Danny Aiello

  • Little Italy (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, April 2022) As far as food-based romantic comedies go, Little Italy shouldn’t be mistaken for the lower-grade stuff made for TV – it’s not great art, but’s a bit spicier, more ambitious and more successful than its Hallmark channel equivalents. The increased budget shows, both in narrative structure (complete with an opening sequence presenting our protagonist as kids), the pedigree of the director (Donald Petrie, who has a few big-budgeted romantic comedies on his filmography) and in the grade of actors: Hayden Christensen, Emma Roberts and Danny Aiello aren’t the biggest stars around, but they are recognizable name actors, and they help make the film just that much better. (It’s also rated R for some language and racy content – a significant difference!)  Set in Toronto’s Little Italy, the film follows a young woman as she comes back from a culinary apprenticeship in London and rediscovers what happened to the neighbourhood during her years away: A feud has split the local pizzeria scene, her best friend as a kid has become an attractive man. The rest of Little Italy is familiar (all the way to, yes, a chase to the airport). But it’s the execution that makes it likable, whether it’s some saucy dialogue, likable character moments or the immersion in Toronto’s colourful multicultural matrix – even if the film doesn’t bother hiding its cultural stereotypes. It’s not much (and looking at the scathing reviews earned by the film, it’s clear that critics were comparing it to mainstream fare rather than the made-for-TV romantic comedies) but there’s a quasi-nostalgic throwback to Little Italy, which feels as if it could have been made ten or fifteen years earlier. I don’t necessarily think it’s that great, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

  • Mistress (1992)

    Mistress (1992)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, June 2021) Despite the self-aggrandizing nature of such projects, I love it when Hollywood makes a satire about itself. They don’t even have to be all that insightful — as a cinephile, I can appreciate the attempt to tell a joke. In Mistress, we follow a pair of past-their-prime director and producer as, out of the blue, a passion project long left abandoned has a chance of being revived. The only catch (as is the case in 1,000% of film projects) is financing, and the three investors interested in the project each want their mistress to be cast in a prominent role. Much of the film tracks how a purely artistic project ends up compromised by multiple overlapping contradictory requests — while it’s a comedy, the ending is unusually grim (well, not that grim) in that nothing comes out of it. Mistress is fun enough, but it punches above its weight due to some very good casting. Robert Wuhl and Martin Landau are likably pathetic as a bottom-feeding writer-director-producer pair trying their best to exist in a system that doesn’t care for them. Their will is tested by three investors, played by Robert de Niro, Danny Aiello and Eli Wallach in three strong performances. But as far as I’m concerned, the most memorable casting here is Sheryl Lee Ralph as a high-powered woman who’ll take advantage of a break but not let anyone walk over her. She does bring a lot of energy to what is, overall, a much more low-key affair. Mistress belongs to the kind of self-deprecating Hollywood comedy that’s probably equally funny and anger-inducing to insiders. Fittingly for a film aimed at professionals, the focus here is more on producing and financing than the shooting of the film itself. It’s watchable enough even today, although I suspect that it was probably released too close to The Player to make waves of its own upon release.

  • Fort Apache the Bronx (1981)

    Fort Apache the Bronx (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, March 2019) In a fit of perverse humour, I decided to watch Fort Apache the Bronx right after the original Fort Apache it references. The comparisons are not kind to the 1981 film in more ways than one. Obviously, it’s not as much of a classic as the original—the titular reference is an ironic nod at the state of New York City’s Bronx by the late 1970s—with entire city blocks destroyed as urban blight, and a police force under siege by so-called barbarian forces. But the episodic police drama does miss one of the earlier film’s most interesting point—that “the other side” opposing the policemen actually had valid grievances for going to war and was portrayed in something of a sympathetic fashion. There’s not much of that here—Paul Newman plays a young cop assigned to the worst precinct in the city, and coming to grip (or not) with its casual lawlessness, drug use, unpunished crimes and code of silence regarding abuses by police officers. Fort Apache the Bronx is a grim movie, and it exemplifies the prevailing attitude that “drop dead” NYC was then considered unsalvageable. The rubble-strewn post-apocalyptic atmosphere is worth a watch by itself but remains hard to shake, and it’s good to have such anchor points as Newman, Rachel Ticotin as a likable nurse, Danny Aiello or Pam Grier as no less than a cop-killing prostitute. The unusual plotting, mean to unsettle viewers used to tidy endings, feels very New Hollywood with its unabashed grittiness and refusal to comfort audiences. Still, it’s not that dour of a film despite the setting: the burnt-out cynicism of the police characters, used to “holding the fort” against the criminal hordes, manifests itself through biting black humour. In keeping with the nihilistic 1970s (and in opposition to the reactionary 1980s), Fort Apache the Bronx is at ease with the idea that peace in a neighbourhood can depend on police leniency—things start turning truly sour when a new inflexible police chief comes in and demands stricter crackdowns. The slice-of-life plotting doesn’t have much of a main plot and features a number of clichés along the way, but forty years later it feels like an anthropological expedition in an alien land. I ended up liking quite a bit better than I thought at first.