Rae Dawn Chong

Pegasus vs Chimera (2017)

ByChristian Sauvé 2020-05-212025-04-29 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, May 2020) As a male who gazes, I can tell you that one of the worst things about the male gaze from a practitioner’s perspective is the avalanche of terrible stuff that you have to endure in order to see what you really want to gaze at. Take, hah, Pegasus vs Chimera. It’s an absolutely terrible fantasy film that weakly regurgitates genre clichés through some of the worst possible execution. It’s a blender mix of fantasy tropes badly imagined and severely limited by bargain-basement production values. It has it all, and by all I mean: weak script, incompetent direction, substandard acting, dull music, cheap sets, unconvincing costumed and uninteresting visuals. Think about any single aspect of filmmaking, and this film underperforms at it. The actors are so uniformly terrible (Mimi Kuzyk, in particular) that anyone will have to blame director John Bradshaw for such a shoddy job. But I was expecting all of this. Pegasus vs Chimera is, after all, a Showcase original TV movie with CanCon credentials (i.e.: shot in Canada using a Canadian crew, thus qualifying for minimum Canadian content requirements for cable TV channels) and those don’t usually fly high. So, there’s the question: Why did I start and persist in watching this? Three words: Rae Dawn Chong, one of the loveliest icons of the 1980s. I wanted to see how she was doing these days, and she doesn’t disappoint: she looks fantastic, and her acting is marginally better than most of the actors. But was it really worth the aggravation of the rest of Pegasus vs Chimera? Those who criticize the male gaze are all missing one thing: the truly dumb stuff that we would be doing if we were not gazing.

Movie Review

Beat Street (1984)

ByChristian Sauvé 2019-09-102023-03-19 Movie Review

(On Cable TV, September 2019) There isn’t a lot to the plot or characters of Beat Street that we haven’t seen since then—this weakly plotted musical comedy follows the adventures of a few Bronx teenagers as they dance, beat box, DJ, tag and create music. But the plot or characters aren’t the point—the point is to showcase early-New York rap and breakdancing, as the film’s plot is structured in a way to feature such sequences. The result is a wonderful time capsule of early hip-hop, featuring plenty of names that even casual fans such as myself can recognize: Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, Kool Moe Dee. There’s a lot here that prefigures later looks at hip-hop—including a dance battle sequence that feels like the prototype for the entire Step Up series. The actors themselves are passable—although Rae Dawn Chong looks great here. Not every moment works (I’m not so happy about the graffiti sequences, for instance, and the more conventional dramatic beats feel overwhelmed by the dance and music sequences) but as a time capsule movie, Beat Street is definitely worth a look.

Movie Review

Commando (1985)

ByChristian Sauvé 2016-09-012017-03-09 Movie Review

(On TV, September 2016) I had managed to avoid seeing Commando until now, and it strikes me that this is exactly the kind of movie they’re talking about when they’re talking about generic 1980s action movies. This is the archetypical one: eighties atmosphere, straightforward plot, ho-hum action sequences, a pre-prime Arnold Schwarzenegger (physically impressive, hugely charismatic but not yet comfortable as an actor or taking full advantage of his persona) and Regan-era politics—or whatever passes for them. This, I’ll hasten to clarify, doesn’t make Commando any good. In fact, it’s terrible in many ways: from the get-go, in which a father-daughter-bonding sequence seems to skirt self-parody, this is a film directed without grace or deeper ambition: It simply moves from one generic action sequence to the next without smoothing over the inanity of its plot points. Schwarzenegger’s acting is not good, the lovely Rae Dawn Chong is asked to deliver some rotten lines, Vernon Wells does the best he can in a ridiculous character … and so on. Clunky, naïve and unpolished, it’s a wonder why Commando has endured even today. But, of course, it has Schwarzenegger, a clever succession of chases and explosions, and just enough substance to matter even as other similar movies have disappeared in time. The pacing moves at a breakneck speed, to the point where it’s hard to begrudge anything to a film that wraps up neatly within 90 minutes. Commando is a template more than a film, but—wow—was it ever imitated afterwards. Consider it a lesson in whether it’s better to do something good or memorable.