Year: 2001

  • U.S. Marshals (1998)

    U.S. Marshals (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2001) Serviceable chase film starring Tommy Lee Jones and Wesley Snipes. Several twists and turns, most of which can be seen well in advance, including a traitor that every one can identify from first appearance onward. The directing is average, save for an exceptional long take detailing the aftermath of a plane crash. Some wholly unnecessary scenes and characters, like “the girlfriend” and the opening sequence, burden the film with unnecessary elements. A few adequate action scenes. It’ll do if there’s nothing else on TV. Otherwise, don’t bother.

  • Sugar & Spice (2001)

    Sugar & Spice (2001)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2001) Any film that appears in the middle of January and sinks without a trace has got to be complete trash or a pleasant surprise. Such is Sugar & Spice, not a classic by any mean but a conveniently amusing comedy with a sharper sarcastic edge that you might have expected from the trailers. The low budget and deficient technical qualities (the first half-hour is marred by an inaudible sound mix) are disappointing, and so’s the quick ending, but the rest is good enough. Don’t expect much and you won’t be disappointed.

  • Wasn’t the future wonderful?, Tim Onosko

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dutton Paperback, 1979, 188 pages, C$12.95 tpb, ISBN 0-525-47551-6

    Save for the occasional odd SF paperback, most of the books reviewed in these chronicles are easily available from libraries or used bookstores. Anything that makes it up to frosty Ottawa, Ontario can probably be acquired anywhere else in North America, so I feel safe in not boring my readers with arcane material or, worse, whipping them up in a frenzy about some obscure book they’ll never find.

    So it pains me to have to rave about a full-page coffee-table paperback published in the late seventies. Most certainly long out of print, presumably unfindable by casual readers, Wasn’t the Future Wonderful? is nevertheless a must-read, a definite curio for anyone interested in social change, science-fiction, history, futurism or what I’d call innovation management.

    Subtitled A View of Trends and Technology from the 1930s, Wasn’t the Future Wonderful? is simply a collection of the most outrageous articles published by “Popular Mechanics”-type magazines during the 1930s, wrapped in an introduction and a few follow-up notes.

    It doesn’t sound like much, a reprint of musty old mags, but when you encounter such grandiose headlines as “Explaining technocracy: A revolution without bloodshed”, “Airport in the Heart of a City Provided by Logical Design”, “Big Cities to Have COOLED Sidewalks”, “The Great Wall of China to be Motor Highway” or “Science Shows NOISE Causes Indigestion”, there’s bound to be more than nostalgic interest.

    Each article is accompanied by superb illustrations that are often more interesting than the articles themselves. As only full plates are reprinted, some pages -such as an article by the great Nikola Tesla himself- are adorned by flavor-of-the-time advertisements. Tires for $2!

    In any case, it’s certainly fascinating to peer at what the forward-thinkers of the 1930s were planning for the future. Granted, many things came to pass (like television), but in almost all cases, the end result was realized using much different means, and with far different consequences, than the idealized version.

    But it’s for the futures that never happened that Wasn’t the Future Wonderful? becomes fascinating. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the fields of large-scale engineering, where dozens of gargantuan schemes (an air-protection installation inside London, a fighter-jet skyscraper dwarfing the Eiffel tower, six-level highways, plans to radically modify intersections, etc…) are proposed without any regard as to who would want such a thing. Wasn’t the Future Wonderful? then becomes an exercise in how -or why- some things just aren’t practical.

    Granted, Popular Mechanics probably wasn’t the orthodox view of the nineteen thirties, but was it so different from today’s “Major new breakthrough!” articles published on a daily basis in our newspapers? Predictions might be more restrained, more subtle today, but it doesn’t mean they’re better, or more accurate.

    The book concludes with a wonderful article entitled “Most Scientific Fiction CAN’T COME TRUE”, in which such wacko schemes as teleportation, travels to the moon or radio signals to Mars are relentlessly debunked. I hope they’re as right about teleportation as everything else.

    In any case, Wasn’t the future wonderful? is a wonderful book, filled with surprises and unusually good at giving a sense of technical perspective. Teachers could use it to develop scientific literacy. SF Writers could use it as a guide to non-silly prediction. Artists could use it to acquire a sense of realistic craziness. Everyone else can use it to spark discussion, jog those little gray cells or simply have a good time. It’s a fun book. Bring it back in print!

  • Say It Isn’t So (2001)

    Say It Isn’t So (2001)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2001) Well, the age of the gross-out comedy is upon us, and as if it wasn’t enough that almost all of them are There’s Something About Mary ripoffs, what really makes’em stink is that they’re just not funny. I mean, who could reasonably greenlight a comedy about incest featuring mutilation and poking fun at amputees? No small wonder the film elicits only a few forced groaners and quickly sank at the box-office. It doesn’t help that Heather Graham is upstaged in the looks department by the “other woman” character (who’s in barely three scenes), and that Chris Klein is one of the blandest romantic protagonist imaginable. (He’s interesting for maybe five minutes, during which he sports a slacker haircut that disappears almost immediately.) Unfunny, unfocused, exasperating by its willingness to always go for the obvious gross-out, Say It isn’t so unfortunately is. A leading contender for worst-of-year title.

  • Riddler’s Moon (1998)

    Riddler’s Moon (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, March 2001) Weak, slow-paced, cheap-looking made-for-TV film. Concerns a handicapped hero, a drunk father figure, a squeaky-voiced single mother (Kate Mulgrew, in-between Star Trek Voyager episodes), dumb rednecks and an extraterrestrial relic buried underground. If you fall asleep during the film, you’ll have the good fortune to miss the idiotic ending, where the rednecks help, the father-figure gets together with the single mother, the kid gets cured… oh, and everyone else’s memory gets erased for no good reason. Hm, now that you know the ending, there isn’t much point in seeing it, right? Combines fluffy science-fantasy with the low production values of a low-budged TV film to create the ultimate in cinematic irrelevance! On the other hand, it is one of the few rural SF stories I can recall. One point for originality.

  • Miss Congeniality (2000)

    Miss Congeniality (2000)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2001) Sandra Bullock has always projected a girl-next-door image, even in her tougher roles, but films that have taken full advantage of that duality have been few and far between. Since Speed, her career has been filled with wrong vehicles (28 Days, Forces Of Nature), half-successes (Demolition Man) or films no one wants to discuss again (Speed 2). But she really gets to show her stuff with Miss Congeniality, as an “ugly” FBI agent forced to undergo a complete makeup in order to compete in a Beauty Pageant. Girls will love the fantasy; guys will simply drool over seeing her in Lederhosen, bikini and evening gown in a short thirty-minutes stretch. The rest of the film is paint-by-number fish-out-of-water scripting, with few surprises but sustained fun from start to end. Not bad.

  • Mad Max (1979)

    Mad Max (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2001) Worth seeing out of historical interest, but that’s it. Doing wonders on a very low budget, this first effort by George Miller starts with a very good car chase whose energy level is sadly not surpassed anywhere later in the film. The middle section is a predictable bore, as it laboriously sets up a revenge story whose shocker comes only fifteen minute before the end of the film. A young Mel Gibson stars, looking a lot like the popular stereotype of a gay porn star. Interestingly enough, the whole post-apocalyptic thematic of the two sequels is nearly undetectable in this first film, as much a consequence of the low-budget than a lack of imagination at that stage. Often unintentionally ridiculous by its lack of funds and polish.

  • The Genesis Code, John Case [Pseudonym]

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ballantine, 1997, 467 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-345-42231-7

    I love thrillers. I read dozens of ’em per year. Naturally, I now demand more that the simple obvious plots to get me interested. The days when I could get excited about a simple governmental conspiracy are long past, unfortunately; now, if it doesn’t involve at least the mafia, the Girl Scouts and the flat-earth society, I don’t even bother reading past page 100.

    I jest, and yet I find some plots, character and situation too clichéd to be tolerable. I demand to be surprised by the author, even at the expense of realism if appropriate. If I can predict the course of a novel when I’m not even halfway through, it means someone’s not doing his job, and even though I could be wrong, I don’t think it’s me.

    So, whenever The Genesis Code opens up with an Italian priest going gonzo after hearing a confession from a highly-rated doctor, it doesn’t even take the DNA helix on the cover to figure out where this is going. Whenever the said doctor exhibits an interest in genetics and religious artifacts, it only confirms suspicions. By the time a link is uncovered between deceased women and a cute kid comes in, it’s a lot like being hit in the head repeatedly by clue-by-fours.

    Unfortunately, exhibiting all the gosh-wowedness of a first-time novelist, “John Case” (it’s a pseudonym) keeps hammering it up until the last sentence, which laboriously demonstrate what we’d been expecting for a while. In terms of surprises and originality, The Genesis Code rates as a solid, tedious dud. I’ve seen the idea explained more interestingly in several science-fiction short stories. Often.

    The flaws don’t stop there; the plot is constructed in such a way that one major character really only comes into the novel in the last third, feeling somewhat like an intruder. Many scenes drag on for far too long. The bad guys are unkillable. There’s a cute kid.

    But despite everything, The Genesis Code remains a modest success, mostly because it does what it does in a reasonably efficient fashion. The pacing moves quickly past its lulls and the writing style is all very readable. The characters are adequately defined. I was quite taken with the description of an order of elite, unstoppable Catholic assassins even though that particular concept, again, isn’t totally new.

    And in the end, it’s the old things well-described that make up most of The Genesis Code‘s definitive interest. We’re told that “John Case” is a pseudonym for an investigative journalist (though, from the laudatory passage on tabloid newspapers -see P.348 and P.362-, we can safely guess that he’s not exactly working at the Washington Post.) and his professionnalism shows in the amount of well-presented details that bolster the credibility of the novel’s mechanics. The protagonist is a security consultant, and his action do reflect this mindset, as does his investigative methodology. The more scientific/technical details also seem credible.

    Even though you might guess the end fifty pages in and see many passages as being needlessly long, there’s seldom a reason to stop reading. Granted, this doesn’t make The Genesis Code a remarkable thriller, but at the very least it won’t you make curse the (short) time you’ll spend reading it. And, who knows, maybe you won’t be jaded enough to guess the ending after a few pages.

  • Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

    Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2001) Seeing all three Mad Max successively can be a curious experience, as the scope of each film increases dramatically each time, with lavisher sets, better technical directing and a more polished script each time. This third film opens with a helicopter shot (!) and features sets with hundreds. Despite the enjoyable “Thunderdome” sequence, it’s a mistake to keep the Mad Max character (Mel Gibson, looking a lot like a long-haired George Clooney) off his natural element; the road. Tina Turner is gorgeous, almost worth by herself the time to see the film.

  • Mad Max 2 [The Road Warrior] (1981)

    Mad Max 2 [The Road Warrior] (1981)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2001) Much better sequel to the original film, this time taking the post-apocalyptic motif to an extreme that would be replicated in countless imitators. Obviously made with a higher budget that the prequel, and with considerably more assurance: The end action scene is a bona-fide classical sequence. Mel Gibson here looks like Russell Crowe in a career-defining bad-ass role. A shame that the script couldn’t have been more polished, because there’s a long middle stretch, and the dialogue (especially the villains’) is unintentionally hilarious. Definitely worth a rental for action fans, though. First film well-summarized in the first few minutes of the sequel.

  • Enemy At The Gates (2001)

    Enemy At The Gates (2001)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2001) The battle for Stalingrad ranks as one of the most dramatic stories of World War 2, and it was about time for a big-budget film to be made on the subject. That it ends up starring high-powered actors like Jude Law, Joseph Fiennes and the incomparable Ed Harris is just icing on the cake. The opening sequence is gripping, as is graphically shows brand-new recruits being thrown in a battle where each side can shoot at them. The rest of the film is mostly good, though by the end an ordinary love story threatens to topple the whole film. Any other film can and does include the requisite romance, so couldn’t we focus on Stalingrad some more? In any case, the images are gripping, the action scenes work well and while the cat-and-mouse game between opposing snipers could have been more focused, there’s enough of it to be satisfying. A good film made less special by a tacked-upon romance, Enemy At The Gates still stands as the first good film of 2001.

  • Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000)

    Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2001) Once in a while, there comes a film so mind-boggingly odd that it’s a wonder it got made. That’s exactly Dude, Where’s My Car?, a delightful absurdist science-fiction comedy that’s so good that it might be hard to acknowledge the fact that it eventually has to end. You wouldn’t expect a film about two slackers trying to find their car to be so inventive, but it just keeps building to better jokes. It’s goofy, good-natured, hilarious, without an ounce of pretension and with a surprising lack of gross-out gags so prevalent in current comedies. I laughed like an idiot and predict a wide cult following. Sweet!

    (Second viewing, On DVD, August 2001) It’s remarkably easy to dismiss this film as being nothing more than a stupid stoner teen comedy, but look closer and you’ll change your mind. Oh, I’m not saying it’s smart-disguised-as-silly, but there is a considerable amount of clever go-for-broke gleefulness in the way the film just marches on and boldly goes places you just don’t expect. It’s not only a blast on a second viewing, but on the third too. The DVD includes some pointless “extended scenes” you might be hard-pressed to distinguish from the originals. I also features an audio commentary track that’s a trip of its own: It starts off in mid-laugh, continues incoherently for a few minutes, breaks off as one of them goes get beers (or goes to the bathroom) and generally presents a picture of the film being a perfect accident where serendipity had at least as big a role to play as the screenwriter. Still, it doesn’t change my mind; the film is a great little comedy with many delightful moments. See it! It’s underrated!

  • Nobel Dreams, Gary Taubes

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Random House, 1986, 261 pages, C$25.00 hc, ISBN 0-394-54503-6

    Popular clichés are prompt to paint scientists as emotionless creatures purely concerned by the pursuit of knowledge, so intellectually driven that they can make abstraction of the petty human emotions shared by The Rest Of Us.

    That, of course, is wrong. Scientists are human beings like everyone else, and the intellectual drone only existed in movies (if he wasn’t mad, like most other movie scientists). They laugh, scream and shout just as much as you and I, and matters get less and less purely intellectual when you try to stuff hundreds of scientists at the same place.

    Even though now somewhat dated, there are few books that do a better job at representing conflicts between scientists than Nobel Dreams, a nonfiction book about a quest for subatomic particles, a huge subterranean ring in Geneva and a scientist named Carlos Rubbia.

    The root of Nobel Dreams‘s interest lies in the intrinsic nature of a type of scientific experiments grouped under the term “Big Science”. Contrarily to scientific endeavours that can be accomplished by a single researcher or a small group of experimenters, Big Science requires massive equipments, large teams and carefully orchestrated logistics. It’s not only hugely expensive, but it requires a massive administrative and logistical effort. Particle research, because of the enormous energies it requires to operate, has been a Big Science poster child since World War II (which featured the most emblematic Big Science effort ever in project Manhattan) and Nobel Dreams is partly an examination of such an experiment and the groundwork required for a Nobel-prize-winning success.

    To this end, science journalist Gary Taubes spent time in CERN, the European high-energy physics center, getting to know the personalities and issues involved in the discovery of the W and Z particle. All of it would have been a drier, less interesting exposé if it hadn’t been for the lighting-rod personality of Carlos Rubbia, a formidable scientist with a massive ego and an abrasive personality. Reading Nobel Dreams, we get a taste of the implacable politics inherent in running Big Science experiments, where scientific concerns take a back seat to power imperatives. Running those experiment takes money -the root of all that’s interesting- and considerable charisma, especially when dealing with a multi-national workforces composed of highly skilled, highly obstinate theorists and experimenters.

    It’s a story of beating-the-other-team, of personal friction and petty vindictiveness. It’s a story of brilliance and arrogance, of self-sacrifice and personal vanity. It’s a story of victory (the W and the Z) and defeat (the latter, less successful, experiments to prove super-symmetry). But over all, it’s a great bunch of stories about a set of jobs that aren’t very well understood by a great many people.

    There are, inevitably, flaws: While Taubes makes a great effort at vulgarizing his subject, there are still a few thick patches of jargon. Worse; even though the structure of the book is rather clear, it doesn’t include an index, making it nearly useless for references purposes. And, predictably enough for a book already fifteen years old, it’s difficult for laymen to know whether the suppositions advanced in Nobel Dreams are still valid, and if the people involved went on to other better things.

    (Well, was difficult to know earlier. Today, with the magic of the Internet search engines, it’s relatively easy to find out that Gary Taubes is still writing acclaimed scientific vulgarization, that the Higgs hasn’t yet been conclusively identified and that Carlos Rubbia hasn’t disappeared from the planet even though he most definitely hasn’t won a second Nobel. It’s also really easy to find out that Nobel Dreams itself has earned a good reputation in the field of science nonfiction.)

    In any case, the true value of Nobel Dreams is to uncover some of the less idealistic side of science; how humans, with all their faults, are still very much at the heart of science. And that, even while reading about despicable behaviour, is still a very comforting thought.

  • Lodestar, Michael Flynn

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2000, 365 pages, C$35.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-86137-0

    I like to think that there’s an unspoken contract between author and reader, going well beyond any financial transaction possibly taking place. While the reader is willing to give out several hours’ worth of time and concentration, the author, in return, has to ensure that our investment is well spent. The book has to be entertaining, enlightening, educative or engaging, and preferably all that at once. See it as a coldly Return-On-Investment equation influenced by our materialistic culture or not, but most of us would rather read good books than bad.

    This unspoken bond becomes more important as the length of the story increases. A bad short story remains a bad short story, but at least the most you’ll spend on it is a few minutes. But a bad trilogy will set your reading back for weeks, and the complete run of the Dune series will take a few months to even the fastest readers, with ever-diminishing returns.

    The first book in Michael Flynn’s as-of-yet-untitled future history, Firestar, was a lengthy bore for several reasons, running from rampant naive libertarianism to endless setups to a comatic pace to unlikeable characters. Some liked it, but others just wished it went somewhere.

    The second volume, Rogue Star, was much better. A nice pure-SF curveball coupled to some long-awaited payoffs and a more involving story all contributed at a much stronger volume. Even the characters seemed to do something interesting… and it all lead to a spiffy conclusion.

    The third volume of the story (which doesn’t seem to be a trilogy) is a stunningly dull return to the first volume’s flaws, except that this time we can’t very well blame it on the need to define the characters.

    A lot of the book’s 350+ pages is taken with a cyber-war that is not only long and tired, but also useless as most information gleaned during this episode could easily be revealed far more efficiently. The redundancy of this scenario, and the laboriousness with which most points are made, is emblematic of Flynn’s approach to the series. Whereas a snappy writer could have compressed the first volume to a few paragraphs and trimmed at least half the second volume, Flynn is just content with writing on and on and on. Lodestar could be resumed in a chapters and few would see the difference.

    But no. Flynn is writing a future history, with all the extra smothering of extra realism-through-exhaustion that implies. He did his research, it shows, and the reader suffers from it.

    It’s not as if I don’t want this story to be told; I think that Flynn is on to something, that his hundred-odd cast of characters and his willingness to detail everything is admirable. But he needs not only an editor with a chainsaw, but also a keyboard that sends electric shocks at each page break. As it stands, Lodestar is a pure waste of time, a sideway trip that doesn’t really advance the overall story.

    (Nowhere is this better illustrated by the cover art, which represents a foreshadowing dream sequence near the end of the book, itself a preview for the fourth (fifth?) book in the series. If, like me, you saw the cover and intuited a sizeable jump between the second and third volume, then wait for the next one to come out.)

    If ever you find yourself in a bookstore with your hands on Lodestar and an irresistible urge to find out what happens next in the series, read the very good epilogue, which tells you everything you need to know about the book. Then proceed directly to the next book.

    If you haven’t started the series, don’t. Not only will you waste your time, but it looks as Firestar will be obsolete before the last volume is published.

    It might be that Flynn needs money. It might be that we’re in for the “Trek-Movie curse” of odd-volumes-suck, even-volumes-rock. It might be that Flynn simply doesn’t care. But it’s certainly a breach of the unspoken contract between author and reader to read 350+ pages in a series book… to find out that nothing really happens.

  • The Fifth Horseman, Larry Collins & Dominique Lapierre

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 1980, 478 pages, C$15.00 hc, ISBN 0-671-24316-0

    Regular readers of these reviews know that I’m a big fan of techno-thrillers. I usually associate this fondness to the same impulses that push me toward hard-Science Fiction and nonfiction books; a craving to understand the world, and to play with rigorous “what-if” scenarios.

    Techno-thrillers were formally defined as a genre by the mega-success of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, which not only told an engrossing yarn of intrigue and action, but did so with a quasi-documentary style that took delight in pointing out fascinating facts to the reader even as the story went along. It wasn’t the first techno-thriller, nor even the first bestselling techno-thriller, but it became something of a publishing watershed.

    Historians of the genre, even casual ones like myself, can take delight in unearthing earlier works in the same genre. Michael Crichton’s first thrillers (The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man, most famously) certainly fit the mold, as do other popular novels of the Seventies.

    While, technically speaking, The Fifth Horseman misses the Seventies by only a few months, there’s no doubt that it’s a strong contender as a primary source of influence for the genre. It’s got everything that latter techno-thriller would use; a dastardly terrorist plot concocted by an enemy leader; military hardware; international scope; police procedural work; a whole stable of characters at all levels of society; ever-decreasing odds; nick-of-time escapes; limpid writing; and, perhaps most distinctly, a love and flair for details. Israeli airplanes don’t simply depart to bomb an enemy country: We follow the whole process, from political decision-making to locked vaults with activation codes to pilot scramble to the actual flying. Improperly handled, if makes for lethargic writing, but properly used -like here- it brings extra levels of suspense and verisimilitude to the story.

    This extends to using real characters as cameos or antagonists. While most current writers would be content with using a faceless dictator from some unnamed country, Lapierrre and Collins don’t shy away from naming Qaddafi as the bad guy, even providing substantial dialogue, psychological profiling and internal monologue!

    Oh, the book isn’t a complete success: The characters aren’t equally interesting (for each dynamic mayor Abe Stern or street-smart policeman Angelo Rocchia, there’s a useless Whalid Dajani or weaselly Patrick Cornedeau.) and not every subplot is equally interesting. (The French subplots, for instance, were probably more useful to Dominique Lapierre than to readers of the past twenty years.) The readership of 1980 being relatively unfamiliar with techno-thriller conventions, there is maybe a tad too much explaining. And when you compare The Fifth Horseman‘s relatively simple find-the-bomb plot with the sophistication of some of the latter techno-thrillers, it’s hard to be impressed.

    But keep in mind that the book already has a fifth of a century, and that it remarkably hasn’t aged a lot since. The decision to focus on a terrorist threat rather than a Cold War intrigue helps a lot, as is the nature of the threat; somehow, even though the equipment currently used by NEST is probably far more sophisticated, I don’t think that finding a nuclear bomb in New York today would be any easier today…

    All in all, The Fifth Horseman still works well, and not only as a historical curio. It was a good thriller and remains so today. Students and fans of the genre will get an extra value out of reading it, but casual reader shouldn’t feel cheated either.