Renee Zellweger

  • Same Kind of Different as Me (2017)

    Same Kind of Different as Me (2017)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) When it comes to films such as Same Kind of Different as Me, I’m not sure where the line is between a familiar collection of clichés and a heartfelt inspirational drama. I’m not inclined to be kind, though. Seemingly aimed at the white suburban set, it features an upper-middle-class couple (he’s an art dealer; she’s apparently a philanthropic gadfly) going through some marital troubles and trying to change things up by volunteering at a local homeless shelter. That’s when they meet a surly, violent black man who, in the end, will teach them valuable lessons about life, love and everything else. It’s far too easy to be cynical about movies in which a poor black person serves as a vehicle for the enlightenment of its white protagonists, but apparently that’s still acceptable — better yet, it’s apparently unassailable considering that it’s based on true events. Still, Hollywood takes control of the story here, and every moment seems maximized for maximum sentimentalism. The result is too manipulative to be any interesting, making the rather good cast (Greg Kinnear and a strange-faced Renée Zellweger as the white couple; a far better Djimon Hounsou as the homeless man) stick out. It’s an utterly familiar kind of Hollywood film — a film that you can leave playing while you leave the room for a few minutes, and come back knowing exactly what happened while you were away. The third act gets increasingly weepy for anyone except jaded movie reviewers. It’s all quite cloying and repetitive, especially in comparison to other similar movies. It’s cleanly directed by Michael Carney, at least, but you’d have to look for a while before finding any compelling reason to watch this particular take on a mildly obnoxious kind of story.

  • New in Town (2009)

    New in Town (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, November 2020) It doesn’t take more than five minutes for New in Town to establish without ambiguity that it fully intends to follow the most obvious of romantic comedy formulas. As a young ambitious urban executive (Renee Zellweger, at the end of her pouty-squinty period) is transplanted from Miami to Minnesota to take over an underperforming manufacturing plan, she meets-cute the union shop steward and falls under the irresistible spell of the local community. You can write the rest of the script yourself, so little surprise does it contain—at one point, you can scream, “show me the tapioca!” and be richly rewarded by a close-up of said tapioca bowl in a fridge. It’s that kind of film. The same film produced ten years later could have gone political, but this one seems content with spouting off feel-good homilies about small towns, the heartwarming nature of tough winters and the evils of hands-on corporate ownership. Zellweger is not bad in the lead role, although Siobhan Fallon Hogan has a plum role here as the voice of the locals, and Harry Connick Jr. plays the love interest with a decent amount of charm. Don’t get your hopes up in hoping for a militant union film, though — this one scrupulously avoids anything beyond the usual bromides of dubious corporate overlords versus hardworking Midwestern folks… and only the strict minimum at that. New in Town wears its adherence to formula as a badge of honour, so it’s not really clever or insightful to point out how predictable it can be—the real fun of the film is in the set-pieces (such as how to survive being stuck in a snowstorm), the atmosphere of a small snowbound town (it was shot near Winnipeg, Canada) and some of the expected plot points. It’s perhaps best seen as cinematic wallpaper—something to put in the background, fit to be picked up ever few minutes as the film plays on a strictly predictable schedule.

  • The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre aka Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995)

    The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre aka Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) Nearly every actor has a few regrets in the hungry days of their filmography, and some movies benefit from being those regrets—raising their profile far above what they would have been without those subsequently big-name actors. The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre had no less than two of them, enough so that it would, within two years, be re-edited, retitled and re-released as Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation to capitalize on the sudden stardom of Matthew McConaughey and Renee Zellweger. Nothing but regional luck explains this dual pairing: The film was a low-production affair that scoured the Austin acting scene to find its actors, and both were newcomers looking for any kind of work. Zellweger does look cute in glasses as a young woman preyed upon by a family of killers on Texas backwoods roads. McConaughey plays against type as a younger member of that family that also includes include a deceptively normal-looking realtor as bait (the attractive Tonie Perensky). What could have been just a forgettable and generic plot soon turns bizarre (and worse) when the usual teenager-versus-hillbilly-psychos dynamic somehow comes to include links to a secret society (???) involved in the JFK assassination (!!!) as represented by a snappily dressed man in a limousine (?!!) who just drops by the house to have a look around (??!) Even the legacy of the Texas Chainsaw series (and I use the expression lightly, not being a fan of it) is severely undermined by Leatherface being an incredibly inept opponent reduced to being in drag and screaming helplessly. Thankfully, this family eats pizza rather than humans, but that’s just one more thing that comes to confound those expecting a continuation to the series. I, personally, don’t care about the Texas Chainsaw premise at all, so I’m enjoying a reaction to the film similar to that of Halloween III—the more they desecrate the series’ mythos, the more I’m enjoying the put-down. Still, subverting expectations isn’t a virtue by itself, and much of Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation is just tedious. Occasionally interesting for watching McConaughey and baby-faced Zellweger in such schlock, intermittently intriguing for undermining the entire series, but otherwise not really worth the effort.

  • Empire Records (1995)

    Empire Records (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2020) I started watching Empire Records without great hopes, expecting that I’d go do something else while it played. But I ended up unexpectedly captivated by the result. It’s not much of a movie in strictly conventional terms: Structured as a day-in-the-life of record store employees (albeit on the store’s last day as an independent, as they also host a major 1980s singer), it’s a mixture of various short subplots thrown together around a common setting. But there’s quite a bit of charm to the result—and even more now as a time capsule of what it could have felt like to work in a record store in the mid-1990s. As befits the setting, Empire Records has a wall-to-wall soundtrack of 1990s alternative music, and it sounds even better today than back then. The script has a pleasant rhythm to it, with some characters inhabiting a slightly different reality from the others—at least two of them have a special relationship with the fourth wall, leading to some of the film’s funniest moments. Other characters have their own far more conventional dramas, and the ensemble show the fun dynamics of a close-knit group. The cast is remarkable for featuring early appearances by some actors who would go on to better things. Robin Tunney and Liv Tyler are both eye-catching enough, but the out-of-persona surprise here is probably Renée Zellweger as a promiscuous teenager. Empire Records is all slight but good fun, although I suspect that my age (I was twenty in 1995) has something to do with it. [January 2025: It’s funny what sticks in mind from a film, and five years later my favourite quote from the film is still “Empire Records, open ’till midnight, this is Mark. (beat) Midnight.”]

  • Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016)

    Bridget Jones’s Baby (2016)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2017) I really liked the first Bridget Jones’s Diary, but as someone who believes that romantic comedies should never have sequels, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason didn’t impress as much, and I’m even less enthusiastic about Bridget Jones’s Baby. This third film of the series has additional issues in that it takes place much, much later—so late, in fact, that what was adorably goofball behaviour by Bridget Jones in her twenties now seems a bit sad and unbecoming to someone in her forties. The youthful charm of the character has worn extremely thin and reviving a romantic triangle (involving uncertain paternity, no less) in that context seems more desperate than amusing. Those objections duly noted (and acknowledging that Zellweger, in growing older, seems to have become far more generic an actress), Bridget Jones’s Baby remains a mildly enjoyable piece of romantic comedy. The plot cheats are egregious, the humiliation comedy gets old, the ultimate issue is rarely in doubt. But parts of it are fun, the script is intermittently self-aware, Colin Firth is dependably good, Ed Sheeran shows up in a cute cameo and Zellweger can still pull at masculine protective heartstrings. On the other hand, let’s not pretend that this third entry in the series does anything but coast on the merits of its predecessors, and is likely destined to “third movie in the series bundle” status within a few years, never to be sold as anything but part of the DVD set. I’d ask the series to stop now before Bridget Jones’s Toddler, but I’m really not confident that anyone will listen.