(In theaters, January 2005) As a rabid fan of the first Ghost In The Shell, I had high expectations for the sequel, all of which were dashed. In a bizarro reversal on the strategy of playing up a first film’s strengths, Innocence revels in the first film’s worst traits and forgets nearly everything that made it so good. In a nutshell, Innocence is a simplistic fifteen minute film stretched over more than an hour and a half. The rest of the time is spent spouting nonsense at tediously low bandwidth. While Major Kusanagi is good for a cameo voice appearance, Batou simply isn’t strong enough as a protagonist: He is adrift without a strong anchor, and the hound dog doesn’t cut it. Innocence is not without its good moments; the last fifteen minutes, once the action starts again, is good in ways that remind us of the first film, and some odd scenes here and there (the intro; the barely-coherent convenience store shootout; the repeated sequences) have at least the potential to be interesting. Plot-wise, though, this film is a mess (yeah, just go in and start shooting the Yakuzas… that’ll work), and it doesn’t even try to cover up its worst problems through fast pacing. Worse is the philosophy: Unless something went horribly wrong in translation, you could find more philosophical insights in the third Matrix film (yes, the third) than this one. Yikes; don’t be surprised if the endless droning just drives you to sleep. On the visual front, the CGI is much nicer than in the original film, but the traditional character animation now clashes with the background more than ever, a problem that is only becoming more jarring as animated films keep depending on this half-and-half technique. Go rent the original again and temper your expectations again regarding this sequel.
Cooler, The (2003)
(On DVD, January 2005) Don’t be surprised if you start wondering, twenty minutes in the film, how much more of the protagonist you can take. William H. Macy stars as Bernie, a fantastically unlucky man who works a low-rent Vegas casino as a cooler, a man whose bad luck is so contagious it evens up the odds in favour of the house. As you may suspect, this uninterrupted streak of bad luck doesn’t stop at gambling: Romance is similarly impossible, and there is a basic pathetic quality to Bernie’s existence that overwhelms everything else. Bernie is a loser mostly because he’s never learnt to be anything else, and his trouble start once he begins to turn things around. Stuck with an unbearably evil boss (Alec Baldwin), his budding romance with a friendly waitress (Maria Bello) may be his salvation or his doom… depending on where Lady Luck decides to take him. As with most movies dealing with the element of chance, the plot can often be an accumulation of improbable coincidence. But the film gradually improves out of its initial humdrum beginning, using its low-life Vegas locale to good effect. It’s not a spectacular film (despite odd moments of good direction) nor is it something you’ll start cheering for, but it’s the kind of movie that leaves a good impression once the first act is over.
Bridget Jones 2: The Edge Of Reason (2004)
(In theaters, January 2005) The first rule of happy romantic comedies are that they end at the right moment. There is no rational reason for them to have sequels, given that the ending is already pre-ordained and all you get is ninety minutes of needless complications. What’s worse in this case, however, is that this sequel raises anew the question “What does he see in her?” and fails to offer any good answer. What’s left is a series of “oh, isn’t she adorably stupid!” moments, of which we had quite our share in the first film. Gaah. (And I liked the first film.) Fans of the book will be both pleased and saddened by the considerable changes wreaked on the plot line: No more incompetent handyman, no more interview with Colin Firth, no more uncomfortable suicide attempt. More of Hugh Grant as Daniel Cleaver. More of Colin Firth as the unflappable Mark Darcy. Much more of Renee Zellweger as Bridget Jones. (She looks a lot more curvaceously attractive here, extra pounds and all, than the featureless stick-like waif she played in Chicago.) I suppose that undemanding viewers will enjoy more of the same. For the rest of us, though, enough is quite enough. No reason, no edge either. Hey, who knew Thai prisons were so entertaining?
Lost in a Good Book, Jasper Fforde
NEL, 2002, 372 pages, C$14.99 tpb, ISBN 0-340-73357-8
Jasper Fforde made quite a splash with his 2001 debut novel The Eyre Affair, a dazzling mix of humour, alternate fantasy, thriller and romance in a world where barriers between fiction and reality aren’t quite as solid as anyone would think. This assured debut quickly won him the favour of book-lovers around the world, and the least one can say about the sequel Lost in a Good Book is that it won’t disappoint any of his fans.
Fforde leads us once more into his madcap alternate reality via the narration of detective Thursday Next, a woman of uncommon abilities and unparallelled contacts. Her father is a time-traveller, her colleague is a supernatural slayer and her pet is a dodo. Given that her enemies range from criminal masterminds to the Goliath mega-corporation, it doesn’t take half a book before her husband is erased from history. Next step? Recruitment by a very special policing force and the impending end of all life as we know it.
Oh, yes, all the fun of Fforde’s first novel is to be found in Lost in a Good Book, and much much more. This sequel deals heavily with the reality/fiction transgressions that shined so brightly in the first book, playing well to his established crowd of book-loving readers. Picking up scant weeks after the events of The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book fulfils the first requirements of a good sequel by confronting its protagonist with the consequences of her earlier actions.
Once more, Next has to defy the odds against her and navigate through impossible adventures to make it alive at the end of her novel. What’s new in this volume are her added powers and responsibilities as a junior member of Jurisfiction, an organization dedicated to keeping literature free from tampering. You see, all books in history are kept at the Grand Library, most novels have lives of their own and Jurisfiction is the agency that keeps it all in order…
This particular subplot leads to one of the best scenes in the entire novel: As Next greets her compadres in literary enforcement, she recognizes them easily from classic works. But then…
“Welcome to Norland Park, Miss Next. But tell me, as I am not so conversant with contemporary fiction – what book are you from?”
“I’m not from a book.”
Upon which her interlocutor “looked startled for a moment, then smiled even more politely” [P.265]
Heh. And if you don’t think that’s mildly clever, just wait until Next uses decreasing levels of entropy to her advantage.
But one could quote favourite bits for ages without touching upon how Lost in a Good Book lives up to the expectations raised by its title: There isn’t much in this book that isn’t tons of fun, from the daily details of the protagonist’s life to neat ideas (such as communication through footnotes) and an increasingly sophisticated mythology featuring all, er, creation. Readers should rejoice, because Fforde is writing catnip for bibliomaniacs. (From the title of the third book of the series, The Well of Lost Plots, I’m guessing we’re not done exploring meta-fiction. Particularly absent is the role of the authors in this fictive cosmology, which is probably being kept in reserve for a latter instalment)
This being said, Lost in a Good Book comes with its share of dark moments, characters being eliminated and a finale that is more of a temporary respite than a conclusive victory, suggesting that this is only a middle tome of a continuing series. While few would designate this series as anything but a comedy, I suppose that every character will have to take a few hard knocks until the grand happy ending.
But don’t let this discourage you: If you enjoyed The Eyre Affair, it won’t take much to convince you to race through the rest of Thursday Next’s adventures. I myself am rationing all Fforde Ffiction to one per month, and there are regrettably only two more to go. Know simply this, though: During Lost in a Good Book, I never peeked at the page number to gauge my progress through the book. Not once.
Web Site Report – December 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, December 2004 Total Visitors 5,621 Total Pageviews 13,962 (Corrected Total: 9,943) Total Hits 18,019 Total Bytes Transferred 416.9MB Average Visitors Per Day 181.32 Average Pageviews Per Day 450.38 (Corrected Average: 320.74) Average Hits Per Day 581.25
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 346christian-sauve.com/new-york/day_2.html 229christian-sauve.com/reviews.html 157christian-sauve.com/reviews/movies-1998.htm 146christian-sauve.com/links.html 144christian-sauve.com/texts/free-movie-tickets.htm 137christian-sauve.com/texts/100films.htm 134christian-sauve.com/reviews/movies-1997.htm 130christian-sauve.com/search.html 130christian-sauve.com/texts/worldcon-2004-noreascon4.htm 126
Few changes this month. Movie material continues to be a top draw.
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 2049 (2279)Netscape|6 1309 (New!)Googlebot|2 628 (647) Netscape|5 320 (1014)Explorer|5 314 (366)
Netscape 6′s triumphant arrival on the list indicates not so much FireFox’s increasing popularity (though that’s not something to dismiss), but updated web client definition for the Urchin web stat engine. It’s worth noting that a lot of the Netscape numbers are from spider bots self-identifying as such. (Perhaps to give free numbers to whoever wants IE’s share to go down.)
2. Where do these people come from?
Our top five sources of referrals (in visitors) were
google.com/search 588 (451)yahoo.com/search 191 (213)www.google.ca/search 121 (142)sympatico.msn.ca/results.aspx 104 (156)google.com/imgres 74 (85)
Nothing to report here, if it wasn’t by truly annoying web-referal spam attacks by the morons over at x*py.com, aizz*.com and bl*ginc*me.com. Can’t fool me more than once, guys…
3. Ohh! Visitor comments!
Busy month for the christian-sauve.com mailbox. Here’s the total:
1. Jeff Vandermeer, writer of Veniss Underground, reads my review (briefly: not bad!) and writes…
Hey–thanks for the review of Veniss. I found it frank, honest, and refreshingly free of b.s. or posturing.
Thank you sir.
2. My explanation of SOLARIS (2002) continues to accumulate anonymous raves:
This solaris review is the only reason that I even sort of understand what the heck is going on with that movie. Thanks!
Naw, thank you.
3. A lengthy discussion about how to get free movie tickets followed the following message…
Hi Christian, I was looking at your site, and read what ya wrote and I was wondering how you get an invitation to movie premieres, and was wondering if theres a way I can. (…) Were you at phantom premiere 2 days ago? (it was great) Also you know when are some upcoming premiere dates for NYC (or way to see)?
…which made me realize that I really dropped out of the free-movie-tickets game since 2001.
Needless to say, very few of what I have to say about getting free tickets in circa-2001 Ottawa is even remotely applicable to movie-mecca NYC.
4. Yet another writer saw it fit to use my comment form to drop me a press release hyping their newest book. Sorry, not interested. (And no free publicity for you, sir!)
5. Finally, a mysterious and pseudonymous colleague wrote to suggest…
I’d like to see you review more foreign cinema. Especially your thoughts on the works of Fassbinder and Kaurismaki. Have you ever seen good anime such as Miyazaki and Takahata? A must for film buffs.
…which sounds like a set of pretty good recommendations to me. Here’s to increased movie literary in 2005!
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)
Here are our top-ten queries:
solaris explanation 15solaris explained 9solaris movie explanation 9losing weight 7amazon bookmarklet 5frank camper 4free movie screenings 4how to get free movie tickets 4monique sparvieri 4sauve 4
Few surprises here.
>claustrophobic googolplexes
There’s poetry in these two words. Or maybe just a googlewhack.
>cute redhead christian screenwriter
Suddenly, i’m curious: can there be more than, say, half a dozen people on the planet qualifying for this search query?
Until next time, my name is Christian Sauvé and I remain… obsessed by web statistics.