Claire Danes

  • The Mod Squad (1999)

    The Mod Squad (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, September 2020) The biggest occupational hazard for TV shows move adaptations it getting over the inane high-premises often built into serial TV. In The Mod Squad’s case, the problem is magnified by its origin in a TV show thirty years earlier, down to the dated “Mod” in the title. (If you thought, “What, we some kinda… Suicide Squad?” was bad, wait until you hear its 17-year precedent “So you kids are, what? Some kind of mod squad or something?”) Here, Claire Danes, Giovanni Ribisi and Omar Epps do their best to convince them that they’re delinquent hoodlums while working undercover for the police. While the best-case scenario for The Mod Squad would have been a middle-of-the-road crime action thriller (or a 21 Jump Street-style parody), this reboot struggles under the dated nature of its inspiration, and can barely be bothered to deliver the essentials of the film it’s supposed to be. With twenty years’ hindsight, it’s also easy to see that the film is far too deliberate in its appeal to 1999 young adults (I was part of that cohort, so I can say that the film’s soundtrack feels like a nostalgic throwback to that time’s dance music) and simply feels like a fifty-year-old producer’s attempt to imagine what young people would like. There are some interesting names in the cast (notably Dennis Farina and Richard Jenkins as adult supervision), but The Mod Squad itself is too gimmicky, too badly handled, too unintentionally funny to be effective.

  • Romeo + Juliet (1996)

    Romeo + Juliet (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2017) Going into Romeo + Juliet, I only knew two things: I usually like director Baz Luhrmann’s work (I usually love the first half-hour of his movies); and I have a lot of trouble with Shakespearian dialogue. Despite my best intentions, I bounced off hard from the recent contemporary reimagining of Coriolanus and Much Ado About Nothing: my brain can’t process that language even with subtitles to help. In that context, Romeo + Juliet’s central conceit, to reimagine Shakespeare’s best-known romantic play with the same dialogue but in a mid-1990s Californian-ish context with warring crime families using fancy guns rather than swords, seemed like courting trouble. Fortunately, Luhrmann’s typical verve was enough to get me over the initial hump. The opening sequence of the movie not only indelibly imprinted IN FAIR VERONA in my mind, but was stylish and action-packed enough to get me interested in the (more sedate) rest of the film. Leonardo DiCaprio is fine as Romeo, while Claire Danes makes for a fair wide-eyed Juliet. Able supporting presences by actors such as John Leguizamo, Pete Postlethwaite and Harold Perrineau (plus a very young Paul Rudd) complete the already wild portrait. Add to that Luhrmann’s usual energy and visual flair and the Shakespearian dialogue becomes far less important—knowing the basic beats of the classic story means that we’re free to appreciate the adaptation rather than the words, and so Romeo + Juliet comes alive. While much of this energy dissipates in the latter half of the film, there are enough elements of interest in the modernization of the story (complete with car chases, helicopters and news media commentary) to keep watching until the end. As pure piece of style, this is a film that is both precisely dated in mid-nineties aesthetics yet timeless because of them. It’s breathless, witty, just sappy enough to qualify as a true version of Romeo and Juliet, and an experience in itself. Maybe I’m getting ready to take another look at Coriolanus and Much Ado About Nothing…

  • It’s All About Love (2003)

    It’s All About Love (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On-demand, September 2012) When writers with no understanding or affection for science-fiction turn to the genre, the result is often a mixture of pretentious philosophy, incoherent fantasy and plot-free structure labeled SF in the misguided conviction that you can use the genre label to say anything without scrutiny.  So it is that in It’s All About Love’s near-future, we get a blend of human cloning, people dropping dead in public places, Uganda experiencing country-wide weightlessness, all water periodically transforming into ice.  These elements make no sense in a literal fashion, but trying to figure out the metaphorical link in-between those events and the on-screen adventures of a divorcing couple soon turns to indifference.  Who really cares when the film fails to achieve any kind of narrative momentum?  Deadened by terrible dialogue, dark cinematography, arthritic camera moves and major actors who seem stuck in roles they didn’t want, It’s All About Love mystifies more than it enlightens.  Joaquin Phoenix mangles an Italian accent while Claire Danes looks bored and Sean Penn seems to have shot all of his plane-bound scenes in half a day.  Mark Strong makes an impression in an early minor role, but the doubt remains: how did all those actors end up in this inert and ponderous film?  It’s All About Love keeps going long after it should have concluded, and writer/director Thomas Vinterberg doesn’t seem interested in making any part of his film accessible to the audience.  With this results (and that’s not even going into the now-legendary tales of the hostile reception the film got at Sundance in 2003), little wonder that It’s All About Love sank without a trace and can now be seen only by sheer happenstance.  Some movies are best forgotten.