Tcheky Karyo

  • The Gravedancers (2006)

    The Gravedancers (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2021) You would think that a steady diet of mediocre horror film would be a terrible thing, but it’s actually not too bad in recalibrating expectations. After getting used to the lower common denominator, anything that even inches its way above minimum competence is good enough. So it is that The Gravedancers doesn’t seem particularly promising at first — another story about three young people breaking taboos (in this case, dancing in a graveyard — haven’t they ever seen a horror movie before?) and getting supernaturally punished for it. But the execution does have something going for it; the plot isn’t as linear as we’d think (hello, ghosthunters; what’s that, an evil ghosthunter? ) and there’s even a welcome surprise in seeing Tchéky Karyo in a supporting role. The third act goes get quite a bit better, leading to a better finish than anyone would have expected from the slow first act. The Gravedancers is not that good, but it is better than average and at this point that’s what I’m looking for.

  • Addicted to Love (1997)

    Addicted to Love (1997)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, December 2015)  I heard about Addicted to Love long before it showed up on my noteworthy-films-of-1997-that-I’d-missed list.  This is, after all, the one where America’s-Sweetheart Meg Ryan ends up playing a short-haired psycho stalker with a fondness for riding motorcycles and making a reference to “a blast of semen”.  This is the one where Matthew Broderick turns out to be an equally-obsessed psycho stalker who can’t let an ex-girlfriend go and instead lives into an abandoned building next to her apartment to keep a constant eye on her.  This is the film where their characters team up to destroy the life of two rather nice people in the hope that they’ll either suffer or crawl back to them.  (I’m sure there’s a fantastic essay somewhere on the web that explains this film’s ludicrousness in excruciating details.)  Romantic comedy?  So it claims.  The bigger problem, though, is that Addicted to Love shows signs that if could have been much edgier, but deliberately holds back.  Did Ryan and/or Broderick impose limits on how dark their characters could be?  Did the script fall into the hands of a director unwilling or unable to follow the story where it need to go?  Did the screenwriter lose his nerve?  I’m not sure and while the result on-screen plays considerably better than what you’d expect from the above summary, there’s a sense that it doesn’t go as deep as it needs to.  Still, what we get is interesting enough: There’s some inventiveness to the light/voyeurism motif (the protagonist is an astronomer and one of the film’s big gadgets is a camera obscura), some of the scenes are crazy enough to be funny, Tcheky Karyo is good as the nominal antagonist of the piece (yet a more mature character than everyone else) and the film predictably wraps up with a big happy romantic bow.  Addicted to Love is not too bad, but it’s not quite what it could have been.  For a 1997 film, though, it doe still have some interest, especially considering how it plays off Meg Ryan’s once-unassailable persona as a romantic ingénue.