Madolyn Smith

  • The Caller (1987)

    The Caller (1987)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2021) The life of an avid cinephile is not always fun — watch too many bad movies in a row, and you’ll start wondering why this is the hobby you’ve chosen. As you make your way out of the list of classics and start working on the rest, you’ll start fearing that you’ve seen all there is to see — that the future is going to be a parade of similar plots, clichés, undistinguishable characters and few surprises. But then there are movies like The Caller to give us hope all over again. To be clear, The Caller is not a big or perfect movie: It’s very nearly a theatrical piece, chiefly concerned with an elaborate cat-and-mouse verbal joust between a woman living alone in a house and a mysterious stranger who intrudes upon her life during one evening. It doesn’t take all that much time for a mysterious fog to permeate the film — the way the two speak to each other is not normal, and there’s clearly more than we’re seeing to their relationship. They overtly speak of murder and give each other points for seeing through their deception. The following day, their intricate dance continues with even more unexplainable exchanges and abnormal behaviour. It’s all compelling stuff, and the repartee here is quite good. The cast is minimal, but Malcolm McDowell brings his usual menace to the role, while Madolyn Smith looks beautiful and gives as good as she gets in the dialogue. You can keep guessing throughout the entire film (I still like my theory of this being extreme role-playing between a kinky couple), but I almost guarantee that when the finale hits, you’ll be still be amazed at it all. Now, I don’t think that the film makes a whole lot of sense when you factor in the conclusion, but there’s a lot more to it than the twist, and even knowing the twist is not enough to distract from the enjoyable moment-by-moment acting joust. The Caller may not even be a particularly good movie but it’s something rarer: a surprise, an original and a reassurance that the world of film is vast and will always contain something new.

  • Funny Farm (1988)

    Funny Farm (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2019) Chevy Chase heads to rural Vermont in a comedy that pretty much plays as you’d expect. As Funny Farm begins, a Manhattan sports journalist and his wife head over to the country in the hopes of transforming an advance for a novel into a fresh start for them both, away from the busy rhythm of the city. Of course, they don’t know squat about the new house, the town, its people or even how to make friends with the locals. Hilarity, or at least predictable gags ensue. The inversions happen, the ironies pile up and yet Funny Farm isn’t much of a comedy. The comic style is very broad, to the point of feeling overly familiar even before seeing what happens next. You can call out the jokes from their setup, and even a slightly less predictable third act doesn’t really improve the entire thing. Chase is up to his usual self (which is either funny or not—his specific brand of comedy can go both ways), while Madolyn Smith is more remarkable as his wife. As someone who fetishizes the idea of writing full-time, I did get a kick out of some aspects of the film. Alas, that’s not quite enough to make me like the film. On the plus side, I didn’t quite hate Funny Farm either. But it would be fair to say that I found it almost useless, and not really worth revisiting.