(In theaters, December 2004) It’s always a pleasure to see Martin Scorsese at work again, and he does much to please both fans and general audiences with this Howard Hughes biography. Leonardo DeCaprio may not be such a good casting choice as Hughes (he look too frail and, later, far too young), but his performance is impressive. Mogul in most sense of the terms, the historical figure of Hughes is unequalled when it comes to the richness of available dramatic material: His love life was a parade of celebrities, his legal battles were legendary and his personal problems were, shall we say, gigantic. The Aviator is seldom as absorbing as when it races through Hugues’ good days as a fascination with Hollywood leads him to a life-long passion for airplanes and then on to the civil aviation business. The script has its weaknesses, but they’re often paved over by a Casino-strength Scorsese ably assisted by top-notch editing. The Aviator runs into repetitive sequences later on, as Hugues’ descent in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders gets the better of a grander-than-life character. Many sequences then run too long, and keep on making a point long after which it’s been understood. (Ironically, the film focuses too much on Hughes’ disorders to give a more complete picture of his personality as a businessman, a playboy and an inventor: I wonder if it hadn’t been better to stick to the accepted chronology of Hughes’ life, in which his worst OCD episodes developed much later in life) Still, The Aviator still leaves an impression of superior film-making. Blame Cate Blanchett, whose dynamite interpretation of Katharine Hepburn deserves both an Oscar and a separate biopic of its own. (Kate Beckinsale’s Ava Gardner is also quite good, but Gwen Stephani is over-hyped as Jean Harlow) Blame the seamless visual effects. Blame the Beverly Hills crash sequence, itself a spectacular action scene. Blame the lavish production. But perhaps best of all, blame a director who understands how to portray a character who finds deep joy while flying in a film titled, indeed, The Aviator.
America (The Book), The Daily Show (and Jon Stewart) presents…
Warner, 2004, 227 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-446-53268-1
Reading America (The Book), I kept flashing back to historian J. Barlett Brebner’s saying that “Americans are benevolently ignorant about Canada, while Canadians are malevolently well informed about the United States.” I mean; here I am, good little Canadian, reading a parody of an American civics book and laughing at American politics as if they were my own.
But when you’re in a country sharing a border with the elephant known as the United States of America, there’s not much of a choice: We Canadians know that even the slightest American tremor will have repercussions everywhere else in the world, starting here. Watching America isn’t just a Canadian pastime rivalling hockey: it’s sheer national self-defence. The USA may not care too much about Canada, but we’re still the ones getting shoved around when the elephant gets prickly.
Hence our national amusement at TV shows like The Daily Show, a blistering look at American politics front beneath a veneer of silly humour and parody. Hence (I imagine) the good sales figures of an America-centric humour book north of the 49th parallel. Some of us know the American political process better than most US citizens. Part of our national pride (I hate to say) is based on not being part of it.
What the writers of America (The Book) intended was a picture-perfect parody of your usual Civic Education textbook, down to the full-colour hard cover case binding, wide layout and abundant use of photo clip art. There’s even class exercises and a topical supplement covering the 2004 presidential election. Physically, it’s a wonderful design job. Fortunately, the content is up to the presentation.
America (The Book) is a sarcastic look at the American political process, from its historical origins (“For purposes of this chapter, ‘person’ still means ‘white males’ up until 1870, then ‘males’ until 1920, then ‘all people but really still just white people’ until 1964” [P.62]) to its current implementation. There’s usually one or two good gags per page, and two or three audible laughs per chapter.
But as you may guess, it’s not all gags and giggles for the masterminds writing the book: America (The Book) is at the same time a sharp criticism of the less-salient aspects of the US political process, starting with the influence of lobbyists, the way amendments are grafted upon unrelated bills and the structural factors discouraging anything but a two-party system. There’s plenty of serious material in the book, as long as you’re willing to see past the jokes. (Sometimes, you don’t even need to: The pixelicious “Third Party Graveyard” [P.110-111] is worth framing by itself.)
Ironically (or not), the only let-down offered by America (The Book) happens once it starts looking outside its borders. Canada is gratified with recurring and appropriately self-depreciative “Would You Mind If I Told You How We Do It In Canada?” segments, but passages like “All governmental business is conducted in both French and English, because a small minority of Canadians, called ‘Québécois’, never wanted to learn English, and we thought it was rude to ask them to.” [P.59] don’t exactly betray a witty understanding of the situation. Still, it a comfort to realize that all other countries fare worse; Chapter 9 (“The Rest of the World: International House of Horror”) tries to satirize the appalling isolationism of some Americans, but it merely comes across as a lamer, less funny section. Oh well. Also worth noting as a weaker element is the appearance of some Daily Show regular characters, an inclusion that could puzzle readers who aren’t familiar with the TV show.
But never mind the above: as self-effacing Canadians, we’re just grateful to be able to buy your wonderful books and find mentions of our country in them. It would never occur to us to have the nerve and write, in bold capitals, FOR THE SAKE OF YOUR DEMOCRACY AND THE FATE OF THE REST OF THE WORLD, BUY THIS BOOK AND UNDERSTAND THE POINTS IT’S TRYING TO MAKE BEFORE YOUR BIPOLAR POLITICAL DISORDER ENDS UP LEADING TO THE DEATH OF THOUSANDS OF INNOCENT FOREIGNERS!!!
Oh no. Never. We’ll just read the book and laugh respectfully. Tee-hee.
Web Site Report – November 2004
Here are the monthly highlights for christian-sauve.com:
1. Mmm. Numbers…
My prickly “Urchin” web stats engine tells me that…
Report for: christian-sauve.com, November 2004 Total Visitors 5,103 Total Pageviews 12,679 (Corrected Total: 8,859) Average Pageviews Per Day 422.63 (Corrected Average: 295.3) Total Hits 17,112 Total Bytes Transferred 403.3MB Average Visitors Per Day 170.1 Average Hits Per Day 570.4
The “corrected” numbers take out the CSS, robots.txt, PDFs, mis-filed graphic files (ICO, GIF, JPG) and other non-public files mistakenly considered “pages” by the statistics pre-digestion engine. All results are a bit higher than last month.
In any case, our top ten most popular pages are
christian-sauve.com/index.html 317christian-sauve.com/reviews/movies-1998.htm 244christian-sauve.com/new-york/day_2.html 195christian-sauve.com/texts/free-movie-tickets.htm 152christian-sauve.com/reviews/movies-2001.htm 142christian-sauve.com/reviews.html 141christian-sauve.com/links.html 125christian-sauve.com/reviews/movies-2002.htm 125christian-sauve.com/novel/index.html 120christian-sauve.com/texts/worldcon-2004-noreascon4.htm 117
The NaNoWriMo blog was a draw this month. My Noreascon 4 report continues to attract attention. Movie stuff completes the list.
If you care about such things, (who would not?), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors, last month’s results in parentheses):
Explorer|6 2279 (2331) Netscape|5 1014 (1095) Googlebot|2 647 (421) Explorer|5 366 (246) NaverBot 1.0 146 (New)
Not much to report here.
2. Where do these people come from?
Our top five sources of referrals (in visitors) were
google.com/search 451 (488) yahoo.com/search 213 (199) sympatico.msn.ca/results.aspx 156 (146) www.google.ca/search 142 (116) google.com/imgres 85 (77)
Google seems to be losing steam these days.
3. Ohh! Visitor comments!
Interesting month for the christian-sauve.com mailbox. Here’s the total:
1. Mike, from Switzerland, writes…
I just found your page in the hope to find something about proto profiling, a type of neurolinguistic programming NLP (Brain- and behaviour research). It should be a subject of one of your texts, but because there are so freakin’ many, I thought it’s a lot faster to ask you where to find it, because if somebody knows it, then you!
… and here’s my reply:
Thanks for writing. Unfortunately, my only instance of “proto-profiling” refers, as you have found, to the early criminal profiling method described in Caleb Carr’s novel The Alienist. From what I can gather about “neurolinguistic programming” through sources like wikipedia it does seems like a field I’d be interested in.
Alas, there isn’t much on my web site to help you. Apart from reviews of some general business creativity books, Douglas Rushkoff’s highly interesting treatise on persuation and a sarcastic take on Dianetics (which you could very well disregard) there isn’t much related content on my web site yet. Sorry for not being more helpful, but I have a novel to get back to…
2. A mysterious and tenacious R.W. wrote to ask…
I am searching the title of a movie realisation 2003 subject: the operation “eagle claw” in the desert of Iran in 1980 the operation was conducted by COLONEL CHARLES BECKWITH from the DELTA FORCE.
Being reasonably well-informed about Eagle Claw (the 1980 Iranian hostage rescue mission, which failed thanks to poor planning and an unbelievable series of mishaps), I really really tried to find a movie about it that I would have missed. Unfortunately, latter details suggested that we were looking for a 2003 movie that featured the hostage crisis, but wasn’t dedicated to it. (It was for a contest of some sort, I gather.) After much fun research, I came to the conclusion that the movie in question was the sports drama MIRACLE, which briefly used the hostage crisis as part of its background. If someone else has a better idea, contact me.
3. …and we cap the month by an empty email. Okay. Better than nothing, I guess.
4. Search Queries Oddities
(This being the section in which we take a look at the search engine queries used by various visitors to find christian-sauve.com)
Before going into the “Top Ten” queries, let me briefly note that one fine November day of 2004, I received nearly a hundred hits from variations on the query “What is the name of Chris Nielsen’s daughter in the 1998 movie WHAT DREAMS MAY COME”. (The answer, courtesy of the IMDB, is “Marie Nielsen”, played by Jessica Brooks Grant). Quiz challenge going on somewhere else on the Internet? Well, duh.
Also, unnamed porn-bot was back with the usual assortment of search queries about naked celebrities:
nude scenes featuring brittany murphy 2 nude scenes featuring catherine zeta-jones 4 nude scenes featuring dina meyer 3 nude scenes featuring elizabeth berkley 2 nude scenes featuring heather graham 2 nude scenes featuring julia roberts 1 nude scenes featuring kirsten dunst 6 nude scenes featuring marisa miller 7 nude scenes featuring penelope cruz 2 nude scenes featuring sandra bullock 1 nude scenes featuring shannyn sossamon 9 nude scenes featuring sophie marceau 4 nude scenes featuring vin diesel 11
This being said (and all such queries excluded), here are our top-ten queries:
solaris explanation 11 symbolism in edward scissorhands 8 losing weight 7 solaris explained 6 edward scissorhands symbolism 5 amazon bookmarklet 4 christian sauve 4 that bringas woman 4 being canadian 3 christian movie review 3
Few surprises here.
>movies lists are no good for conservative christians
It’s too easy to make fun of queries like that.
>gabrielle is a robot from riaa you can't fight against her
Beyond simply “what the heck does that mean?!”, I’m completely fascinated by this odd query. It evokes teen rebellion against terminator-style IP rights enforcement and suggests universes far beyond the scope of eleven words.
>austin powers the poet who never behaved
Oddly amusing!
>a promising new technology is described in luscious detail and then exploited for
Interestingly enough, if you feed the above query into a search engine, it takes you directly to my review of Michael Crichton’s Prey, which includes the run-on sentence “Once again, a promising new technology (nanotechnology, to be precise) is meticulously described in luscious detail, and then exploited for cheap thrills as everything goes wrong, protagonists are threatened and the survival of the world is at stake.” How does one random Joe J. Surfer end up entering that particular search query? My best guess is that “random” Joe J. Surfer would, in fact, be a high-school teacher checking an unusually well-written student review for plagiarism and… finding the original. Busted, sucker!
Until next time, my name is Christian Sauvé and I remain… obsessed by web statistics.