Elisabeth Shue

  • The Trigger Effect (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, December 2022) There’s something typically American about movies in which people start shooting at each other the moment order is temporarily eclipsed by extraordinary circumstances. It tells us more about the low-trust people believing in immediate social breakdown than those who would, in theory, hasten that breakdown. Meanwhile, in the real world, most recorded instances of such sudden catastrophes show people helping each other in difficult circumstances—but that would not make a good catastrophe movie. So it is that The Trigger Effects follows an ordinary suburban American man—husband, father, good guy—as the entire area/state loses electrical power. It takes about five minutes for riots to begin and our audience stand-in to start stealing medication and brandishing guns himself. It’s both funny and sad that the film cranks up the paranoia to eleven so suddenly, but that’s the film that David Koepp (in his first but not last feature-length outing as director and screenwriter) wants to deliver. On a surface level, it’s not that difficult to watch—although the film errs in leaving the suburban house to head out to the desert in its second half, as the semi-episodic structure doesn’t seem to build upon itself. On the other hand, despite some very intentionally grim moments, the film isn’t easy to take seriously. The lead trio of Kyle MacLachlan, Elisabeth Shue, and Dermot Mulroney is quite good in an unstable-suburban-menage-a-trois kind of way, even if their issues are also shunted to the side during the last half of the film. While The Trigger Effect has apparently become some kind of cult classic since its unimpressive theatrical run, there are far better movies out there dealing with a social breakdown—and some of them may even be documentaries.

  • Adventures in Babysitting (1987)

    Adventures in Babysitting (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, September 2019) Despite what you may think, Adventures in Babysitting isn’t a John Hughes film. On the surface, it sure looks like one: The story goes from the Chicago suburbs to the big city itself with middle-class teenage protagonists getting embroiled in adventures in the big city à la Ferris Bueller, alludes to cartoonish villains of Home Alone vintage and spends a significant amount of time making its characters grow up in absentia of any parental supervision … like much of the Hughes oeuvre. But it’s a Christopher Columbus film made from a David Simkins script, and the differences do start to become obvious once you look closer. It tries to have a broader appeal than Hughes film with protagonists going from 8 to 18, is far less structured in its one-thing-after-another approach. (Call it a “picaresque journey through 1987 nighttime Chicago, sanitized for family entertainment”) and it doesn’t hit the sentimentalism as hard as Hughes does. (But do remember that Columbus and Hughes would soon collaborate on 1990’s Home Alone.)  The result, spearheaded by Elisabeth Shue with noteworthy early roles for Vincent d’Onofrio and Penelope Ann Miller, is a bit scattered but amiable enough: it’s not trying to make a grand statement, but the way things quickly spin out of control from a simple premise is amusing enough. Clearly geared toward family entertainment, Adventures in Babysitting remains watchable even thirty years later—there’s some timeless material here about teenagers getting away with awesome thrills while their parents aren’t looking in their direction, and just enough excitement without falling into danger.

  • Leaving Las Vegas (1995)

    Leaving Las Vegas (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2016) While Nicolas Cage’s stature as a dramatic actor has fallen tremendously in the past few years, it’s useful to go back to Leaving Las Vegas to remind ourselves of how good he could be when provided with a good script, an attentive director and enough opportunities to show what he could do. Here, he plays a washed-up screenwriter whose alcohol problems have led to divorce, ostracism and, in the film’s first few minutes, a self-imposed exile to Las Vegas where he intends to drink himself to death. This, as the film quickly points out, is not a matter of hours but weeks. There’s one complication in his plan: the appearance of Elizabeth Shue as an escort who finds common ground with him. Their relationship evolves into a spectacularly dysfunctional mess of co-dependency, twisted affection, impossible rules and headlong rush to self-destruction. The ending is not uplifting, but it’s entirely appropriate. Writer/director Mike Figgis (working from a novel) shoots the film using low-grain super-16 stock, lending a muddy quality to the images that works in the film’s unpolished favour. Leaving Las Vegas, given its downbeat nature and harsh scenes of humiliation and pain, is not an easy movie to love—but it’s easy to respect and it plays well even twenty years later, especially as a reminder of Nicolas Cage at the height of his dramatic capabilities. Given his propensity to take up roles in direct-to-video thrillers and the disappearance of adult thrillers from the Hollywood landscape, I don’t think we’ll ever see anything quite like this from him ever again.