Oprah Whitney

  • A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

    A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, August 2020) There are many ways in which A Wrinkle in Time irritates me. It starts, clearly, with not being part of its target audience. This is a film clearly designed to appeal to teenage girls, a group of which I’ve never been part of. But it’s also self-consciously a fantasy film dressed in science-fiction garb, and I’m of the film belief that you have to play by the rules of SF if you’re hanging in its playground. But it doesn’t—by going for science-fantasy babble ever chance it gets. When the film features people scoffing at the protagonist’s theories, it wants me to feel sorry for them, but I’m rather there thinking, “No, this is actually stupid.” (One notes that the original classic YA novel by Madeleine L’Engle had pretty much the same issues, if not worse.) The dialogue can be overly precious at times, the rhythm of the film is very uneven and even the villains can be cartoonish. Despite basic technobabble about quantum entanglement and such, the film really is a fantasy in which a girl travels to the dark kingdom to rescue a loved one. The mismatch between my expectation of the form and the way it’s executed would normally be enough to put me off the result with a broken suspension of disbelief. In many ways, A Wrinkle in Time feels a lot like the similarly disappointing Tomorrowland, leading me to think that they may be something stupid in the water at Disney Studios. But here’s the thing: Despite all of this, I still have quite a bit of affection for the result. Everything else about A Wrinkle in Time is quite likable. I like Storm Reid as the protagonist, and I think we should make many more movies for young girls. I absolutely enjoyed the casting—if going on a death-defying adventure means having Oprah Whitney, Mandy Kaling and Reese Witherspoon as guardian angels, then sign me up. (Witherspoon gets the chance to be very funny along the way.) Even the supporting actors include likable choices such as Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Michael Peña, Zach Galifianakis and Chris Pine. This is definitely the father in myself speaking, but I really liked the overall message of girl empowerment and positive depiction of father/daughter relationships. The ending wraps things up satisfyingly, and director Ava Duvernay clearly shows a mastery of her craft every step of the way. The now de-rigueur wall-to-wall use of colourful CGI leads to spectacular visuals and, as much as we can use this qualifier on a $100M Disney production, the film does seem to have some earnestness to it. It’s true that I wanted to like the film more than I did. On the other hand, A Wrinkle in Time did manage to keep my sympathy despite flaws that would have destroyed most movies with the very same issues. I strongly suspect that a better film would have moved even farther away from the original L’Engle novel, prompting calls as to why it was even an adaptation.

  • The Color Purple (1985)

    The Color Purple (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2017) I gather that, at the time, seeing Steven Spielberg tackle a serious socially-conscious non-genre period drama such as The Color Purple project was a bit of a novelty. Of course, in retrospect it clearly shows the beginning of an important facet of Spielberg’s filmography all the way to Schindler’s List, Amistad and Lincoln. Has it held up in light of those latter examples? Yes and no. As hard as it can be to criticize a film denouncing injustice, there are times where The Color Purple gets, well, a bit too purple. Repeated scenes of abuse get tiresome, the film moves at languid pace (the victory lap epilogue alone feels as if it takes fifteen minutes) and as similar pictures has never gone out of fashion, I’m not sure the film feels as fresh today as it might have been back then. On the other hand, it is skillfully shot, expansively detailed and it features two terrific debut performances by none other than Oprah Whitney (in a non-too-complimentary role) and Whoopi Goldberg as the main much-abused protagonist. Danny Glover is also remarkable as a repellent antagonist. As for the rest, The Color Purple is about as far from Spielberg’s earlier work as it could be, even though it is thematically consistent with some of his later films—as an attempt to shatter perceptions about what we could do, it seems to have worked splendidly. As for the rest, the film does have a timeless nature—the depiction of the early twentieth century still looks credible, and had the film come out today, chances are that it would have done just as well in the Oscars sweepstake. Obviously best seen by people with an interest in period drama, The Color Purple may not be an easy watch, but it eventually proves its worth.