David Strathairn

Eight Men Out (1988)

Eight Men Out (1988)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, June 2019) I’m not much of a baseball person, but even I found myself gradually interested in Eight Men Out’s depiction of the World Series-fixing scandal of 1919—a sordid little footnote in American sports history during which gamblers managed to convince a few White Sox players to deliberately lose games and be compensated by a share of the profits. Perhaps the most interesting thing in writer-director John Sayles’ film is the way even a fixing operation is fraught with complexity: It’s not enough to even convince the players (in this case, helped along by the baseball team owner’s legendary cheapness)—you have to prevent leaks, ensure that they’re paid, and fight against every player’s instinct to win. A bunch of name actors (including John Cusack, David Strathairn, Charlie Sheen and others) help keep Eight Men Out interesting even despite the absence of a satisfying climax: the film mirrors the regrettable real events that led to the lifelong expulsion of eight players from the baseball league—including Shoeless Joe Jackson—, the team owners asserting their control over players (a decades-old theme) and national disillusionment about the purity of baseball. Despite the usual warnings against learning history from Hollywood movies, Eight Men Out is a fascinating illustration of incidents that many would rather not acknowledge … making it even more important a subject.

UFO (2018)

UFO (2018)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On Cable TV, March 2019) I’m not a sympathetic viewer for undigested ufology, but UFO’s main strength lies somewhere else, somewhere I’m more than willing to follow: A scientific procedural thriller, in which an incredibly bright mathematics university student pulls at the thinnest threads in order to figure out a scientific mystery. Writer-director Ryan Eslinger turns in quite a cerebral film, with no action and arguably no antagonist either. But it’s a clever suspense movie in which the question is whether the protagonist will figure out the mystery, with equations and conceptual breakthroughs being what he needs to get there. Alex Sharp turns in a Miles-Tellerish lead performance (that’s a compliment) as the obsessed student, with some assistance by Gillian Anderson and David Strathairn. The low budget of the film is used effectively by a script that knows that its strength lies elsewhere than big-budget spectacle filmmaking. I quite enjoyed it despite my misgivings about presenting this as a true-ish story—it’s best to ignore the weak woo-woo attempts to link it to “real” events and enjoy it as a purely fictional thriller. In that light, it reminded me not only of my own computer science university days, but of the pleasure I got then from reading hard-SF short stories tackling first contact from a mathematical-as-universal-language perspective. I really can’t claim that I completely followed all of UFO’s heady concepts, but I knew enough to follow along and to appreciate that the film doesn’t treat its audience as idiots. There’s some noticeable but clever foreshadowing throughout, and I enjoyed it quite a bit more than the more ambitious but also more pretentious wave of low-budget Science Fiction that we’ve seen lately. Hard-SF readers should get quite a kick out of it.

Memphis Belle (1990)

Memphis Belle (1990)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On TV, May 2018) I saw bits and pieces of Memphis Belle back in high school, but sitting through from beginning to end doesn’t really change my opinion of the film: This is as basic a movie as it’s possible to make about WW2 bomber crews. It’s willfully schematic, reusing plenty of familiar wartime movie tropes in order to comfort its audience. It’s the story of a single bombing mission, supercharged with dramatic intensity (if they come back from their fiftieth mission, they can go home!) and every single incident of interest that may have happened at any point in WW2. It does work in that while Memphis Belle is familiar, it’s not really boring: there’s enough going on to keep watching the film without effort, and the familiarity ensures that the film will still make perfect sense once you come back from a kitchen snack visit. Don’t try to go read up on the film’s historical accuracy—it’s safe to say that most of what’s on the screen happened, but certainly not all at once. There is some additional interest in the cast, given that many of the young men in the Memphis Belle crew have gone on to other things: Most notably Billy Zane, Matthew Modine, Eric Stoltz, Sean Astin and Harry Connick Jr., with special mention of David Strathairn and John Lithgow in ground support roles. Much of the film was shot practically, making the rather jarring special effects stand out more—nowadays, much of the film would be a pure CGI spectacle, although whether this would be an improvement would depend on the director—see Red Tails for an example of going too far. The nice thing about Memphis Belle is that you get almost exactly what it says on the plot summary. Nothing transcendent, but nothing terrible either.