(In theaters, November 2005) As tempting it may be to excuse this film’s flaws by restating that it’s a kid’s movie, it’s not much of an excuse when comparing the film to any of Pixar’s offerings. The comparison is even more apt considering that Chicken Little is the first film from Disney’s own CGI unit, whcih was set up partly to replace the Mouse’s dependence upon its Pixar distribution agreement. Alas, if Chicken Little occasionally shows moments of charm and wit, the overall film suffers from a bad structure, blatant emotional manipulation and tonal shifts that cumulatively take their toll. One thing that is irreproachable is the quality of the animation and some of the character design: Suburban Oakey Oaks residents are well-patterned after animals, and the sight-gags can be amusing. Sadly, some of those gags seem thrown in the movie without much attention to their surroundings: Chicken Little is filled with individual moments that don’t make much sense in context, especially given how the film doesn’t aim for absurd humour. This ties into the weak structure of the film, which feels padded and meandering; the baseball game sequence is a perfect example of this wobbly structure, clumsily inserted in the rest of the film almost as an excuse to present baseball gags. The soundtrack seems just as forced, providing even cheaper emotional manipulation than the rest of the oft-maudlin screenplay. Fortunately, it all leads to a more focused third act that’s even funnier with fresh memories of War Of The Worlds. But even this late-start burst of energy can’t hide a film that can’t manage to transcend its kiddie audience, much to the dismay of their parents.
Contacting Aliens, David Brin & Kevin Lenagh
Bantam Spectra, 2002, 191 pages, C$22.95 tpb, ISBN 0-553-37796-5
Few Science Fiction universe are as entertaining as David Brin’s “Uplift” series. On one level, it’s a standard galactic-civilizations setting, with plenty of alien races, big ideas, neat gadgets and an inspiring niche for humanity. It’s space opera at its finest, without much relevance to the future as it could be, but compulsively delightful for five of the six books in the series. (I still doze off at the memory of Brightness Reef). Brin is a natural storyteller: his mixture of humour, action and against-all-odds bravado is the stuff of classic SF adventures.
The one bit of background innovation that makes it different from other series is a twist on environmentalist concerns: The galaxy out there, we finally discover once we start poking around the stars, is one big potpourri of related species. An essential part of the series is “Uplift”, the lengthy process by which one species brings another to sentience and full-fledged galactic participation. Every species has been uplifted by another… except, curiously enough, humans. In the series, humans have managed to uplift a number of species (dolphins and chimps, at first) while seemingly being patron-less. You can imagine how well the aliens are taking the news, and which kind of upset this causes in well-mannered galactic society.
Contacting Aliens is, to steal the sub-title, “an illustrated guide to David Brin’s Uplift Universe”, designed as if it was a manual distributed to future agent of humanity as they travel across the galaxy. Galactic history and institutions are sketched, followed by a lengthy bestiary of alien species. Most of those description are accompanied with amusing ink drawings from Kevin Lenagh. The guide is roughly arranged in galactic “family lines”, which prove more related than at first glance. As befitting its billing as a “field guide”, the descriptions are written as coming from Earth’s intelligence agencies, with plenty of tantalizing details, vague suppositions and unanswered questions that agents may want to pursue.
Fans of Brin’s universe will be thrilled at the wealth of details contained in Contacting Aliens. The Uplift universe is vast, dangerous and fun: If this book does one thing very well, it’s to keep up in the same amusing vein as the novels, balancing Brin’s optimistic humour with a thrilling setting that could still launch a series of adventures. (In fact, the book contains two mini-pieces of fiction that raise even more questions about the nature of the Uplift universe.)
While the cover sports a spiffy colour illustration by Jim Burns, the guide itself is illustrated by Kevin Lenagh’s simpler black-and-white ink drawings. While Lenagh does an excellent job at portraying Brin’s wilder inventions, the artwork can often err on the rushed and silly end of things. Some of the human figures are unconvincing and the poses often feel unnatural. But I’m being too harsh, perhaps in comparison with Burns’ work: The guide would be much poorer without Lenagh’s artwork, and the sense of fun from Brin’s writing comes across clearly in the illustrations.
If you’re not already a fan of Brin’s series, Contacting Aliens won’t be as interesting as it should be. Gamers used to reading role-playing source-books will find much familiar ground here (indeed, the book ends on a mention of the Uplift GURPS supplement), but the audience is definitely those readers looking for a little bit more Uplift material after the conclusion of 1998′s Heaven’s Reach. It shows the way to more stories in the Uplift universe and it’s certainly a treat for fans.
[January 2006: Via email, Kevin Lenagh adds that he contributed a substantial amount of text in addition to the illustration. He also clarifies that the book suffered from a number of unfortunate production issues, making the end result somewhat less impressive that he had hoped for. Have a look at lenaghalienfactory.com for better examples of his art, including color versions of some illustrations in Contacting Aliens.]
Web Site Report – October 2005
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, October 2005 Total Visitors: 8,455 Total Pageviews: 16,910 (Corrected Total: 9,988) Total Hits: 19,486 Total Bytes Transferred: 476.9MB Average Visitors Per Day: 272.74 Average Pageviews Per Day: 545.48 (Corrected Average: 322.19) Average Hits Per Day: 628.58
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 higher than last month, but don’t read too much into that — I really got hammered by pok*r referral spam this month, and the corrected total takes that into account.
Our top ten most popular pages are
christian-sauve.com/ 422 christian-sauve.com/texts/free-movie-tickets.htm 251 christian-sauve.com/reviews/movies-2001.htm 157 christian-sauve.com/reviews.html 144 christian-sauve.com/texts/worldcon-2004-noreascon4.htm 140 christian-sauve.com/reviews/movies-1998.htm 126 christian-sauve.com/about.html 125 christian-sauve.com/reviews/movies-2002.htm 124 christian-sauve.com/reviews/index.html 120 christian-sauve.com/texts/summer-films1999a.htm 119
Few changes this month. Movie material continues to be a top draw.
If you care about such things, (and who would not?), here’s a look at browser statistics for the month (by visitors, last month’s results in parentheses):
Explorer|6 3487 (2013) Netscape|6 2874 (2214) Googlebot|2 346 (345) Netscape|2 297 (New) Explorer|5 297 (227)
IE6 regains the top spot, and I’m as amazed as you are at the Top-5 ranking of Netscape|2.
2. Where do these people come from?
Our top five sources of referrals (in visitors) were
google.com/search 812 (621) www.google.ca/search 220 (146) google.co.uk/search 75 (66) yahoo.com/search 71 (69) ask.com/web 64 (65)
One cool new link this month: Peter Watts approvingly links to my review of his short story "A Word for Heathens" by saying "Christian Sauvé called it ‘awe-inspiring in its unremitting pessimism’ in his review, which is one of the nicer things that anyone has ever said about my work."
Alas, The referal log was a source of almost uninterrupted spam.
3. Ohh! Visitor comments!
A few new messages this month:
1. Embarrasingly enough, a reader reports broken links on our Français page. Oups!
2. Another anonymous reader came to christian-sauve.com via my (French-language) essay on Neuromancer (at www.revue-solaris.com) and is satisfied enough to say…
I just read your essay in french called "Neuromancer, vingt ans après".
I just wanted to tell you how I appreciated this.
I just discovered Neuromancer (21 years after it’s first publication) and your essay is a good "etat des lieux".
Gee, thanks!
3. Finally, Nancy from Winnipeg discovered my essay on Eye Laser Surgery and wrote to say…
I’ve spent a few hours reading the internet on PRK and yours was the most informative article from a practical standpoint. (funny, too!)
Hey, I didn’t suffer though it all so that people could be bored and depressed!
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:
>christian sauve x12 >amazon isbn x8 >frank camper x7 >movie sneak previews x7 >solaris explanation x6 >free movie premiere tickets x6 >sauve x5 >free advance movie screenings x5 >carter catastrophe x4 >sneak preview movie tickets x4
Not much to say here.
>being canadian christian suave
I’m flattered that someone would actually look for this, but at least spell the frickin’ name right…
>canada vs sauve
Whoah! This will fuel my paranoid fantasies.
>cartoon robber in black mask taking a sheep pictures
What the…?
>godzilla is better than babe the pig
Interesting…
>naked pictures of monique imes-jackson
Eeek.
>photos christian sauve
They’re my web logs, and they’re freaking me out! (I kid: As it happens, I know exactly who entered this search query and why.)
Until next time, my name is Christian Sauvé and I remain… obsessed by web statistics.