre, well—desert landscapes and brief flashes of partial nudity will have to do as small compensation for having to sit through this.

  • The Miseducation of Bindu (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I’m not a big fan of comedies where the main joke appears to be humiliating the protagonist throughout the entire running time, so there are plenty of moments in The Miseducation of Bindu in which I just felt sympathy for the character and loathing for the film. Megan Suri delivers a winning performance as the titular Bindu, a bright young woman of Indian ethnicity who, when forced to attend an American high school and being bullied for being different, immediately sets out to find a way to get out of there. As the film opens, she’s nearly done getting the credits to stop attending: the only thing stopping her is a mandatory Spanish test. She speaks the language all right (take it for granted that she’s ridiculously smarter than anyone else)—it’s the test fee that’s stopping her. Compressing most of the film’s action on a single day in high school, where she must hustle to raise the money to get out of there, is a smart decision—tarnished somewhat by the third act that spills over a few weeks later. Much of the so-called plotting is a conga line of embarrassing moments with her bullies, friends, family and colourful figures that populate her school. Writer-director Prarthana Mohan tries to walk a line between comedy and drama but doesn’t always know on which side to go, and the result is roughly three-quarter of the way there. The clever material and exuberant execution are often undermined by intensely predictable material (such as the heroine’s science-class humiliation, seen -er—coming far in advance) some weird missteps, underdeveloped characters and moments, as well as some expeditious laziness that undercuts the smarter bits of the result. I did like the final result and its feel-good conclusion, but The Miseducation of Bindu shows many signs of having been undercooked or mishandled at the script stage: another rewrite may have strengthened the structure, streamlined some bumps, expanded some telling details and provided more closure while keeping the film’s space/time unity.

  • Valley of the Dolls (1967)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) In a classic case of a sequel overshadowing its predecessor, I went into Valley of the Dolls with distant but fond memories of the over-the-top pastiche that is Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Well, it turns out that screenwriter Roger Ebert was on to something when he wrote the satirical sequel, because this film adaptation of Jacqueline Susann’s trashy 1966 novel is more incompetent than enjoyable. Valley of the Dolls attempts to be a dark mirror to all of those Hollywood fairy-tale films in which a small-town woman travels to Hollywood and becomes a star. Here, we have three young women destroyed by the pressures of chasing celebrity, turning to drugs (the titular “dolls”), bad men and flashy hedonism in an attempt to express the Susann’s glum dissatisfaction. It’s important to note the release year—1967, a turning point in film history when Classic Hollywood retired and New Hollywood took over, with its more realist approach but with the drunken abandon of a moved-out teen boy who finally gets to do whatever he wants. The result is meant to be a bit slummy, but it simply doesn’t have enough skill and finesse to do justice to the material. Valley of the Dolls just feels misguided at every turn, aiming to take down the image of Classic Hollywood (another miscalculation, as it turns out that even twenty-first century audiences like the allure of Classic Hollywood) but not having the right amount of perspective to be able to do so. It wants to showcase sexual freedoms but is stuck in an old-fashioned moralistic mindset. Sharon Tate is there, but not for a long time considering that the plot is scattered over three protagonists. Valley of the Dolls is semi-interesting in the ways it gets it wrong, of course, but the result is still wrong. Watch the Ebert-scripted satirical follow-up instead—you won’t miss much from the original.

  • Madea’s Big Happy Family (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) You can feel the irony of Madea’s Big Happy Family titling very early on. Not just because happy families don’t make for good movies, but because writer-director-producer-star Tyler Perry is once again being as unsubtle about it as anyone can humanly be. As a mother receives a terminal cancer diagnosis, her attempts to tell her family about her condition are all sabotaged by unruly characters, simmering resentment, long-held secrets and cheap screenwriting tricks. Madea comes in to save the day with some tough love, but she doesn’t quite get it all right, and as the film goes through Perry’s atonal storytelling, there’s a big tragic moment to make the film come into focus. How you feel about the result will depend on your familiarity with what Perry is doing and your ability to like it even in small bits and pieces. He has his moments as a writer-director—the “Byroooooon” thing is as crude a comic device as possible, but it gets a laugh nearly every time. (Props to Lauren London for committing to such a character.) Madea’s overreach this time gets her to drive through a restaurant window, which also gets a laugh even if it’s an expected one. Perry’s theatrical background serves him well in structuring the narrative, in which tension points are gradually exposed and pressured. He also gets the atmosphere of a fractious Atlanta-area family and some decent character work from a variety of actors—including Loretta Devine as the ill-fated mother. As far as Perry movies go, Madea’s Big Happy Family is somewhere in the middle of a fairly narrow band—good if you like his material despite its flaws, but not something different enough to make converts.

  • The Best Man Holiday (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I have some admiration for the way The Best Man Holiday manages to deliver a fourteen-year-later sequel to a film that didn’t necessarily need one, navigating a tricky path between comedy and tragedy, repeating the same formula yet branching out, and showing character growth while not making it all about the events of the first film. It’s visibly a different film: the image quality is less grainy and more luminous, the male actors have much less hair, and everyone (actors and characters) clearly has more than a decade’s worth of experience under their belt. The film finds a way to get everyone back under the same roof (not always convincingly), and updates everyone on their achievements since the last film. Our protagonist writer is in a difficult situation: no longer a best-selling author, his editor is pushing him to collaborate on the biography of his about-to-retire football star friend. But since no one behaves entirely rationally in this film, this becomes one of many secrets that the film’s pressure-cooker Thanksgiving holiday will reveal. Quite a bit of the film’s structure feels artificial—not just the nonsensical elements required to get everyone together, but the triple-climax whammy—as if writer-director Malcom L. Lee didn’t want to choose between a football game triumph, a good tragic cry or a frantic birth sequence and said to himself what if I could have all three? Inevitably, this requires a few awkward transitions, tonal inconsistency, two regrettable time-skips and other contrivances. Still, it works, and largely on the strength of the actors… and the script during specific moments rather than its overall construction. The exceptional cast of the first film is back for more, and the increased maturity of the cast and crew is best seen in how a one-joke character played by Melissa de Sousa is developed sympathetically throughout the film. Otherwise, this is a film with Taye Diggs, Sanaa Lathan, Nia Long, Harold Perrinau, Terrence Howard and Regina Hall… who could ask for more? Cleverly re-using the first film’s accumulated goodwill to a significant purpose, The Best Man Holiday manages to be a sequel that pivots from the previous film to its own strengths, and delivers a buffet of entertainment in the end.

  • Darling (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I’m not usually the kind of movie reviewer who’s harsh on whether films have aged gracefully or not. Most of the time, I tend to accept them as product of their era, and I can distinguish between good intentions at the time versus what we expect as the modern standard. I can grit my teeth at the kind of low-grade racism and sexism that was Hollywood’s baseline, and know enough about filmmaking history to tolerate technical limitations all the way back to the silent movie era. Being well-intentioned counts for a lot! But if there’s one era that I have more problem processing, it’s that weird mid-1960s to early 1980s New Hollywood period… largely because it seems so intent on upsetting the status quo that it often loses itself. I had a much harder time than expected watching the British New Wave’s late entry Darling, for instance. Focused on Julie Christie’s performance as a young woman with a chronic inability to make up her mind, it’s a romantic drama that explicitly refers to earlier film eras by having the woman’s duelling older lovers played by then-veteran Dirk Bogarde and Laurence Harvey. At the same time, it desperately wants to be of its time—specifically the Swinging Sixties sweeping Great Britain at the time, loosening morals and creating new icons for a post-post-war generation. Our characters seem as aimless as it must have felt at the time—too many possibilities, too few commitments, and an intent to upset institutions that seems irresponsible in retrospect. As a result, Darling feels curiously naïve and childish today—both on a personal level with the protagonist incapable of growing up, but also in the wider social experimentation that didn’t pan out as hoped. It’s a film that, in its desperation to feel different yet its inability to settle on a way forward, feels much longer than its 127-minute duration and much more irritating than it was intended. Not every Oscar-nominated picture ages well, but Darling seems even more dated than most—not because it’s technically limited, not because it’s particularly retrograde, but because it intently proposes ideas that just feel immature generations later.

  • The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Urgh. I had a hard enough time mustering much enthusiasm for British pro-colonial ode The Charge of the Light Brigade at face value. Now that I’m reading in the film’s production history that twenty-five horses were killed as a result of its action scenes, I’ve got no sympathy left. Part of a particularly irritating subgenre of 1930s Hollywood that took up grandiose adventures of British colonialism as a pretext for spectacle (Gunga-Din is particularly difficult to digest), this is a film that should otherwise be a romp to watch. It’s directed by Michael Curtiz! It stars Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland! It’s got David Niven in a small role! The action all climaxes during a spectacular battle sequence between the British and the Russians! And yet, and yet, and yet… I just couldn’t get into it. As a colonial of oppressed French-Canadian heritage, I’ve spent too much time delving into the ugliness of British colonialism to be all that enthusiastic about it, no matter how sanitized it is through wide Hollywood distribution. (Fun fact: In historical terms, the incident that inspired this pro-British film is widely seen as a major failure of British military leadership.) And that was before I found out about the film’s infamous place in movie history. The best thing The Charge of the Light Brigade ever did was to lead to the creation of laws regulating the welfare of animals in movie production—and a famous moment in film history during which star Flynn tried to hit director Curtiz in sheer outrage at his indifference to animal cruelty. Not that you’ll see that in the film, regrettably.

  • The Legend of Lylah Clare (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) I’m going to be very brief about The Legend of Lylah Clare because I’m so disappointed in it. Hollywood satires are right in my wheelhouse, and yet the film doesn’t work. It’s a clunker almost all of the way through, playing with Hollywood archetypes but not achieving anything along the way. It’s not really funny, it’s certainly not insightful and it’s entertaining only in seeing how a film with a big budget and even larger intentions can fail to achieve anything. You can see where and how the same elements could have been combined for a much superior result, but that’s not it—The Legend of Lylah Clare simply doesn’t work despite Kim Novak in the lead and plenty of call-backs in the details. Even for a Classic Hollywood buff, it’s a dud.

  • The Color Rose aka The Sinners (2020)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Most of the movies you’ll never see are those that fail to fulfill their potential. They’re inert, perhaps bolstered by a few good technical qualities, but otherwise singularly uninvolving compared to what they could and should have been. They don’t catch anyone’s attention, and sink away from memory and distribution channels. So it is that The Sinners, in getting interested in a clique of mean girls styling themselves after the seven deadly sins in a small religious high school, could have gone in any number of really interesting directions—some of them as wild as could be imagined. But as the dark dour tone of the first minutes suggests, it rather settles for a trite slasher thriller in which the girls are killed one after another. If you’re looking for levity or entertainment, forget it: this is all meant to be dark and rather depressing. The cinematography isn’t bad at all, especially considering the usual low budget of a Canadian horror film, but it’s all in one monotonous tone that leaves much potential untapped. The casting isn’t diverse enough to compensate for a flat screenplay that doesn’t do enough to distinguish the seven girls… or make us care about it all. By the time The Sinners unspools its final twists meant to be shocking, the best it can get is a bored shrug. First-time writer-director Courtney Paige gets a few things right, but doesn’t fulfill her potential, nor can create much excitement along the way. Too bad—there’s quite a bit of potential left on the table and the result is much duller than it should have been.

  • The Best Man (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2022) Writer-director Malcolm D. Lee seldom gets any respect—he may be Spike Lee’s cousin, but his work over the past two decades has largely been in the comedy and romance genre, and despite his strong all-black-cast films delivering copious entertainment, he flies well under the radar of most commentators. His debut film, The Best Man, does showcase him at his best—efficiently managing a great cast for an ensemble romantic comedy that is both familiar and matter-of-fact in its unconventionality. Featuring a cast of upwardly-mobile middle-class black characters, it’s a film that otherwise plays along familiar lines: long-buried secrets suddenly emerging over a short momentous period, as a book written by the best man of an imminent marriage blows open affairs and lust in a small group of friends. (As with most other movies about writers, our “novelist” character can’t imagine his way out of a short story and has to write an autobiographical novel. Why he thought this would go undetected is beyond the scope of the film’s logic.)  The story pretext may be thin, and some of the scenes may feel lazy, but The Best Man is indeed at its best when it indulges in the interactions between its characters. Taye Diggs is not bad as the not-so-secretive writer protagonist, but most of the film’s attention goes to Terrence Howard in his breakout role as an unrepentant womanizer, and Harold Perrineau as a man trying to escape his domineering girlfriend. On the distaff side, The Best Man is an embarrassment of riches, with Nia Long and Sanaa Lathan competing for the protagonist’s attention, Monica Calhoun as the sweet bride-to-be with a secret, and Regina Hall’s short but striking debut as a lap dancer. The pacing of the film goes steadily forward, and even the largely useless flashbacks to the characters’ college years don’t break up the flow too much. It all culminates in a warm but honest reckoning in which no characters hold a grudge as they look forward to the future. Which includes a sequel, The Best Man Holiday.