Marc Forster

Christopher Robin (2018)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-12-092023-03-19 Movie Review

(Netflix Streaming, December 2019) Disney studio executives must have terrible family lives considering the number of family movies they greenlight that include a father who must learn to spend less time at work and more time with the kids. (Do people really need to be told that stuff, or is this the kind of unarguable dramatic arc that gets a free pass every time?) Christopher Robin is the latest in this long trend, as it features Winnie the Pooh’s human protagonist as a grown-up man without a shred of imagination who must choose between overtime and family time, not to mention loyalty to his employees or efficiently cost-cutting for his company. You will not be surprised by the choice he makes early in the film, or the one he makes at the conclusion of it. There is an obvious mechanistic aspect to Marc Forster’s direction that comes from the screenplay itself—I won’t even bother describing the middle portion of the plot, so clearly is it developed from the central premise. But even in its CGI-heavy execution, the film does manage to poke now and then at the innate charm of the Hundred Acre Wood. The cast of characters comes to life in convincing fashion (the film was nominated for several Special Effects awards) and the script doesn’t send unexpected curveballs. Still, I wonder about the limits of using a midlife crisis as an excuse for a family film—surely there’s no need to bother kids with mild adult-onset depression. Why are Disney executives regurgitating their therapy sessions on-screen?

Movie Review

The Kite Runner (2007)

ByChristian Sauvé 2017-10-242023-03-14 Movie Review

(Netflix Streaming, October 2017) Dramas like The Kite Runner remind me of unflavoured health food: it’s good for you, no one looks strangely if you say you’re eating it, but it feels completely joyless. Respectable but blandly ordinary, this drama set in Soviet-then-Taliban-occupied Afghanistan sees an Americanized refugee going back home to re-immerse himself in childhood memories and rescue a friend once betrayed. It’s as high-drama as you’d expect from a guilt-fuelled movie featuring kids and while it does work without being unbearably manipulative, The Kite Runner still leaves viewers with the sentiment of having seen something unnecessary. Adapted by director Marc Forster (who’s done much better and much worse) from a script by David Benioff from a best-selling novel from Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner checks off most of the boxes of middlebrow popular drama. Ethnic flavour? Yes. Universally applicable themes of guilt and redemption? Sure. Likable actors, faraway setting, adequate directing? Yes, yes, yes. And yet the end product feels manufactured, as safe as its kind of story can be. I expect that everyone’s mileage will vary on this one.

Movie Review

Stay (2005)

ByChristian Sauvé 2017-08-182023-03-14 Movie Review

(On TV, August 2017) From the very first disorienting moments of Stay, what with its first-person sequences, a psychiatrist protagonist and hints of something stranger going on, it’s obvious that this is going to be a twisty thriller. Ewan McGregor stars as a therapist trying to help a troubled young man not to commit suicide, but his probing only reveals more confusion. Meanwhile, Naomi Watts is troubled as his girlfriend and Ryan Gosling, back in his punchable-face pre-Notebook early career, is suitably abrasive as the suicidal student. As the movie goes on, it makes less and less sense and experienced viewers may choose to disembark from the emotional train at this point, suspecting that it’s headed for a crash. The resolution of the film would prove them right, as it conjures up a weak explanation for the film that nonetheless manages to make a mockery out of it, merely one step removed from “it was all a dream.” What a disappointment, coming from director Marc Forster (Stranger than Fiction, World War Z, etc.) and screenwriter David Benioff (Game of Thrones). But what saves the film from complete failure is Forster’s intense stylistic touch, infusing to the film a style that keeps it interesting even as we begin to suspect that it’s narratively hollow. I’d use “Lynchian” carefully, and not as a term of endearment. Small interesting segments do not amount to a satisfying whole, especially when it’s the film meta-narrative conceit that it’s a whole assembled out of fragments. I went into Stay completely cold (as in; unaware of its content) and can’t recommend the experience—like many movies who keep a self-conscious punch for the end, it may best be seen as warm as possible: Read the rather good Wikipedia plot summary first, and then see the film for yourself fully expecting the twist. Maybe it’ll be more satisfying like that.

Movie Review

World War Z (2013)

ByChristian Sauvé 2013-12-272014-01-15 Movie Review

(Video on Demand, December 2013) Historically, zombie films were popular because they allowed filmmakers to do big horror on a small budget: Find yourself a secluded location, a few shambling extras and you had yourself a movie. Now, thanks to the current craze for all thing zombies, a studio can end up spending nearly 200 million dollars to produce a large-scale globe-spanning zombie thriller. With this budget comes the freedom to do things that haven’t been seen over and over again: a wide-screen takeover of an American downtown; a wider-screen zombie fighting sequence set in a middle-eastern city, and zombies taking over an airplane. Add to that a rapid opening and two unsettling visual motifs (raining zombies, and people being thrown to the ground by a CGI zombie jumping from the left edge of the screen) and the result is a zombie film that warrants viewing despite the genre’s overexposure. The quasi-legendary production problem encountered by the film (including star Brad Pitt reportedly not speaking with director Marc Foster and a third act that was completely re-written as the film was shooting, leading to the cutting of an entire large-scale action sequence) are still visible in the more restrained third act, but the result hangs together relatively well, even despite a spectacularly dumb “vaccine” plot running throughout. Brad Pitt is fine as the hero jack-of-all-trades; he escapes unscathed from the film’s more serious issues. World War Z (which, perhaps thankfully, has little to do with Max Brooks’s epochal source novel) is best seen as a collection of four big set-pieces rather than a coherent whole. While one may regret the film’s wasted opportunities to tie those exceptional action sequences to more serious geopolitical themes, as was the case with the original novel, World War Z still manages to fulfill the most basic expectations of viewers, and should be hailed for that. While we all wait for a tenth-anniversary Blu-Ray edition that will unlock the deleted sequences and detail the film’s production problems, unsatisfied viewers will probably want to go read Brooks’ novel for more context and substance.