Year: 2005

  • Hostage (2005)

    Hostage (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2005) There isn’t much that is remarkable in this Bruce Willis film, if not for the fact that it brings to mind about half a dozen similarly unremarkable films in Willis’ career. Bland villains, by-the-number developments, pedestrian directing, somber cinematography: Without the big-name headliner, this could have been a straight-to-video release and few would have noticed. The gritty cinematography is annoying, but not as much as the lack of involvement with the characters. Daddy is a mob accountant and the bad people are teenage hoodlums: why is it difficult to care about these people? Even Willis is more of an enigma than a hero. Oh, there are a few quirks here and there, but almost nothing here comes to the level of The Negotiator, to name another relatively recent hostage-rescue drama. Made to fill the shelves of your local video-club, this film acceptably competent, but just that and no more.

  • Crush Depth, Joe Buff

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2002, 449 pages, C$37.95 hc, ISBN 0-06-000964-0

    By now, Joe Buff fans should know what to expect from his third novel. Cutting-edge near-future submarine warfare. Shaky grasp of story-telling techniques. An absence of political complexity. A story that emerges out of the water mid-way through, to conclude with yet another duel between submarines. At least Joe Buff is getting better with every following book, though Crush Depth doesn’t show the same stark improvement that set Thunder in the Deep apart from the debut Deep Sound Channel. In fact, it’s such a small improvement that some readers may come to question why they’re reading the entire series.

    For it is obviously a series, and there’s no hope that it will conclude anytime soon. Buff is slated to write nearly a dozen novels in the “Jeffrey Fuller” universe, each one describing a campaign in a fictional near-future war opposing English-speaking Allies to a new Germany-led Axis. In this third book, captain Jan ter Horst and XO Gunther van Gelder both return from the first novel, while our stalwart hero Jeffrey Fuller must once again go head-to-head against enemies that are as smart as he is. Plot-wise, that’s all you need to know: You can infer the structure of the novel from Buff’s previous ones: There will be a submarine fight, a terrestrial raid and another submarine fight. One wonders if all twelve Fuller books will suffer from the same structure.

    What’s new here is a land-bound prologue in which Fuller and series love interest Ilse Reebeck tour a wartime New York city. Unfortunately, this segment only highlights how Buff’s political sense comes nowhere near his expertise in military affairs. What becomes obvious is that Buff is merely using his future history to re-fight “The Good War”: Wartime New York suffers from rationing and plays big-band music as if it had escaped from a romantic WW2 film, whereas the big bad Germans are only one snappy salute short of being total Nazis. Given the pacifist learnings of real-world Germany, let’s just say that a German civil war is more likely than them presenting a credible challenge to the Anglo-speaking power bloc. Buff constantly tries to hand-wave “nuclear weapons!” as the big equalizer, but that excuse doesn’t excuse much given, once again, the anti-nuclear forces at work within Germany these days. (Don’t try to make me believe that massive executions would resolve that problem.)

    The political unlikeliness at the root of Buff’s future history have always been problematic, but it becomes even more so as the series advance and Crush Depth, for instance, suggests an escalation of warfare from countries lining up against the US. Now, I would pay good money for a military thriller in which the US was the antagonist that a righteous alliance of nations would try to contain (heck, we’re already half-way there today), but somehow I don’t think that this is what Buff has in mind. (Wouldn’t it be a fantastic twist, though?) Oh well, onward, what with tactical nuclear weapons raining down on our protagonists like so many cheap fireworks.

    Buff’s strength has been in portraying submarine warfare as a complex interrelationship between psychological, military, oceanographic and technological factors. While the degree of innovation is smaller in Crush Depth than in the series’s previous two volumes, there are still a number of good ideas and scenes here and there. Particularly noteworthy is a third act taking place under the Antarctic Ross Ice Shelf, though the final conclusion seems weak after all the build-up leading to it.

    In terms of story-telling, Buff is still improving, though he still has a way to go before delivering a novel that can be enjoyed by laypersons: There are a number of hilariously unconvincing dramatic blunders in Crush Depth, including the clumsy introduction of Fuller’s father (“I haven’t thought about my father in months because I don’t like him… wait… who’s that man at the urinal? It’s my father!”) and a fake death that just isn’t unconvincing (no one will buy in it), but doesn’t even make sense in the internal logic of the series.

    Given that even this type of stuff represents an improvement over the previous novels, you can see why I’m sceptical as to whether I’ll ever truly enjoy one of Buff’s novels. I happened to have the first three books on my shelves, but now that I’m done with them, it’ll be a challenge to convince myself to pick up the follow-up Tidal Rip. Maybe at a used book sale. Provided it’s really, really cheap.

  • Elf (2003)

    Elf (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2005) There are two movies warring for attention here: An innocent kid’s film about the meaning of Christmas through the antics of an elf lost in New York, and a silly comedy that has to please the adult fans of Will Ferrell. No surprise, then, if the film gives out such a mixed impression. Parts of it work, but they come from different films. Ferrell is sweetness incarnate as the Elf lost in New York, but Elf is equal part amusement and embarrassment as he’s confronted with the very grown-up streets of New York City. The romance and the last-act thriller may have worked in other contexts, but here they just feel forced and badly integrated to a kid’s film. Not entirely pleasant to watch nor particularly funny, Elf exists in a demimonde of conflicting goals. Only Ferrell’s compelling performance saves it from complete disinterest.

  • De-Lovely (2004)

    De-Lovely (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2005) I’ve never been able to let bad wordplay stand in the way of a nuanced review, and so I can’t help but write: De-Lovely is De-Boring. Granted, I know next to nothing about Cole Porter, but it’s not this tepid musical biography that will make me rush to know more. Granted, I did like some of the staging and the way some numbers were integrated into the overall story. But then the music starts and I can’t muster much enthusiasm for the types of show tunes Porter was known for. The framing device can’t do much to counter-act the increasingly wearying impact of the film, which runs about half an hour too long and gets less and less interesting as Porter’s life goes by. (“Just die already!” becomes the rallying cry in my living room) I suppose that devotees of musicals will get a kick out of it; as for myself, this movie just can’t make me care. Which is ironic because when you take a look at all the good material that’s stuffed in this film, you’d expect much better.

  • Dawn Of The Dead (2004)

    Dawn Of The Dead (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2005) Now that’s how you make a zombie film. Re-inventing absolutely nothing and taking no ironic distance to its material, this entry in the undead sub-genre nevertheless manages to deliver the requisite amount of bloodshed, action and grim humour that is required of such movies. Director Zack Snyder knows what he’s doing, moves the story along at a decent clip and does surprising things with an average script by James Gunn. While there are numerous wasted opportunities (the satiric bite of the original film, for instance, has been completely eradicated), too many annoying characters and only occasional flashes of wit, Dawn Of The Dead at least fulfils the basic requirements of zombie film. “Shoot’em in the head” has seldom been more graphic than its depiction here. Stay during the credits for the full story. The DVD includes many, many extra features.

  • Something Rotten, Jasper Fforde

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Hodder & Stoughton, 2004, 393 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 0-340-83827-2

    There’s something rotten in the state of England. Fortunately, Thursday Next is back on the case, two years after the events of The Well of Lost Plots. As Something Rotten begins, the twin pressures of Jurisfiction leadership and homesickness are getting to her: After a problem in a genre Western is solved in an entirely unsatisfactory fashion, she decides to get out of the Bookworld, come back to Swinton and finally get her eradicated husband back.

    This fourth book in the Thursday Next series is meant to be a conclusion of sorts to the series, and so a whole bunch of errant plot threads are tied back together one after another in the madcap fashion by now so familiar to Fforde fans. Something Rotten reaches back all the way to The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book for references and in-jokes, successfully concluding the series. (Maybe.)

    This being said, there’s enough new material here to keep everyone interested. Next doesn’t come back alone from the Bookworld. For one thing, her infant son (Friday Next, of course) comes back with her, giving rise to all sorts of complicated situations of which finding day care is the least difficult. For another, she’s shepherding Hamlet as he visits the real world to assess his own reputation. This wouldn’t be a Fforde novel without tons of subplots, so you can also expect Thursday Next to confront assassins, coach a cricket team, save the world, team up with agent Spike for another supernatural adventure, get news from her deceased time-travelling father, deal with Neanderthals, find cloned Shakespeares, deal with the Goliath corporation and fight the evil Yorrick Kaine. Whew!

    Given the depth and complexity of Fforde’s imagined universe as developed over the first three books, I can’t imagine how a new reader would react at the sight of all this stuff. But for faithful fans of the series, Something Rotten is pure gold. Fforde doesn’t necessarily preclude further volumes in the series (you can even see hooks for something called The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco buried into the plot-line of the novel), but we should be grateful that he’s willing to bow out in style. After setting most of The Well of Lost Plots in the fictional Bookworld, Fforde wisely re-sets Something Rotten to take place almost entirely is Next’s “Real World”. It gains in plausibility, but loses in invention. While it would be an exaggeration to say that the world of Thursday Next has gotten boring, it’s true that it doesn’t offer as much that’s completely new.

    Still, Swinton is a pleasant place to visit, and the fevered pace of Fforde’s invention is almost as manic as in the previous books. What’s more, it even finds a very dramatic ending that deftly balances real emotion and amusing slapstick. Also included is gentle political satire (as Denmark is designated as the root of all evil as part of a dastardly plan by Yorrick Kaine), the usual typographical finds (here, a historical figure speaking in Gothic fonts) and two or three revelations about the characters’ future. All told, Something Rotten is just as readable, just as enjoyable and just as amusing as the first three books of the series, giving form to a quartet that’s well worth recommending to every ardent reader on your Christmas list.

    With this, a natural end to the Thursday Next series, Fforde and ffans find themselves at a branching point: The author surely has some other universes to create, but it remains to be seen whether he’ll allow his readers to box him into a narrow series of books that is perhaps best left complete. We’ll see: His next book, The Big Over Easy, is supposed to be a stand-alone book. Better a singleton than overcooking a series which, at this time, seems to have reached its potential.

  • City Of Angels (1998)

    City Of Angels (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2005) It would be too easy to dismiss City Of Angels as romantic clap-trap about angels, impossible fairytale romance and cheap existential questions. It would be even easier to dismiss the film as a slow-moving morass of fabricated sentiment with an unclear mythology and a script that couldn’t be more obvious if it included subtitles about the screenwriter’s intentions. But to do so would be to ignore, unfairly, the delicious frisson of wonder at some of the film’s visuals: The “angels” watching over Los Angeles like so many dark crows. The idea that angels hang out at libraries (oh, c’mon; even stone-cold atheists would like this one to be true). The handful of scenes that make you go “hey… that’s nice.” Dennis Franz’s performance as a fallen angel who has learnt to appreciate life. Granted, in order to get to these things you have to suffer through love scenes between Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage. (Ergh.) And possibly fast-forward through chunks of the film. And certainly try not to giggle at the splat-ending, or the contrived death scenes. But even cynics may find two or three things worth keeping about this film, and that’s almost two or three more than they would expect.

  • Beauty Shop (2005)

    Beauty Shop (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2005) This second spin-off of the surprise hit Barbershop dilutes the formula so much and treats it with such contempt that you’ll have a hard time seeing it as anything better than a fluffy comedy. Queen Latifah is often irritating as a protagonist who doubles as the film’s most racist character (seriously, why bring the “coloured” word in discussions that have nothing to do with it?). The supporting characters aren’t much better as the whole range of black stereotypes are exploited without a moment’s worth of self-reflexion. Heck, the entire female gender is exploited without a moment’s self-reflexion: It may be nice and all to see bootyology elevated to a science, but curvy actresses aren’t much of a relief when the script they have is so bad. It’s not just the bad jokes as much as the lame plot, the awful coincidences and the dumb characters. Suuure, the annoying vid-kid just happens to catch a payoff between the antagonist and the city inspector (both white). Suuure, the beauty shop just happens to be underneath an electrician’s apartment, an electrician who just happens to be handsome, single, artistic and non-threatening. Suuure, the client who walks though the door in a panic just happens to be a famous radio DJ. Such plot cheats are unforgivable, and it’s not just a white/black, male/female thing: Dumb is dumb, lazy is lazy and even my panting fascination for Andie McDowell has its limits.

  • Call of the Mall, Paco Underhill

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 2004, 227 pages, C$37.10 hc, ISBN 0-7432-3591-6

    After explaining Why We Buy, retail naturalist Paco Underhill sets his sights on shopping malls in Call of the Mall, his second book on the nature of today’s shopping environment. Focused and dramatized through fictive conversations with fellow mall-goers, this follow-up on “the science of shopping” is both a retread and an improvement on the previous book.

    Successfully structured as “a day in the mall with Paco Underhill”, Call of the Mall examines the modern institution known as the shopping mall from a variety of aspects, from retail to architecture, security to wilful inaccessibility. In doing so, Underhill shows what’s wrong with malls and why they’re doomed to failure. But don’t take this book for what it’s not: Neither scientific textbook nor anti-capitalistic screed, Call of the Mall is just as focused as Why We Buy on improving the performance of stores, sometimes at the shoppers’ expense and sometimes not.

    To give you an idea of how Underhill approaches his subject, consider that he doesn’t take us inside a mall until Chapter 5: In the meantime, he discusses what malls are (a real estate business more than a retail one: mall owners make their money renting space to stores, not selling products), where they’re built (far away from anything else, to keep customers inside as long as possible), how they’re built (not very esthetically) and the whole problematic of finding a parking space. Underhill clearly knows malls: His day job, after all, is to study shopper’s habits, spending hours and hours “in the field”, shadowing shoppers as they normally behave in retail environments. So when he discusses his own emotional attachment to malls, he knows what he’s talking about.

    It helps that his writing style is readable like few others. It’s all too easy to be taken with Underhill as he invites us to spend a day at the mall with him. It doesn’t take much to imagine this as a documentary film, as he dramatizes shopping situations with typical customers or invites us to see a food court through his well-trained eyes. Call of the Mall is unpretentious, sometimes superficial, but seldom boring.

    At most it can be repetitive, especially if you’re already familiar with his previous Why We Buy: Underhill, after all, has spent his professional career establishing his consulting firm and building his own theories of shopping: If he sticks to the same ideas from one book to another, it’s not dogmatism as much as it’s professional experience. While his tendency to systematize experience can be exasperating, they’re generally on-target: The way he describes male shoppers in malls isn’t quite a perfect match for me, but it’s close enough to make me trust his descriptions of other demographic groups.

    But beyond the easy entertainment value of the book lies a series of insights in the world of malls and how they work. If you have ever wondered about food courts, mall toilets, pushcarts, the disappearance of bookstores from suburban malls (hint; it’s not because people don’t read, it’s because people browse more than they buy, especially where they’re waiting for other people), why similar stores are located in clusters or secret entrances to malls, don’t worry: Underhill has studied these things and now he’s ready to tell all about them.

    Ironically, Underhill concludes his book by saying that malls are past their heydays. Their “lack of mercantile DNA” [P.202] will prove fatal: Built away from transit routes, slapped together without regard to architecture or communities, those self-sufficient island of shopping are not going to find any supporters when they start falling down (often literally, as they reach their thirtieth or fortieth year). What’s the next step, then? “Big boxes” retailers, on-line shopping or a return to shopping districts? Maybe we’ll have to wait until Underhill’s next book to find out.

    Fascinating conclusion, but I couldn’t read the book without tying it to the malls I know and it seems to me as if the Ottawa-area malls have at least a fighting chance. For one thing, they’re all built near transit routes (my own morning bus ride takes me through or near four malls) and often act as transit for people going from one place to another. For another, they’re covered and heated: When you’re dealing with Canadian winters, that’s not an inconsequential factor.

  • Why We Buy, Paco Underhill

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 1999, 256 pages, C$37.00 hc, ISBN 0-684-84913-5

    The next time you’re out shopping, pay attention: someone may be looking at you. No, I’m not talking about security cameras or other shoppers checking you out (though, hey, enjoy the attention if you can get it). I’m talking about people like Paco Underhill, shopping scientists studying the habits and behaviour of ordinary consumers in a retail environment. Perhaps more accurately called “retail naturalists” than “shopping scientists”, Underhill and members of his consulting firm Envirosell spend hundreds of hours per year following shoppers, analyzing store layouts, looking at store signs and trying to improve the shopping experience.

    Why We Buy is Underhill’s first book, and it brings together several of Underhill’s painstakingly-developed theories about the modern state of shopping. At a time where North-American shopping has nowhere to go (ie; no fast population growth, no rapidly increasing income levels), the only alternative is to sell more efficiently. That’s where consultants like Underhill come in: by studying the way we shop, they can identify problems and fix what’s clearly not working.

    One easy example: The “landing strip”. You can’t just walk inside a store and start shopping: You need time and space to adjust, remove your sunglasses or your toque (depending on the season), take stock of the store’s layout or pick up a shopping cart. Clever managers won’t try to put merchandising inside the “landing strip”, but will exploit the area in more subtle ways.

    Another easy example: The “butt-brush” aversion. North American simply don’t like being touched (even accidentally) when they’re bending down. Trying to make them bend in confined spaces, where closely-arranged shelves only allow for a limited amount of space, is an exercise in futility. Solution: more space, and re-arrange merchandise so that people who can’t bend (older people, for instance) won’t have to.

    Both of these things may sound like common sense, but at a time when increasingly chain-driven shopping is being managed from corporate headquarters, retail operations can need a reality-check. The drive to rationalize operations by using fewer clerks, minimal wages, more crowded shelving can actually decrease sales rather than improve operations. In a competitive industry where even tiny adjustments can make the differences between black and red ink, Envirosell’s advice clearly finds a market.

    This type of information is a boon to retailers (one can imagine a conscientious store manager reading this book and making significant changes to his store), but it’s just as interesting to the consumer cattle being studied. It’s impossible to read even two pages of Why we Buy without a sigh of acknowledgement as Underhill explains how the retail industry works, or at least ought to work. But be forewarned; Underhill comes to the store to improve it, not to destroy it: His lucrative perspective isn’t one of a consumer muckraker, but a merchant optimizer. While the two often coincide (a happier shopper is a bigger spender), you will not find in Why We Buy a critique of consumerism or a scathing exposé of modern marketing techniques. Lavish consumerism is seen as a desirable objective to attain, and Underhill spears nearly all of his time suggesting ways to improve the spending experience.

    The other problem with Why We Buy is that Underhill has so much experience in stalking the habits of the wild shoppers in retail environments that his perspective is limited is areas other than his own. His “suggestions” for bookstores will be greeted with aghast stares by book-lovers, while his own open contempt for the “cyberjockeys” driving on-line shopping betrays both ignorance and shortsightedness.

    Still, for shoppers both enthusiastic and reluctant, Why We Buy is a compulsively readable, highly informative book. Deliciously written and stuffed with telling examples, it’s a way to deconstruct the shopping experience and understand our behaviour. (I thought Underhill was indulging in gratuitous stereotypes as he was describing female shoppers… until he started describing the habits of male shoppers, which are pretty much spot-on identical to mine.) It may be a book solely about how more dollars can be squeezed out of our wallets, but that doesn’t make it any less fun.

  • Fugitives and Refugees, Chuck Palahniuk

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Crown, 2003, 176 pages, C$25.00 hc, ISBN 1-4000-4783-8

    If you’re not a fan of Chuck Palahniuk and you’re not in any hurry to learn more about Portland, this is going to be a very short review: Don’t bother with this book. It’s written by Palahniuk for Palahniuk fans, with an appropriate look at the city of Portland and the weirdness contained within. No, it’s not an accident if you haven’t seen Fugitives and Refugees in bookstores and may never even have heard about it. Please skip the rest of this review. We’ll see each other at the next one

    As for the rest of you, I can only assume that you want to learn more about Portland and/or are already die-hard fans of Chuck Palahniuk’s fiction from Fight Club to Diary. If you have already read his non-fiction collection Stranger Than Fiction, you’re already halfway ready to have a look at Fugitives and Refugees.

    Part of the “Crown Journeys” collection, this is, obviously, a look at the city of Portland. But unlike a typical travel guide (and much like a typical Palahniuk book), it focuses on the weird, the cool, the unusual and the perverted. Portland high quotient of quirkiness, explains Palahniuk though an interview with Geek Love‘s author Katherine Dunn, can be attributed to the theory that “everyone looking to make a new life migrates west, across America to the Pacific Ocean. Once there, the cheapest city where they can live is Portland. This gives [the city] the most cracked of the crackpots. The misfits among misfits.” [P.14] The fugitives and refugees of the entire country, one could say.

    And so Palahniuk takes stock of his chosen city and reports back from the field. Half of Fugitives and Refugees is built like a typical travel guide; here’s a chapter on restaurants (complete with recipes, to the grand pleasure of all Palahniuk-naggers who maintain that his fans would buy even The Man’s grocery lists); here’s a chapter on shopping; another on museums. But then the book gets weirder: There’s an explicit chapter on the city’s sex trade; another on the haunted buildings of Portland; a third one on the underground tunnels under the city…

    Palahniuk has done his legwork in tracking down the fugitives and refugees of his city. His guide to the city’s landmarks is augmented by mini-interviews with zoo keepers, milling experts, fancy carmakers, drag queens, museum owners and the inventor of a self-cleaning house. Fascinating stuff, regardless of whether you intend to visit Portland or not. It’s in this section of the book that you can perhaps most clearly see similarities with Palahniuk’s other non-fiction collection Stranger than Fiction.

    But much as Stranger than Fiction also found some of its best moments in self-reflective pieces about Palahniuk’s life, every chapter of Fugitives and Refugees is interspersed with “Postcards” from the author’s personal history, from his starring role in a MTV video to his participation in Portland’s SantaCon’96. Palahniuk’s fans will be delighted and fascinated by another peek at the author’s life, but even regular readers are likley to consider these pieces as the book’s highlights. I’m still laughing myself silly about his description of an LSD trip inside a planetarium, and I’m fascinated by his description of the “Portland’s semiannual Apocalypse Café”, a potluck held in a condemned industrial building, as if it was in the ruins of a post-apocalyptic society. Very Fight Clubish indeed.

    Palahniuk’s fiction is less distinguishable by its overall plot than its shocking vignettes and affectionately described oddball characters. This holds true with Fugitive and Refugees: while this won’t leap on top of anyone’s reading list based on the sole distinction of having been written by Palahniuk, it makes for an interesting (and fast) read for his fans. They will find everything they like about the author’s fiction on full display here, along with a number of tasty anecdotes from his life. What remains to be established for non-Portlanders is the ratio of impression-to-reality: From Fugitives and Refugees, we get the impression that Portland is a city teething with repressed craziness, but is it truly as special, as weird and as off-the-wall as Palahniuk says? Heck, it almost sounds as if a visit is in order to find out…

  • Schild’s Ladder, Greg Egan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2001, 250 pages, £16.99 hc, ISBN 0-575-07068-4

    Sometimes, there is no shame in saying that you’ve been beaten by a book.

    I certainly feel like that after reading Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder. I may think of myself as a savvy hard-SF fan with a good understanding of science and a facility for technical jargon, but Egan has clearly bested me with this extrapolation of thirty-first century physics.

    The central plot isn’t terribly complicated. First, the prologue describes how a far-future scientific experiment goes wrong and starts eating the very fabric of the cosmos. Schild’s Ladder then jump hundreds of years later, on a station perched at the frontier of this novo-vacuum’s continuing expansion. Aboard the station, two post-human factions: The Preservationists, trying to fight back against the expanding blight, and the Yielders, who are looking for an accommodation and a way to exploit this new set of circumstances. Stuff happens, discoveries are made, a trip is taken and soon enough, well… oh, there’s not much to spoil, but let’s still not spoil it.

    If the plot is simple enough (and, to be truthful, not that different from a number of classic SF stories in which heroic scientists have to face an alien enigma) it’s the details that will make cry in confusion and beg for simpler novels. Open up a page at random, and you’re likely to read a line like “Once that was achieved, Tchicaya scribed a series of probes that would spread out laterally as well moving straight in, improving their changes of gaining a comprehensive picture of the Planck worms.” [P.187]

    Uh-huh. Okay. Not bad, but imagine 250 pages of that and you’ll quickly reach for a romance novel in order to speed-read once more. Not content to play around with advanced physics, Schild’s Ladder boldly invents post-“Theory of Everything” physics that are to our understanding of the universe what super-string theory is to Newtonian physics. Ambitious, undoubtedly fascinating for the Nobel Prize crowd, but utterly baffling for even smart-ass readers such as myself.

    But difficulty of comprehension doesn’t necessarily betray lack of enjoyment. Midway though the book, it struck me that even though I couldn’t understand half the jargon, I was swimming once more in the comfortable thought-space of hard-SF. Egan’s protagonists are scientists for whom the hunger of knowledge is all-powerful, and there’s a pleasant vibe to this kind of attitude that I was missing after so many hum-drum thrillers and pedestrian SF novels. What’s more, you eventually learn to tune out the most advanced sections of Egan’s prose, and simply extract whatever meaning you can from the plot-line surrounding the physics.

    Interestingly enough for a writer whose short stories are usually better-rated than his longer fiction, several of Schild’s Ladder‘s best moments come in smaller portions. The opening novella isn’t bad, Protagonist Tchicaya’s shared childhood experience with Mariama is worth excerpting by itself and the final voyage is -though at the limit of intelligibility- almost worth another story. Even in the nuts-and-bolts linking scenes, Egan goes farther than anyone else, fiddling with acorporeal characters and their psychology as if it was just another thing. Never mind that other novelists (paging Richard K. Morgan) can devote entire novels to the very same throwaway ideas.

    Ultimately, it’s the sense that Schild’s Ladder does things impossible to achieve in any other genre of expression but science-fiction that gives full meaning to the book. For someone to sit down and extrapolate far-future physics in sufficient details for readers to recoil in stunned incomprehension is nothing short of admirable. I have long maintained that science-fiction should first be defined by what it can do better than anything else, and this is the kind of novel, utterly cryptic to anyone not already well-versed in the genre, that best exemplifies that kind of thinking. Is it one of 2001’s best SF novels? I don’t think so. Is it one of 2001’s purest SF novels, though? Ah-ha.

    It took me a while to get to this novel, and now that I have, I suddenly find myself at the end of Egan’s oeuvre so far: The already-mysterious author has almost completely stopped writing since 2001, devoting himself to the cause of Australian asylum-seekers. For hard-SF, this pause has been deeply felt; Egan continues to show signs of life (His web site is still regularly updated), but it’s an open bet as to when he’ll be back in bookstores. In the meantime, enjoy this novel as maybe the most advanced piece of diamond-hard SF he’s ever penned, and wonder if anything will ever top this. In this light, beating my head against this novel is nothing short of the ultimate compliment.

  • Un long dimanche de fiançailles [A Very Long Engagement] (2004)

    Un long dimanche de fiançailles [A Very Long Engagement] (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, February 2005) Fans of Jean-Pierre Jeunet will be pleased: The conscious aesthetic displayed in Amelie are once more present here in this romance/suspense hybrid that either uses a love story as an excuse for a war drama, or vice-versa. Visually, this is a gorgeous film: The sepia colouration meshes surprisingly well with Jeunet’s dynamic direction, and the switch between harsh WW1 drama and romantic rural France isn’t as jarring as you may think. Deftly mixing military fiction with a long-running investigation in the search for a long-lost love, Un Long Dimanche De Fiancailles is a delight from start to finish at both a visual and a narrative level. While it runs slightly longer than it should and sometimes fails to exploit all the possibilities at its disposition, it’s nonetheless a fantastic film and a good showcase of how modern film-making technique can jazz up some classic stories. Don’t miss a French-language appearance by Jodie Foster, or the clever nods to different genres as the film progresses.

  • Freefall, Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket Star, 2005, 559 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-7434-0607-9

    I seldom buy books as soon as they come out, let alone read and review them in the same month they’re released. I had to make an exception in the case of Freefall, the third techno-thriller by the Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens writing couple. Their previous Icefire (1998) and Quicksilver (1999) were easily two of the most interesting high-tech suspense novels of the late nineties, and a third one would be cause for celebration no matter what it was about.

    Luckily, the premise of their newest effort is a barn-burner: In 2008, the story goes, an automated lunar probe comes back to Earth, bringing back the first lunar samples in more than three decades. But just as the samples are transferred aboard the International Space Station, powerful explosions wreck half the station, kill most of the crew, destroy two space shuttles and strand the few survivors in orbit without hope of rescue. Stuck in a dying space station, geologist Corazon Rey opens up a sample canister and discovers, mixed with lunar rocks, the mummified remnants of two human fingers…

    That’s how Freefall starts. As for how it ends, well, I’d rather leave you in suspense. For the biggest thrills of Freefall are in reading about conspiracies and secrets, the hidden history of the space race and the surprises of today’s military forces. It’s a novel that features an entirely different picture of the race to the moon, a frighteningly plausible explanation for the Roswell/Area 51 conspiracies [P.295] and an exciting second race to the moon. Freefall starts with a sequence in which American operatives investigate the Chinese space program underneath a flooded hydro-electrical reservoir, and it never lets up after that. Even more so than in Icefire, the Reeves-Stevens take a malicious pleasure in cramming throwaway mysteries and cool ideas in every available crevice of their novel. The net winners are the readers with a taste for that sort of “wouldn’t it be cool if…?” speculation. In this type of fiction, there’s a fine balance between far-fetched but still plausible supposition and straight-out wonk-wonk UFO-nuts territory, and Freefall skirts that line as close as possible without falling in X-Files territory. (Though I’ve got my doubts about P.270)

    When thriller mechanics are concerned, the Reeves-Stevens know how to hook their readers like true professionals. Freefall doesn’t suffer too much from its twin-mountains structure: The middle lull between two complicated pieces of techno-adventure is exploited for some much-appreciated exposition and to tighten up the tension some more. The climax reaches a beautiful convergence of plot threads and emotional power, especially for those still carrying a torch for the cause of space exploration. This is the best space-based near-future techno-thriller since Homer J. Hickam’s Back to the Moon and that’s high praise indeed.

    Extensively researched and effortlessly convincing, Freefall aims straight at the techno-geek reader and scores a definite hit. Fans of the Reeves-Steven’s previous two techno-thrillers won’t be disappointed. Readers of Icefire will be specially pleased by the return of the earlier novel’s terrific characters, with a much-expanded role for NORAD wizard Wilhemina Bailey. I’m not normally a fan of thriller series, and this one is just a bit too contrived in how it places known characters in exactly the right jobs and places, but it’s a pleasure to see Cory Rey and Mitch Webber arguing once again.

    This pleasure carries further, of course: In terms of readability, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more compelling techno-thriller this year. There always the temptation to read “just another chapter” to find out what else the Reeves-Stevens will take out of their magic bag of techno-tricks. Suffice to say that after a steady diet of bland books and admirable literary novels, I had a blast delving in Freefall‘s too-few pages and all-too-wonderful secrets. For techno-nerds, reading this novel is like sipping on Jolt Cola syrup: all the caffeine, with the added advantage of a sugar rush.

    If you’re up for historical secrets, high-tech conspiracies, going back to the moon, exploding space shuttles and all that fun stuff, you can call Freefall “book of the year” and stop looking for anything better. As for myself, I have seldom been so well served by a “buy-on-sight” decision: Freefall is likely to remain one of my favourite techno-thrillers of the decade.

  • The Spongebob Squarepants Movie (2004)

    The Spongebob Squarepants Movie (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, February 2005) My total knowledge of Spongebob Squarepants being strictly limited to second-hand sources, I didn’t know what to expect from this film. This may explain why I enjoyed it so much: obviously aimed at kids, but with enough wackiness to appeal to older viewers, The Spongebob Squarepants Movie is a fine example of absurd comedy. I merely have to mention that the climax involves a fight set on the nearly-naked body of David Hasselhoff and a “I Wanna Rock” psychedelic music video freeing oppressed masses to give you an idea of the tone of the piece. Other things such as the insanely catchy “I’m a Goofy Goober” theme song, live-action sequences and saucy double-entendres aimed at everyone looking for them are just icing on the cake. Good, fun stuff. Fast-forward to the end of the credits for a last cute pirates gag.