Reviews

  • A Little Romance (1979)

    A Little Romance (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) There is so much unadulterated syrupy-sweet sentiment in A Little Romance that while watching the film I had the time to develop obesity, cavities and diabetes. Consciously twee, it’s a romance featuring an American 13-year-old (Diane Lane, in her film debut) and a French 13-year-old (Thelonious Bernard), under the watchful eye of an older man (late-career Laurence Olivier). The backdrop is Paris, and then Venice, but if the leads are teenagers, the audience for the film is clearly meant to be adult, as the themes have more to do with the purity of an ideal teenage romance than anything else. Director George Roy Hill keeps things so light and unlikely that the film is best seen as a fantasy of sorts. A Little Romance probably works well with its intended audience in their most receptive mood, but if you happen to fall outside that segment… well, the sugar is overwhelming.

  • His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th (2009)

    His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2021) Considering that I’m very much not a fan of the Friday the 13th series (considering my loathing for slashers in general, it’s no surprise if my favourite entry, Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, is the one that die-hard fans hate), it’s a wonder why I’d willingly submit myself to a feature-length documentary about it. But what can I say? Completionism ruins everything, and considering that I’ve seen the entire series, I might as well have the documentary as the cherry on top. At its best, His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th is a coherent exploration of the twists and turns of a series over three decades, quickly explaining how every entry came to be, telling us anecdotes about the production of each film, and letting the actresses tell us about their experiences shooting the film. In this regard, His Name Was Jason does the job: we get a short look at each film in the series, at the filmmakers and the actresses (with a scream supercut). But this documentary comes with two caveats — one specific and one far more important. The specific one is that my least favourite moments of horror movies are “the kills,” the elaborate special-effects sequences in which characters are slaughtered every few minutes and seem to be the chief attraction for many fans that I barely restrain myself from calling psychopathic. As a result, the fairly lengthy segment in which the series’ “best kills” are lovingly detailed and gushed over had me reaching for a copy of The Rise and Fall of American Civilization. But, hey, everyone likes different things for different reasons. SFX artist Tom Savini certainly looks as if he’s having fun here. The far more important caveat in taking in His Name Was Jason is that it’s chiefly a promotional item made to highlight the arrival of the 2009 reboot of the series — not a great film, despite the over-the-top praise that participants in the film are delighted to plug in. As such, don’t expect any critical analysis or much acknowledgement of how the franchise erred along the way — this is for fans, and His Name Was Jason: 30 Years of Friday the 13th reflects what it thinks the fans want from such a puff piece. You can conclude many, many things from that intention, but I’ve already said too much.

  • Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000)

    Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2021) I know just enough about animated Japanese films that I shouldn’t be surprised to find out that a film with terrific art would have not-so-terrific animation and a borderline incomprehensible plot. But Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust is not that much of an oddity compared to other animated films of a similar vintage: Take any frame of the film and you’ll be impressed by the visual quality of the result. String them along into a sequence and you’ll recognize the shortcuts taken to keep the production costs down: highly constrained animation, interminable travelling mattes, lengthy segments where nothing moves, and other such common measures with pre-digital animation with a limited budget. Add longer sequences and the plot clearly can’t support the images: We end up with this jumble of plot elements that barely fit together and aren’t structured for any kind of storytelling intensity. It’s also when the demands of a limited animation budget crash into the requirements of a well-paced film: with interminable exposition and people talking over static shots, the film struggles to advance in more than short bursts of action. I still think that the art is often magnificent, and some of the ideas are interesting. The way writer-director Yoshiaki Kawajiri puts everything together, unfortunately, undermines even the best assets of the film. Anyone tempted to bemoan the 3D era of animation may be gently reminded of Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust and what happens when you don’t have the means to do justice to your creative intentions.

  • Island of Lost Souls (1932)

    Island of Lost Souls (1932)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) By now, I don’t really need another reminder about the vitality of Pre-Code movies, but Island of Lost Souls is an eloquent example of how movies of that era can feel modern — you wouldn’t see anything like this until the 1960s. The source material practically begs for grown-up treatment: H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau may be 125 years old at this point, but it’s still a potent exploration of disturbing ideas and visuals, with enough material questioning the idea of a creator and social conditioning to still feel dangerous to authorities both religious and secular. Such material demands artistic freedom, and filmmakers in 1932 certainly tried to get away with a lot — Island of Lost Souls is shot like a horror film, with horrible revelations and the still-surprisingly downbeat finale that the material required. The great Charles Laughton plays Dr. Moreau with his typically compelling style, making him a far more interesting figure than the bland antagonist played by Richard Arlen. But if you’re looking for one reason to see the film, just one — it’s got to be Kathleen Burke as “Lota, the Panther Woman” — clearly coded to be a wild, animalistic figure, she looks amazingly modern with long curly dark hair and a demeanour that’s nowhere near how “proper” actresses were directed at the time — she’s like a piece of 1980 cinema thrown half a century back in time and it’s no wonder if she still has a following nowadays. Skeptics beware: Island of Lost Souls is still surprisingly good—It’s not such a heresy to say that there still hasn’t been a better screen adaptation of Wells’ source material, especially considering the debacle that was the 1996 Marlon Brando film.

  • The Search: Manufacturing Belief (2019)

    The Search: Manufacturing Belief (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2021) Pulling together a documentary is harder than you think, especially when it comes to tackling a big sprawling subject and then making sure that the focus remains on the topic. So it is that while The Search: Manufacturing Belief is interesting in its questioning of religion, belief, awe and control, it often feels so scattered as to defy a cohesive argument. Much of the film is structured around a dramatic recreation of a Catholic youth retreat weekend that writer-director Patrick Payne experienced in his teenage years — the Cursillo movement (aka “The Search”) that uses techniques eerily similar to mind control in order to produce a feeling of awe and attachment to a doctrine. (If you start going “uh-oh” at some of the things that happen, well done — the process is well known among cults, military forces and pyramidal schemes.)  Alongside the dramatic recreation of the weekend retreat are interviews tackling the topic of religion and awe, and trying to pick apart the differences between two often-associated emotions. Perhaps the best thing about The Search is how it tries to bridge an understanding between believers and non-believers — everyone interviewed (whether they’re associated with religion or not) brings a rationalist approach to the conversation, and the documentary deals with ideas in a robust manner. Of course, this ends up meaning going here and there, sometimes with atheist crusaders (one of whom seems a bit too quick severing any link between chunks of carbon and an overall sense of morality) and sometimes poking at new ideas without exploring them. It’s both really interesting and frustrating given the scope of the topic. But perhaps that’s inevitable in considering such an intensely personal topic: despite having been raised Catholic (and mentions of “The Search” had me thinking, “hey, didn’t some of my friends attend one of those…?”), I don’t have much to do with organized religion these says but get me started on libraries, tourism and/or the best science-fiction conventions I have attended and I can guarantee you that the language I’m going to use is going to sound a lot like the one used by believers at the end of their retreat. We all have our truth, and we all have the capacity to be awed when we approach what is central to us. The Search strikes an appropriately sophisticated tone in approaching the topic, but it’s almost by design that it wouldn’t get to its core for everyone… it keeps a sense of mystery!

  • Things I Do for Money (2019)

    Things I Do for Money (2019)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) A strange combination of Canadian Content requirements and pandemic-induced blockbuster drought means that as 2021 unfolds, premium Canadian movie channels are essentially grabbing any interesting Canadian movie produced in the past five years, then putting them centre stage as their big premieres of the week. As a result, we’re exposed to significantly lower-budgeted films on a weekly basis. Some of them are unremarkable to the point of being hardly worth discussing, and then there’s the odd surprise. Things I do for Money is rough, scattered, and quirky… but when it clicks, it’s almost unique in its aesthetics. Proudly and loudly set in Hamilton (ON), it’s a film that revolves around two young cello-playing brothers of Japanese ethnicity as they deal with organized crime gangs. As far as crime genre elements go, there’s a bag of money, an expensive painting, complicated family dynamics, and rival gangs of different ethnicities — all things we’ve seen before. But it’s in the things never (or rarely) seen before that the film distinguishes itself — by making cellos an integral part of its soundtrack, for instance, the film gets two or three suspense sequences with a great foreboding soundtrack (at least one of them played in diegetic sound). The relationship between our two protagonists (played by real-life brothers Theodor and Maximilian Aoki, and eventually with their real-life father) is not commonly seen, the grandmotherly foul-mouthed Jamaican antagonist played by Colette Zacca is wonderful (oh, that bingo scene!), the use of drone cinematography is interesting for what feels like a micro-budget film and the promotional material highlights that this is the first Japanese-Canadian film, with ethnically and musically appropriate leads. The flip side of having so many fun things in the same film is that the entire production doesn’t cohere as much as it should. By the time writer-director Warren P. Sonoda makes his film become family drama, crime thriller, dark comedy, teenage romance, social commentary and then a thievery caper, it’s normal to feel as if all of those components should have co-existed more harmoniously together. The caper, in particular, seems a bit too much. Still, Things I Do for Money can be surprising in its details and exhilarating when the music starts: it’s not perfect, but I’d rather see something rough like this than an inert by-the-numbers production that you can’t remember as soon as the credits roll.

  • Ladies in Retirement (1941)

    Ladies in Retirement (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) It took me some time to warm up to Ida Lupino — she’s wasn’t always a flashy actress and she didn’t go for a strong unified screen persona. (She’s arguably more interesting now as one of the rare female directors of the 1950s than as an actress, but that severely underplays her best and most captivating performances.) But as with many non-superstar actors, sooner or later there’s a film that makes people click with her, after which it any film featuring her gets an “Oh, It’s Ida Lupino!”  So it is that Ladies in Retirement is a good honest thriller that would be interesting in its own right as a natural blend of Victorian setting and noir aesthetics only one step removed from Gothic. But it does have an added dimension with Lupino as a 22-year-old playing a fortysomething protagonist who goes murderously crazy. She also plays against her then-husband Louis Hayward — he as a schemer, she as a housekeeper with a big secret. The almost-comic opening soon turns grim, and while the film (adapted from the stage) is much better in its atmosphere and development than its underwhelming conclusion, there’s a gender-bent domestic thriller here that stands adjacent to material in the vein of the not-much-later Gaslight.

  • A Fine Madness (1966)

    A Fine Madness (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) There have been weird movies throughout all of Hollywood’s history, but the 1960s brand of weird movies was in a class of its own. So it is that, in A Gentle Madness, we find Sean Connery playing a seriously problematic British poet expatriated to New York — someone who likes to punch people in the face at the slightest provocation, and sleep with any willing woman in his vicinity. Any less charming actor than Connery would make the protagonist look a psychopath — and even with Connery, this is really not a protagonist we can cheer for. Not that those opposing him are any better, what with doctors plotting to perform a surgical procedure that looks a lot like percussive lobotomy despite their assurances that it’s something much better. If you’re going down the checklist of “impulsive violence… indiscriminate sex… lobotomy” and wonder how the execution will make it better, the answer is simple: it doesn’t. It’s a film that leaves viewers aghast, dredging up Connery’s troubled associations with domestic violence and leaving everyone thankful that this project would never be greenlit these days. Connery and some fine location shooting keep things barely tolerable, but never compelling. By the time the film ends with the protagonist hitting a pregnant woman on the street (it’s meant to be accidental and funny and she doesn’t look pregnant at all, but eh), that’s quite enough with it all.

  • Gypsy (1962)

    Gypsy (1962)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) It took me far too long to realize that Gypsy was based on a true story, but no matter — even if you don’t know anything about burlesque dancer Gypsy Rose Lee and her impossibly micromanaging mother, the film still works quite well as its own thing. Few movies do the passing-of-the-torch thing as well as this one, either narratively, structurally or in a historical context. While Gyspy’s first moments are almost entirely dedicated to the formidable presence of “the ultimate stage mother” played by Rosalind Russell, almost forgetting the children and especially the eldest one, the film gradually shifts focus as it goes on, giving more and more place to the eldest daughter, as Natalie Wood takes centre stage and needs to put her mother in the background for her own good. Taking a step back, the film itself can be seen as a generational passing of the torch between Russell and Wood — both of them not dissimilar as actresses. (Legend has it that the two did not get along very well on set.) Wood looks really good here even if, to remain a family film, Gypsy considerably sugarcoats burlesque to the point of innocuousness. There’s plenty of good dialogue, strong character evolution and enough colourful background details to make it interesting. The first hour is a bit long — and much of it can be justified by seeing the film as a transition between two characters that could have been rushed had the first hour been snappier. Adapted from a Broadway musical that was itself adapted from Gypsy Rose Lee’s autobiography, Gypsy remains a fascinating character portrait more than a true musical… and it’s still effective even in a far more permissible twenty-first century.

  • The Parent Trap (1961)

    The Parent Trap (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Disney Streaming, April 2021) I’m coming to the original The Parent Trap a few years after watching the 1998 remake featuring Lindsey Lohan. I still think that the premise is among the dumbest, most ludicrous ever suggested on film: Oh sure, what divorcing parents of twins wouldn’t each grab one and raise them on opposite coasts in complete ignorance of each other? But if you go with it, the film does work well. The young Hayley Mills is clearly the star of the film, what with her dual roles as a California tomboy and a Boston debutante. The special effects to put them both on screen at once are crude but effective, and they get the point across. While Brian Keith is serviceable as the dad, Maureen O’Hara does get a few great sequences as the mom, especially when she (softly) declares war on her ex-husband’s fiancée and they go at it with veiled insults and catty remarks. The film actually gets more than its fair share of laughs through some good screenwriting, grounding the idiotic premise into something almost believable and executing it with skill. Even the supporting characters get good moments. The atmosphere of the early 1960s is more charming than you’d think… especially considering that much of the film takes place in settings—summer camp, posh Boston house, California mountain ranch—where the passage of time isn’t as obvious. I was, frankly, a bit surprised at how well The Parent Trap still plays today. Sure, it’s a film of its time, but it still hits its marks.

  • Knights of the Round Table (1953)

    Knights of the Round Table (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) I’m not going to be so bold as to say that Knights of the Round Table is a boring movie, but I will say that it is exactly what I could picture if someone said, “1950s colour take on the King Arthur mythos.”  The tone, style and colours are all very specific to that time and the feeling is that you’ve already seen the film even if this is your first viewing. The pseudo-arch dialogue is about as self-important as the need for this British production to mythologize the Arthurian story, and the atmosphere of unreality is reinforced by a series of sets obviously built in-studio with wild colours and unconvincing props. It’s definitely a result of then-trendy design choices affecting the entire production — amusingly, I almost never criticize certain genres (musicals come to mind) for exactly the same characteristics, but historical fantasy is one area where the difference between now and then is especially striking and never to the 1950s’ advantage. If this review is thin on the substance of the film rather than how it’s presented, that’s not an accident — as I said, you’d probably familiar enough with the Arthurian mythos to imagine it very well poured in the 1950s mould, and that’s exactly what you get: Director Richard Thorpe understood that part of the assignment. More patient viewers may have fun comparing the results to other films with the same characters over the decades. As for myself, the result is too generic, with so few advantages over more modern takes that I’m likely to forget most of the film within days.

  • King of Jazz (1930)

    King of Jazz (1930)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) Don’t bother looking for a story in King of Jazz — as with many musicals of the early sound era, it’s a straight-up adaptation of a Broadway revue show, with segments loosely connected together so that audiences across America could go to the movies and have as good a time as their fellow Manhattanites. It was, in retrospect, a classic case of imitating success: at a time where the cinematographic grammar hadn’t yet adapted to the possibilities of meshing sound with images, this was the surest, least-risky, most profitable way to go. As a result, you have to assess King of Jazz on the merits of its number sketches and novelties. Chief among them is that the film was shot and preserved in two-tone colour, which adds a surprising amount of interest when compared to other movies of the early 1930s. But there are a few other pieces of interest as well: It’s a film that features the first-ever Technicolor animated segment (a curiously morbid/racist sketch), as well as Bing Crosby’s first screen appearance. The titular “King of Jazz” is Paul Whiteman, an interesting figure in the history of the genre who’s remarkably well-captured here. There are more special effects than you’d expect from a 1930 musical film, and the intentional variety of the musical numbers (remember: bringing Broadway to entire families in small-city America) means that the film doesn’t play to a single musical aesthetic — but despite the title, don’t expect much of what we now expect from “jazz” considering the way it has evolved over the decades. I found much of King of Jazz interesting for the raw window it opens on circa-1930 popular entertainment, without the added filter of a plot to get in the way. It has quite a documentary value and a few pleasant surprises even ninety years later.

  • The Labyrinth Index [The Laundry Files 9], Charles Stross

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2018, 350 pages, $35.00 hc, ISBN 978-0356511085

    After the status-quo-shattering intensity of previous volume The Delirium Brief, Charles Stross takes the pacing of the Laundry Files series one notch down in The Labyrinth Index. But that’s still going at a brisk jogging pace, because this time around the series’ ensemble cast goes for a big target — rescuing the President of the United States from Fortress America.

    Taking a transatlantic breather is not a bad idea, considering the sweeping changes at home. If you recall the climax of the previous volume, the agents of the British occult agency responsible for protecting the world from trans-dimensional horrors suffered a significant setback when Her Majesty’s government became corrupted by the very horrors it needed to be protected from — the Agency officially dissolved, and a complete takeover of the country by a genocidal alien intelligence only prevented by making a deal with a slightly lesser evil.

    This being said, “a lesser evil” can still be an absolute nightmare when the book opens with an execution sanctioned by the government — a clear sign that things are getting unimaginably worse for the characters (as they usually do in any given Stross series). The new Prime Minister is a front for an extra-dimensional horror who’s willing to keep humans around as long as they amuse him (giving him an edge over those who simply want a worldwide consumption of souls), and as the plot gets going, our protagonists are given an insane mission with no opportunity to refuse. Not when the Prime Minister is redecorating London with an arch adorned with human skulls.

    It turns out that the news from the States is roughly as bad in the Laundry Universe as they were here from 2016 to 2020: The government has also been taken over by evil horrors from another dimension, with the added complication of the American government having incredible means at its disposal. The comparisons only go so far, though: In Stross’ reality, a somewhat sympathetic and competent president has been erased from the collective knowledge of the American population through occult means in the hope of usurping his lawful authority. (It’s about as weird as it sounds, but it does build on The Nightmare Stack’s ruminations on the power of even a symbolic figure in The Laundry’s universe.)  The New Management of the United Kingdom is sending a team of operatives to either rescue, capture or kill the President. Against them: nothing less than the entire intelligence, security and police establishment of America.

    Our narrator/protagonist this time around is Mhari, an ex-girlfriend of Bob Howard later turned into a vampire then given important positions inside The Laundry. But there’s quite an ensemble cast of characters with their own third-person narratives —The Labyrinth Index sets itself up as a three-ring circus of overlapping operatives in setting up its caper. It all comes together as well as a heist film, albeit with more supernatural chaos as things spin out of control.

    In the grand scheme of the series, this feels like an energetic breather episode. The suspense of a thriller operating deep behind enemy lines is captivating, but the focus here is on explaining the state of the series at this point in time rather than advancing things too quickly. There’s a lot to take in: The New Management of the United Kingdom and the state of an American government captured by the creatures it needed to keep out.

    Stross also puts a few pieces on the board to set up later episodes: There’s a hilariously formal PowerPoint presentation outline for a high-tech end-of-humanity plan to be implemented by the American military-industrial complex, but also hints of an even bigger game afoot with even more powerful players. If my narrative intuition is correct, this could be a glimmer of hope for the series’ eventual conclusion, keeping with its ongoing theme of applying a small amount of leverage to gain an advantage or prevent larger losses. It goes without saying that our cast of characters is not blind to the New Management’s brand of evil, but even contemplating rebellion against such powerful forces is going to be a multi-book project. (Not to mention the very scary American plan to hasten the end of the world…)

    But that’s for later. In the immediate scope of The Labyrinth Index, what we have is a good page-turner that brings together a number of characters and plot strands from previous volumes in order to advance the overarching narrative. Mhari is a good narrator, and there’s something interesting in seeing Stross both send his cast farther and farther away from stock humanity (even the team’s lone unmodified human is turned into something more along the way — something that feels like a loss) while working hard at ensuring that recognizable human traits manifest themselves in his superhuman characters — perhaps most notably by giving them stable and deepening romantic relationships.

    Not quite as good as The Delirium Brief (which was a bit of a high-water mark for the series) but better than many of the previous volumes, The Labyrinth Index does have Stross working in a familiar techno-espionage format, delivering good character work on a much broader canvas. It may be the last mainline Laundry novel for a while — in discussing future plans, Stross is deliberately skipping farther ahead in the Laundry universe chronology with his next trilogy of books, trying a slightly-different genre with new characters until he can come back to Bob Howard and friends to close out that specific arc. As a result, we may be a few years away from a direct sequel to The Labyrinth Index, leaving all of those delicious plot threads dangling for a few years. How that will work is anyone’s guess at this point, but Stross has proved time and time again that he knows what he’s doing. I may hold off on reading the upcoming trilogy until all three books are published: From my experience reading the last few volumes of The Laundry series, I may end up reading the entire trilogy in three days.

  • House of Bones (2010)

    House of Bones (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2021) I don’t like how some horror movies somehow end up with faint praise for being bad-but-not-terrible, considering how low the bar can be once you get into low-budget efforts. House of Bones is one of those bad-but-not-terrible things you can catch later at night on cable or on the fifth page of streaming choices. It has a mildly entertaining premise by 2010 standards, as members of a supernatural reality-TV show are attacked by a haunted house. The story is nothing special, but the film gets a few extra jolts of interest from starring forgotten-but-not-unknown Charisma Carpenter and featuring rather more gory effects than you’d expect from a film made for SyFy. What it doesn’t have is the kind of atmosphere than haunted house movie depends on — it’s a series of cheap scares, clearly led by the logic of a bad-but-not-terrible horror movie script rather than any kind of recognizable attempt at creating something more. Anyone stuck watching this rather than anything better may want to focus on the frights and the gore rather than try to make sense of the story, which is lazy enough to keep gaping plot holes without even trying to patch them up. This is filmmaking-for-a-buck at its dullest, and yet not completely terrible. There are times where you want to watch a film but not really watch it all that closely, and that’s probably the best-case scenario for House of Bones.

  • I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955)

    I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) As far as musical biopics go, I’ll Cry Tomorrow is a blend of showbiz drama and addiction memoir, with our protagonist (Singer Lillian Roth, played by Susan Hayward, in a script based on Roth’s own memoirs) first suffering as a child prodigy controlled by her mom, then suffering as her fiancé dies, then suffering as a married woman whose sole shared interest with her husband is alcoholism, then suffering again as she tries to kick all of the bad habits in her life. In other words, this is not a pleasant film — for each mildly entertaining musical number, there’s one ugly scene after another. Unusually enough for the 1950s, alcoholism is portrayed from the inside as a destructive but appealing force, and the film ends up being one of the first depictions of Alcoholics Anonymous. I’ll Cry Tomorrow plays according very familiar lines for modern viewers, but the vintage aspect of it can be interesting. Of course, the film’s best asset has to be Hayward, holding nothing back in a tough depiction of someone familiar to audiences at the time. It’s not necessarily a bad watch even at its most conventional.