Dennis Farina

  • 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.

  • Thief (1981)

    Thief (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, May 2020) You can take a look at Thief and not immediately get how many things had to come together in exactly the right way for it to succeed. First up, you have writer-director Michael Mann in his feature-film debut, taking a few years of experience doing TV and applying a meticulous eye for detail at this drama featuring a master thief trying to get out of the business. There’s also the cinematography proper to an early Bruckheimer production, making splendid use of darkness and light to heighten what could have been handled as just another thriller. You’ve got James Caan, also precise in the way he plays a professional safecracker with an almost abstract idea of what he would do once away from the outlaw lifestyle. It features an able performance from Willie Nelson, as well as the big-screen debut of James Belushi and Dennis Farina. You have exact technical details, a strong sense of place for Chicago, some strong neo-noir style, plenty of elements anticipating Mann’s later movies (Heat, notably), and enough sordid details that not everything is settled by the film’s end. Thief is a strong debut for Mann, an intense role for Caan, and a great throwback watch for twenty-first century viewers.

  • Authors Anonymous (2014)

    Authors Anonymous (2014)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2015) I am, as noted elsewhere, an almost-helpless sucker for movies about writers.  Notwithstanding my own delusions of authorhood, my decades-long involvement in science-fiction fandom in two separate languages means that I’ve met and befriended a lot of writers, giving me a bit of insight into the profession.  As such, it’s hard to watch Author Anonymous without noticing the very broad stereotypes used in the film, the dumb jokes, the rather unidimensional ways the writing characters are presented, and the somewhat acid conclusion.  The premise has something to do with a documentary about a Los-Angeles-based writer’s group, but there are serious issues with the useless mockumentary conceit – the film isn’t all that interested in keeping that illusion going, and the interview-with-the-writers material could have been presented more elegantly.  Still, Authors Anonymous does have plenty of small chuckles to offer, mostly playing off the delusions of the characters: The military guy (Denis Farina, in fine form) idolizing Tom Clancy and resorting to self-publishing; the brooding young man emulating Bukowski without ever writing more than a page; the bored housewife seeing writing as an affectation; her enabling husband (Dylan Walsh, effortlessly charming) confusing ideas with actual writing; and a bubblehead (Kaley Cuoco, playing her own sitcom role) who manages to put a book together without having read one before.  There is a protagonist of sort played by Chris Klein as an honest author afflicted with writer’s block and being jealous of an unlikely success, but the film doesn’t really care all that much about him.  As you may imagine, this is the kind of weakness that can limit a film’s success, and Authors Anonymous is perhaps more tolerable as a string of cheap jokes and stereotypes about writers.  Never mind the conclusion or some of the ways it gets there.  Non-writers may or may not appreciate the film as much as writers will or won’t.