Robert Loggia

  • Innocent Blood (1992)

    Innocent Blood (1992)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On TV, October 2020) I’m maybe halfway done seeing the John Landis filmography, but what’s left is clearly getting more and more esoteric—documentaries, juvenilia and feature films that have been overlooked next to some of his all-time classics. Innocent Blood dates from the two-third mark of his career, after That Accident and the peak of his fame, but before the steady slide in mediocrity that marked most of his last phase. It certainly feels like such a film—it’s not that good, but it shows flashes of dark humour, wit and confident use of genre elements. Anne Parillaud (then red-hot from her performance in La Femme Nikita) stars as a French vampire living in Pittsburgh and limiting her blood feasts to the undesirable elements of the city. A gang war gives her an excuse to feast (“go for Italian”), but she quickly earns the attention of mobsters and cops alike, accidentally creating a group of vampiric mobsters and falling for a likable policeman (Anthony LaPaglia). Before long, we get a vampire/mobster mashup with a bit of comedy and some romance to top it off. Landis boasted of shooting “A Hammer film as if it was directed by Scorsese” and that’s a fair assessment of the result, although it does fall short of what Scorsese would have done. Still, the rain-slicked city streets of the Pittsburgh downtown core look good, and the film does have its good moments. The usual group of Italian-American actors is there to portray the mob (including a few who would later star in many more mob movies), but the real fun begins once the mobsters turn into vampires and start making plans of their own. Parillaud is slightly stiff but LaPaglia is not bad, and Robert Loggia does bite into his role as an undead godfather. The script could have been streamlined, made funnier and slightly more compelling, but Innocent Blood is still an odd, entertaining film even for those who are jaded about vampire movies.

  • Big (1988)

    Big (1988)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2017) Given its enduring popularity, it seems almost amazing that I’d never seen Big until now. But it’s never too late to see what the fuss is about, and so a first viewing shows that its reputation is well deserved. The story of a boy who wishes he was big and then seeing his wish being fulfilled, Big is, at times, a celebration of boyhood, a fish-out-of-water comedy, a wistful meditation on the responsibilities of adulthood and an unusual romance. It works as a heartwarming comedy, even though some of the implications of “age of consent” are too uncomfortable to contemplate for long. There have been many body-switching movies in which kids have to deal with adulthood, but Big remains a reference because it does try something interesting with the concept—allow the boy hero to actually grow up along the way, and seriously have to choose between staying an adult or returning to childhood. I suspect that I will best appreciate Big the second time around—even though it’s recognizably a comedy from its first few moments, it’s not too clear how bad the experience will be for our protagonist the first time, and the movie does get better once we realize that nothing terrible will happens to him. The film’s biggest asset, of course, is Tom Hanks: His wide-eyed performance as an early teen in a man’s body is filled with well-observed mannerisms, and his latter transformation into something closer to a responsible adult is one of the film’s biggest pleasures. Robert Loggia also has a good turn as an unusually sympathetic boss—the iconic floor-piano sequence still works remarkably well due to a sense of fun shared between those two actors. While Big does have a few unpleasant undertones, it does deal seriously enough with its themes to remain current. Plus, you get top-form Tom Hanks at the beginning of his stardom.