Year: 2005

  • Million Dollar Baby (2004)

    Million Dollar Baby (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, January 2005) Oscar season is once again with us, and that means a slew of painful movies about impossible odds, plucky heroes, heavy drama, famous old actors playing what may be the last great performances of their careers, and that type of stuff. It’s as if every year included its quota of such film made for the above-fifty contingent that makes up most of the Academy, and so Million Dollar Baby fits in this year’s slot. Oh, it’s not as bad as you’d expect. The boxing scenes (for it is a film about a woman boxer breaking into the scene though sheer self-determination… oh, you’ve heard this one before) are good, and I suspect that this film will teach more about the technical side of boxing than any other work of fiction. Efficiently directed by Clint Eastwood, this film plays it simply, slips up only occasionally (mostly in its depiction of a hillbilly family) and moves without any fuss. I suppose that it should be commended for an unpredictable third act, but the truth is that the said third act feels very long and pointless after that came before: The sports film veers abruptly into straight-up Oscar-bait drama and never recovers. The last ten minutes feel like a stretch of the inevitable. Bah. You know that the usual crowd will go nuts for the film; people like me barely have the luxury of complaining.

  • Here’s To Life! (2000)

    Here’s To Life! (2000)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2005) I know; if you’re not yet 65, there are few things less appealing than a comedy starring retirement-age actors on a self-discovery trip. And yet, given the chance, Here’s To Life! manages to be something worth watching for the entire family. Eric McCormack stars as the young guy kidnapped by an elderly trio intent on one last wild trip while they still can. That they’ll discover stuff, pass on some of their wisdom and maybe even expire on the way isn’t in doubt, but the film itself has a bunch of good moments and enough material to sustain interest during its entire duration. Fortunately, the film can depend on its veteran actors and lush British Columbia scenery. All told, it’s just a very very nice film. And that’s all there is to it.

  • Broken Angels, Richard Morgan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2003, 400 pages, C$24.99 tpb, ISBN 0-575-07324-1

    Few SF readers were left unimpressed by Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan’s enviable debut novel. A dazzling mixture of pitch-black detective fiction and hard-edged extrapolation, Morgan’s first book immediately announced the arrival of a promising new author, one who could build upon the genre’s traditions and bring them forward in the twenty-first century. While Broken Angels is a conventional side-step in a different genre, it offers plenty of rewards to anyone who won’t mind a bit of action-packed futuristic adventure.

    Takeshi Kovacs, the hero of Altered Carbon, is once again the star of this follow-up novel, but whereas his first adventure was modelled on crime fiction, this one is straight-up military SF served with a touch of treasure-hunting. Stuck on a remote planet fighting a war he never believed in, Kovacs begins the novel in rehab after a particularly nasty battle. He’s soon contacted by a man with a tall story of alien artifacts and a lost starship. Pages later, Kovacs can be found leading the retrieval effort, making deals with amoral corporations and training his crew of intrepid special forces soldiers.

    It’s no insult to Morgan to call him a white-knuckled writer of upscale men’s adventures. Altered Carbon‘s mix of hardboiled sex and violence made even jaded reader wince in shock. Broken Angels follows in the same path, even finding (not always successfully) a surprising amount of sex into a situation custom-made for action. Mercenaries, traitors, body-destroying weapons and humans sins are the norm in this thrill-a-chapter roller-coaster.

    Perhaps the best thing about Broken Angels is how it builds on the hints left in Altered Carbon (Martians!) to create a far more complex universe featuring a long-lost alien race, dirty wars galore, complex power plays between governments and corporations, factions within factions and enough grittiness to make it all feel real despite the plot contrivances. Clearly, Morgan has made himself a playground rich enough to serve as the setting for a few more novels if he so chooses. (Early word suggests that Kovacs will return in 2005’s Woken Furies) Kovacs himself is far more in his element here as a gun-for-hire, thanks to top-notch UN Envoy training and tons of hard-won experience. You can’t ask for a better narrator, even despite his tendency to keep the emotional side of what he does carefully locked away from his tough-guy personae. (Which often works at the novel’s disadvantage —especially when he flips out and starts shooting in chapter thirty-nine.)

    Perhaps just as interesting is Morgan’s explicit political positioning. After a number of rather heavy hints in Altered Carbon (where only the rich can exploit the advantages of “sleeve” technology, etc.), Kovacs’ reluctant-warrior reflections place Morgan squarely alongside other newish writers (Miéville, etc.) whose left-of-centre politics fully inform their fiction. Some will undoubtedly find this tiresome, but in many ways it’s a welcome shot in the arm for a genre who should be asking questions and upsetting the status-quo. In Broken Angels, the merciless portrayal of the corporations running the show is as nasty as the worst cyberpunk had to offer, but it’s partly influenced by the new anti-globalisation movement and developed with a great deal more skill and complexity. (More on this in the singleton Market Forces… at least if I understand the cover blurb correctly.) Despite the sex, the violence and the big guns, Broken Angels doesn’t have much in common with stereotypical military-SF nuke-em-ups. Imagine cyberpunk spliced into an anti-war novel.

    Cynics will be quick to point out Morgan doesn’t innovate much when plotting Broken Angels: “Explorers of various backgrounds banding together to explore an alien environment” can date back all the way to Burroughs’s The Lost World and earlier. But Morgan succeeds reasonably well in updating this template to current standards. Every weapon description is peppered with enough techno-jargon to make you see the serial numbers. The last chapter has as many twists as an entire noir novel. As alluded above, even the generic “war is awful and corporations are bad, m’kay?” message is developed with enough skill to be palatable, maybe even engaging.

    Nothing in Broken Angels is broken. Familiar, maybe, but in the end, what’s left is a fine slick read, with steady forward momentum and enough action to satisfy anyone looking for faster SF. Yes, Broken Angels suggests that Morgan could become a one-trick action/adventure writer if he so chooses. But it’s too early to tell: In the meantime, Broken Angels is a whole lot of fun, especially for reader who like stuff blowing up, but can’t face the prospect of yet another generic Baen military-SF book.

  • Inosensu: Innocence [Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence] (2004)

    Inosensu: Innocence [Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence] (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • The Cooler (2003)

    The Cooler (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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: The Edge Of Reason (2004)

    Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    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.