Neve Campbell

  • Hot Air (2018)

    Hot Air (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) Considering the United States currently charged political climate, fomented by shameless media outlets for which truth takes a backseat to profits, it’s almost inevitable that we would get Hot Air, a dramatic comedy featuring a blowhard conservative radio personality challenged by the unexpected arrival of a hitherto estranged but very progressive teenage niece. The two best things going for the film are its lead acting duo—Taylor Russell is very likable as the niece, but it’s Steve Coogan who gets most of the attention at the radio host: he looks the part, but clearly wants to puncture the façade presented here. Much of Hot Air does poke at the “man who learns better” trope, while not going too emotional about it. The highlight of the film is a long screed from host to public that nods toward Network and does have its moments (among them “You elect a deranged conman just to see what happens!”) but does strip hollow the contradiction between the film’s premise and its execution. To put it simply, Hot Air wants to play with political divisions, but stops short of being political about it: it’s all platitudes and homilies disarming any attempt at taking a true position on its premise. It misdirects and brings the focus to personal epiphanies, while ignoring the uglier political climate in which it’s supposed to take place. The show goes on and still the film tries to make us believe in a context that no longer exists in American culture: Anyone outside US borders will recognize that the political conversation going on since 2016 isn’t between feel-good mushy notions of liberalism versus conservatism, but reason against full-blown authoritarian craziness. Your average American right-wing radio host appealing to a crazed base has nothing to do with the one played by Coogan here, and so Hot Air seems to be trivializing its topic to the point of having nothing to say—which would be completely acceptable for many kinds of films, but not one that explicitly courts audiences with a political premise. I may be part of the problem in ringing a five-bell alarm over what’s happening right now and wishing for more substantial denunciations of a toxic right-wing, but the current situation is not tenable, and I can point to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths to prove my point. Oh, I still liked Hot Air—Cooghan and Russell and Neve Campbell are giving it what they’ve got, and the film does everything that it wants to do in its carefully delimited audience-friendly way. But right now, in the gaslit interregnum between Presidents 45 and 46, I’m more irritated at anyone still claiming to be on the fence.

  • Skyscraper (2018)

    Skyscraper (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2019) If you want a look at the state of the blockbuster film at the end of the 2010s, it would be hard to do better than Skyscraper. Featuring Dwayne Johnson as a security expert working to protect a massive high-rise building in Hong Kong, it works on familiar elements on and off the screen. When a character in the film proudly claims, “Chinese Money, American Know-how!,” they could just as well be talking about today’s Hollywood, with Asian money financing Hollywood films doing their best to appease Chinese censors just to have a chance at playing to a billion Chinese moviegoers. It wouldn’t simply do for our hero to battle terrorists in a building: Skyscraper adds wild science fictional threats and sticks the hero’s family in the building to heighten the stakes. It’s also cribbing from the most popular screenwriting books of the moment in other ways: The first fifteen minutes (once past the prologue) are a non-stop carnival of plot devices exposition: pay attention, because there will be a test later on. Johnson and writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber have a nice working relationship after working together on Central intelligence, and the film is clearly designed to play to his strengths. It’s also fun to see Neve Campbell back in the blockbuster field after nearly a decade of lower-profile pursuits and a parental break. Filled to the brim with top-notch special effects, Skyscraper feels obligated to throw in futuristic plot devices and IT nonsense, including a hall-of-mirrors sequence that takes Orson Welles’s original concept one step further for better or for worse. While the plot elements are familiar, Skyscraper’s execution is competent enough in its genre to be an average blockbuster action film. However, it’s pretty much all soulless … which practically guarantees that it will disappear without a trace once the marketing money runs out.

  • 54 (1998)

    54 (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, August 2015)  What is it about the Disco era that makes every single historical film about it feel so… dour?  Was it the way it imploded upon itself in a few months?  Was it that it gave way to the AIDS era?  I’m not sure, but there are a lot of disco-themed films, from Funkytown to Party Monster and Discopath, that ultimately show Disco as a false front for existential emptiness.  All of this throat-clearing is meant to say that 54 still stands strong as pretty much the same fall-from-grace narrative, wistfully recalling an era of excess before taking it all away from the lead character.  It feels very, extremely, completely familiar as a nominal protagonist played by Ryan Phillippe discovers Disco at the famed Studio 54, befriends plenty of interesting people, and then becomes completely disillusioned about it all.  Two or three things still save the film from terminal mediocrity: First is obviously the period recreation, especially early on when we discover the excesses of Studio 54 at the same time as our protagonist does.  Then there are a few performances worth talking about.  Neve Campbell was on the cusp of superstardom in 1998, and her role here plays off of that then-popularity.  Salma Hayek has an early-stardom role as a signer that makes an impression.  This being said, the film’s best and most affecting performance is Mike Myers’ decidedly dramatic turn as Studio 54’s owner, a sad role with a terrific scene set on a money-covered bed.  Myers has never done anything half as dramatically powerful since then, and it’s with the same kind of sadness that we can look at 54 more than fifteen years later, measuring it against the end of the Disco Era’s promises of non-stop fun.  The film itself may struggle to distinguish itself, but it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have one or two redeeming qualities.

  • Scream 4 (2011)

    Scream 4 (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2012) Absence is supposed to make the heart grow fonder, but what if you still loathe what comes back after a lengthy hiatus?  The eleven-year gap between Scream 3 and Scream 4 means that the last film emerges at a time where the original trilogy has become a nostalgic footnote in the horror genre, but one thing hasn’t changed: It’s just as unpleasant to watch a film in which a quasi-infallible serial killer goes around killing innocent people.  No amount of post-modern ironic meta-commentary can save that genre out of its dead-end hole, and within moments of the opening segment (which, in retrospect, manages to foreshadow the film’s ending) I found my opinion of the film racing in negative territory and my interest wandering elsewhere.  I’m now comfortably out of the demographics that enjoys extended murder sequences, and there isn’t much more to this latest entry in the Scream series.  The one thing I kind-of-liked is the now-unusual feel of the film as a depiction of an alternate-universe America where every character is a high-schooler living in expensive houses without adult supervision.  There’s something quaintly charming and pleasant (in a wish-fulfillment sense) about those lives, and it’s really too bad that they have to come complete with a supernaturally swift knife-wielding psycho.  Of the actors stuck in this wholly useless film, I can only say that it’s good to see Neve Campbell again, and that of the younger actors, Hayden Panettiere is the most captivating as the short-haired sarcastic Kirby.  Otherwise, I can’t even muster any enthusiasm about this limp Scream 4.  The only thing that deserves to be killed here is the psycho-killer genre.

  • The Craft (1996)

    The Craft (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 1998) Rather more pleasant than I had expected. Granted, the first half-hour of this tale of teen witches is long and tedious as the standard oppressed-teens-take-revenge- on-their-oppressors plot is set up and we go through all the expected scenes of outcast-being-laughed-at, babe-being-courted and nasty-people-doing-nasty-things-to-heroine. It’s after that boring setup, however, when things go past the simple revenge fantasy, that things get interesting. Granted, it never quite goes beyond the “okay entertainment” stage, but despite sloppy screenwriting (threads being abandoned in mid-flight, spring-loaded character evolution, one-to-one climax that leaves other characters neglected), the result is more than expected. Special Effects are nice and in-between leads such as Robin Tunney, Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell and Rachel True, The Craft is always interesting to look at.