Bruce Dern

  • Black Sunday (1977)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2021) I don’t normally like the grittiness of 1970s filmmaking, but sometimes it’s just the right thing for the film, and so Black Sunday is a pretty good example of form following function. A type of thriller that has been gradually abandoned by Hollywood, it adapts the Thomas Harris novel (yes, that Thomas Harris) into an efficient thriller. Thick in mid-1970s politics, it features Palestinian terrorist groups allying themselves with a troubled Vietnam veteran to hatch a dastardly plot to kill as many people as possible at the Super Bowl. Unusually enough, the production features a copious amount of footage shot at the 1976 Super Bowl itself, with main characters looking at the crowds from the sidelines of the game, inspecting the stadium for signs of danger, or even running behind the end field to react to a sudden discovery. This helps a lot in ensuring the credibility of the thrills—as do the lavish aerial sequences. At a time when action filmmaking usually had to satisfy themselves with approximations, Black Sunday almost gets it right throughout—the exception being the crash of the Goodyear blimp into the stadium (not a spoiler, given that it’s the image used for the cover of the book and the movie poster), which suddenly degenerates into a blurry frantic mix of close-up shots and panicking crowds. (The production history of the film makes for interesting reading.) As much as I like Black Sunday when it works, I do wish it was shorter—there’s a lot of pointless throat-clearing in its first hour, and the action climax is easily a few minutes too long for its own good. Robert Shaw and Bruce Dern are fine as (respectively) the Mossad agent and the American terrorist battling it out, but Marthe Keller is not my picture of the beautiful operative that the film keeps identifying as the near-magical influence on the American renegade. Director John Frankenheimer was, at that point in his career, a veteran of big-ticket thrillers and that experience shows in the film at its best. It clearly fits within the disaster film trend of the 1970s, and still works remarkably well today. I’m not saying that Black Sunday should be remade with modern pacing and CGI spectacle… but I’ve seen worse ideas.

  • Pete’s Christmas (2013)

    Pete’s Christmas (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2020) Hallmark Christmas movies get a bad rep as repetitive repetitions of familiar clichés and empty platitudes, and I’m sure most would agree that we don’t need more movies repeating the premise of Groundhog Day. Maybe that explains why Pete’s Christmas ends up being a small pleasant surprise. As you may guess, the central premise is to have Christmas Day on repeat, seen from the perspective of an overlooked middle child teenager who, at least at first go, has the most terrible holiday anyone could ask for. Some vague supernatural shenanigans later, the loop begins. If you’ve seen Groundhog Day, the overall arc will feel intensely familiar: disbelief, understanding, random mischief, hedonism, then slow accretion of good actions to improve others’ lives, followed by the end of the loop. Then you combine it with the usual Christmas movie clichés—snow, food, song and family values—not to mention flat directing and low-budget production values. It shouldn’t work, but it does: even in its mechanistic repetitive fashion, Pete’s Christmas slowly builds charm and the amount of indulgence that it needs to run over a sometimes-rough script and obvious plot hooks. Zachary Gordon does turn in a fine lead performance, with Bruce Dern and Molly Parker most noticeable in supporting roles. The gradual resolution of the many issues is handled in non-chronological fashion (or at least that’s how I choose to interpret it, the alternative being a much less satisfying script), with the various characters getting a chance to explain themselves and for the protagonist to walk further along in his path to self-enlightenment. Pete’s Christmas does keep the Buddhist spiritual undertones of its inspiration, although I’m not sure if that’s by design or carryover accident. Still, as far as Christmas movies go, it combines two formulas to end up with a nice little spin. Not what we’d call a great movie, but something a bit better than average if you’re expecting just another Hallmark holiday special.

  • Nebraska (2013)

    Nebraska (2013)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, February 2020) It’s a bit of a surprise that I waited this long before seeing Nebraska—after all, it was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, and I’m a bit of a completist when it comes to those. Plus, it’s from Alexander Payne, an uneven filmmaker but one who can usually be counted upon to deliver a few surprises along the way. Embracing its Midwestern gothic aesthetics, Nebraska is shot in black-and-white (more a cinema-vérité gimmick than something truly interesting) and takes place in working-class America. Quirky characters abound, as the story is precipitated by an elderly alcoholic’s conviction that he has won a million dollars in a Publisher’s Clearinghouse-style contest and must go pick up his prize in person. Exasperated by his constant escapes from home, his son decides to lance the boil and make the drive. Cue the road trip movie, although it stops for a while at the man’s former hometown, a hotbed of past relationships, naked envy and spectacularly dumb characters. I’ll give something to Payne: he can be surprising, and it’s a wonder how Nebraska can remain interesting (in a truly cringe-inducing way) with such low stakes and down-to-earth concerns. Much of this can be attributed to a screenplay with distinctive (if frustrating) characters, featuring lusty elders, cackling rednecks, befuddled sons and gossip-loving townsfolk. It’s not an easy movie to like, but there are enough good scenes here and there to make it distinctive. Bruce Dern is terrific as the half-demented man who sets the plot in motion and eventually gains a strange victory of sorts despite being hopelessly deluded about his real chances. Nebraska may be an odd movie, not exactly pulse-pounding at what it does, but it’s interesting enough and somewhat similar to many other Payne movies in how it explored places and people that seldom figure in most other films.