Month: December 2009

Futurama: Bender’s Game (2008)

Futurama: Bender’s Game (2008)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On DVD, December 2009) Even sub-standard Futurama is better than no Futurama… or at least that’s what’s worth remembering when seeing this third straight-to-DVD feature revival of the TV series.  While there’s little that’s specifically wrong with Bender’s Game, it does seem to lag compared to the other films, and never more so during a third act that takes place in a fantasy world take-off on Dungeons and Dragons.  The jokes seem muted, and depend more on recognition of Lord of the Rings references than anything else.  It’s geeky humor of another sort, of course, but it does seem a bit more off-kilter than the series at its best.  Otherwise, the Futurama mythology is further explored with Dark Matter exploitation details, more of Nibbler and Farnsworth’s history, and another showdown with Mom.  Fans will watch it anyway, but the result is merely entertaining, just not exceptionally so. The DVD adds an entertaining audio commentary track that actually makes the film fun to watch a second time, as well as a few short features that show how much fun it was to work on the show. The best extra, however, is a short anti-anti-piracy PSA featuring Bender, willing to steal, well, anything.

Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs (2008)

Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs (2008)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On DVD, December 2009) This second made-for DVD movie featuring the Futurama crew doesn’t seem quite as successful as Bender’s Big Score, but it does manage to hit a few high points along the way.  Much of the film’s most amusing sequences seem to revolve around the rivalry between scientists, which also gives a chance to the writers to include a bit of nerd humor.  Much of the problems with the film seem to revolve around a structure that doesn’t quite seem what to do with 90 minutes’ worth of running time: The story goes from one setup to another, adding rather than building.  This being said, some of the thematic material makes sense: The resonances between polyamory, robot exclusion and the all-encompassing beast at the heart of the plot work to its advantages, but the sauce is thin by the end of the story.  Still, Futurama can usually depend on laughs even when its premise falters, and this second film does deliver its share.  Fans will be happy. The DVD contains a somewhat interesting audio commentary (great for catching a few more of those obscure jokes), as well as a “lost” Futurama script made for a 3D game that’s more conceptually interesting than enjoyable to watch.

Up in the Air (2009)

Up in the Air (2009)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In theaters, December 2009) Hollywood is so often geared to kids, teens and family that film made for an adult audience are now rare enough to be remarkable.  So it is that this tale of a professional downsizer confronting professional distress and personal attachment is perhaps more enjoyable for its change of pace than for what it actually delivers.  George Clooney is splendid as a protagonist who comes to reconsider a lifetime of non-attachment, and he has the good fortune of playing against two actresses, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick, who do just as well in their own roles: The best scene of the film is a simple three-way conversation in a hotel lobby.  The script itself (which bears only a passing similarity to Walter Kirn’s original novel) seems to be exactly in tune with the times, in-between massive layoffs and widespread hatred of commercial airlines.  Many of the film’s individual moments are oddly amusing, the peek at the life on an ultra-frequent-traveler is interesting and there are clear echoes of Juno in the off-kilter structure of writer/director Jason Reitman’s script.  (Not to mention much of Thank you for Smoking in its cynical premise.)  But there also seems to be an upper limit to Up in the Air’s effectiveness, and the lacklustre third act has something to do with it: After a lengthy detour in Wisconsin, the script more or less goes back to business but studiously avoids wrapping up its threads.  Writer/director Jason Reitman would rather drag things on long enough to diffuse the impact of a more definitive ending, then ends up apparently one of two scenes too early.  Sure, the point is informed character non-growth –which is gutsy enough at a time where “protagonist learns a lesson” is ingrained in Screenwriting 101.  But the ending also deflates some of the film’s prevailing charm… leaving viewers, well, up in the air.  Sometimes, even achieving one’s objective is criticism enough.

The Wheel of Darkness, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

The Wheel of Darkness, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Vision, 2008 reprint of 2007 original, 495 pages, C$9.50 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-446-61868-7

Another day means another thrilling adventure for FBI special agent Aloysius Pendergast!  After the triple-punch of the Diogenes trilogy, both Pendergast and his protégée Constance Greene take a break of sorts in a lightweight seafaring adventure.  The result may be a minor Preston/Child novel, but it’s not without a few stronger moments, and it definitely won’t hurt the writing duo’s reputation.

A plot summary almost reads like a parody: “After the events of the previous books, Pendergast and Constance go for a cruise.”  Of course, you then have to add that they board an ocean liner on its maiden voyage so that they can catch a murderous thief that has stolen a dangerous artifact, but where’s the fun in that?  After a hundred pages, though, the cruise beings and Pendergast’s shipboard activities grows to include things like defeating blackjack cheaters in the ship’s casinos, tracking down a serial killer, helping the crew take down an insane mutineer and losing his mind so that he can enjoy some deep-seated misanthropy.

Wait, wait, what’s that about turning crazy?  I’m revealing one of the novel’s better moments here, but don’t worry: By this time in the Pendergast series, seeing him act out of character is a treat in itself.  Crazy Pendergast, affected by said dangerous artefact, rivals his brother for contempt of humanity, and that’s when Constance -who gets a fairly generous role throughout the novel- gets to play foil to the even-more outlandish Pendergast.  His state of mind is restored in a way that will strike some as profound and others as amusing, but definitely show how far Preston/Child are willing to go in hocus-pocus mysticism while still claiming to write realistic novels.  Still; one of the better reasons for reading The Wheel of Darkness is for the portrait of Pendergast turning insaaane.

That’s partly because the rest of the story is mundane stuff.  Sure, Pendergast gets to play James Bond in out-cheating a band of professional blackjack card-counters (their techniques are straight out of Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House).  Of course, we get a look at the way an ocean liner works when it has to cater to a few thousand passengers.  Fine, we have a crazed serial killer eviscerating victims.  But in the context of Preston/Child’s high-adrenaline series, it all becomes routine.

By the time we’re being told that this is the best, biggest, most massive ocean liner in the history of the world, that this is its maiden voyage, that the company will tolerate no delays and that, well, there’s a tiny storm along the way, readers may start laughing to themselves in anticipation.  There are, fortunately, no icebergs.  But everyone can still guess that this is one maiden cruise that will end badly for many passengers.

But that’s the way it goes, one supposes, for the type of formula thrillers that Preston/Child have been writing together for more than a decade.  As a conceit, the “ocean liner” one isn’t bad, and most readers are bound to like it.  It’s just that after the triple-punch of the Diogenes Trilogy, this one feels like a far more sedate novel, one that doesn’t change much in the course of the series.  Even Constance’s big final-chapter revelation just confirms the last line of the previous book (as if there was any doubt of where that was going); readers in a hurry are not going to miss much by skipping over this volume in the series.

But not every volume can be a game-changer, and so The Wheel of Darkness (what’s with Preston/Child’s generic titles, lately?) does manage to fulfill expectations for Preston/Child readers.  The writing is limpid, the three-ring circus of events is efficiently managed, the details of shipboard operations are absorbing and the resolution does take place during a big storm.  What else could we possibly want?  Until the next novel, this one will do.

Bikur Ha-Tizmoret [The Band’s Visit] (2007)

Bikur Ha-Tizmoret [The Band’s Visit] (2007)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On DVD, December 2009) How you react to The Band’s Visit may depend on your tolerance for unconventional scripts.  The Band’s Visit proceeds from a conventional fish-out-of-water premise (On their way to another destination, an Egyptian police band finds itself marooned overnight in a small Israeli settlement), but ends up delivering a story built on discomfort, twisted agendas and lengthy static shots.  It’s refreshingly original, heart-warmingly human and all of those coded reviewer-speak expressions for “You should feel ashamed of yourself if you don’t enjoy this” but it doesn’t make The Band’s Visit any faster-paced or accessibly rewarding.  The characters are all damaged in their own ways, and their intentions are rarely noble: One’s generous offer of shelter may mask loneliness and attempts to create jealousy, for instance.  Fortunately, the film can depend on good actors to pull it off: Acting-wise, the film belongs to the dogged weariness of Sasson Gabai and Ronit Elkabetz, both of them unconventionally compelling as the leaders of their own groups.  The single-camera scenes drag on, and much of the film occurs in silence.  Which is fairly amusing considering how naturally language is weaved into the script as the two groups of characters converse in their own language between themselves and have to resort to English in order to understand each other.  The ending offers no grand triumph, but a series of small victories that reward without being overwhelming.  Such small and overarching touches do help a lot in making this film interesting and entertaining, but they also push it further into the “foreign curio” category, with a side order of exasperation when the thin plot seems to go nowhere.  The DVD doesn’t contain much except for a thin making-of documentary that affirms that, yes, the film is meant to be slow.

Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006)

Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On DVD, December 2009) Given my indifferent reaction to the first Ice Age, it’s not surprising that it took me years, a free DVD and a lack of other distractions to get to watch the sequel.  It’s not any more surprising that I still dislike the very things that I disliked in the original: The ugly character design, the voice actors, the lowest-denominator script… all of which are back in this installment.  This time, the ice is melting away and there seems to be a lot more animals, but this kid’s film offers little to the grown-up audiences.  Much of the film’s emotional beats are obvious, and the ending drags on far too long.  At least the animation seems fair, and Scrat’s nut-gathering antics are entertaining in-between the rest of the film.  It’s not enough to make Ice Age 2: The Meltdown any better, but it’s a bit better than nothing, I suppose.  The DVD contains a number of features aimed straight at younger audiences, although the pretty good bonus short film, “No Times for Nuts” has at least two unsettling Twilight-Zoneish elements that will resonate with older audiences.

Doomsday (2008)

Doomsday (2008)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On DVD, December 2009) I suppose we shouldn’t begrudge the boys a bit of fun when then set out to make a Scottish post-apocalyptic horror/action film featuring a gun-toting babe.  Still, Doomsday most often feels like a tedious rehash of about half a dozen far better films, made with mechanical skills and little inspiration.  The plot points are so painfully contrived that they create resentment and very little viewer buy-in.  (A plague contained by locking off Scotland?  Uh-huh.)  By the time we reach the cannibalistic barbarians inspired by Prodigy videos and then a pseudo-medieval tyrant, it’s obvious that if Doomsday has anything left to show us, it will be in bits and pieces of direction, not in the overall script or end result.  Director Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers, The Descent) is lost in the woods during most of the film, but from time to time there’s a striking shot or action set-piece that reminds us of his past successes and makes us wish this was a far better film.  Rhona Mitra (presumably standing-in for Kate Beckinsale) is the only one besides Bob Hoskins who emerges from this film with even a smidgen of respect left.  The action tends to be on the splattery side, something that the “unrated” DVD version tends to maximize to very little improvement over the theatrical version.  After a ludicrous car chase that is still better than most of the film, the ending fizzles off –much like the rest of Doomsday.  It is what it is, one supposes –but there’s a reason why it disappeared from North American theatres in mere days. The DVD extra features make it clearer that the picture was aiming for a deliberate hommage to SF exploitation pictures and is reasonably entertaining in describing how to do wide-scale action on a budget… but don’t redeem the end result.

Invictus (2009)

Invictus (2009)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In theaters, December 2009) Perhaps the boldest chance taken with this film is the concept of slowly transforming a political thriller into a sports film.  Picking up moments after Nelson Mandela’s 1994 election as the first post-Apartheid South African president, Invictus goes from nation-building drama to underdog sport film in steady increments, placing more and more weight on sports until political issues becomes subordinate to the results of a rugby tournament.  Fortunately, the film is made by skilled technicians: security issues are used as a way to peek into racial reunification, the legend of Nelson Mandela gets a polish, and we’re shown a nation uniting behind a national sports team.  It’s all curiously enjoyable: The South-African setting and accents are different enough to keep us interested (although I couldn’t help wishing for a big spaceship to appear over Johannesburg), there are plenty of misleading thriller cues (one of them leading up to a thrilling CGI flyby), Morgan Freeman is mesmerizing as Mandela (think “role of a career”), Matt Damon is unexpectedly convincing as a rugby player and Clint Eastwood’s direction is as coolly efficient as always.  Even the clichés (such as more and more slow-motion segments as the game gets closer to completion) and the unequal pacing don’t look as bad when dealt by such experienced hands.  For all of its calculated humanity, Invictus does get viewers to feel better about sports, films and mankind in general, which has its own attraction especially in the usual field of Oscar-baiting films.

The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama

The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Three Rivers Press, 2006, 375 pages, C$19.95 tp, ISBN 978-0-307-23770-5

Well before he was nationally known as a rising star in US national politics, Barack Obama impressed a number of readers with Dreams From My Father (1994), a memoir dealing with race, a complex multi-cultural upbringing and a son’s quest to learn more an absent father.  Well-written and having little to do with politics, Obama’s first book was rediscovered a decade later as Obama became an increasingly familiar face on the evening news.  It was followed in 2006 by The Audacity of Hope, a frankly more political book written in-between Obama’s accession to the US Senate and his successful presidential campaign.

While Dreams From my Father was generally apolitical (although not entirely so, given how Obama was already eyeing a career in politics in 1994), The Audacity of Hope is a different beast.  It’s more easily classified as “pre-electoral”, those books by politicians that pop up whenever they’re thinking about running for high office.  Those books are usually a mixture of political autobiography and vague political program, carefully designed to be read by a literate electorate hungry to learn more about their chosen one.  You can run down the list of nearly every presidential candidate in recent memory to find one of those, usually with subtitles such as “A plan for a new America”.

This doesn’t necessarily make The Audacity of Hope a bad or calculating piece of work.  It does however place it under very different standards than his first book.  It makes it easier to read as a clue to understand what’s going on in the head of now-president Obama.  It also makes chunks of his books practically irrelevant to non-US audiences.

Let’s tackle the dullest part of the book first: the vague political program.  In pre-electoral books, those are the parts where the candidate demonstrates his keen understanding of America’s problems and then proposes a number of solutions, designed for wide popular appeal, in order to resolve said problems.  Expect paragraphs of statistics mixed with campaign trail anecdotes illustrating key concepts.  Expect a lot of expensive platitudes such as “more/better defence”, “more/better education” and “lower/better taxes”.  Expect an appeal to new ways of doing politics, away from the current partisan divide.  The Audacity of Hope certainly meets those expectations, as we get a glimpse of Obama’s early platform, untainted by brutal contact with political and fiscal realities.  For non-US audiences, those aren’t the most gripping segments of the book: issues such as racism, for instance, as so specific to the US that strategies to deal with them are alien even in countries as close to the US as Canada.

Fortunately, there’s more than simply a policy program in The Audacity of Hope.  The most compelling sections of the book are those in which Obama-the-man reflects on his life, his political experience and his early days in federal politics.  Those are the sections in which we learn about his life, his family, what he has learned as a politician so far and what he fears as he sees the rest of his political career in front of him.  Here is where we get to read about his fears about becoming less of a member of the population he’s meant to serve, and more of a professional politician embedded in the traditions of his office.  In-between a too-short account of his romance with Michelle and the affection he has for his daughters, Obama projects the image of a very intelligent man who understands the trade-offs that will be required of him as a politician.

It also confirms what many people have been suspecting about him despite the “Change” rhetoric: Obama may run on the image of a populist, but he’s a far more intelligent, nuanced and careful politician.  Everything we’ve seen in the 11 months since his inauguration fits his book more than his campaign promises: Obama has an uncanny ability to acknowledge problematic issues in ways to make fans claim “Wow, he gets it”, but his willingness to take action will be calculated to the most minute political consequence.  It actually makes him a far better politician than the alternative (despite partisan cries, politics is really a game of incremental inches: Obama will accomplish a lot more as a careful tactician than a firebrand populist) and reading the book’s passages on the tradeoffs required of professional politicians is a reminder that it’s a deliberate choice.

So, no, The Audacity of Hope isn’t quite the soaring, lyrical work that Dreams From my Father was.  Nor is it entirely interesting and compelling.  But once you dispose of the pre-electoral fluff and focus on the rest, it’s actually a pretty handy book to understand Obama-the-President.  Which isn’t too bad, as pre-electoral books go.

Quarantine (2008)

Quarantine (2008)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On DVD, December 2009) Taken on its own terms, Quarantine is a pretty good horror film: Original, tense and effective enough to distinguish itself from so many forgettable bloody movies.  If you’re lucky enough to come across the film completely cold, without any prior knowledge whatsoever, go and have a good time.  Unfortunately, two things killed much of Quarantine for me: the knowledge that it was a remake of a Spanish horror film called Rec and the film’s entire promotional strategy.  If you’ve seen the trailer’s final moments, its poster or even the cover of the DVD, then you have already seen the very last shot of the film –and you will be waiting for it!  Having deliberately seen Rec moments before watching Quarantine, I spent most of my time during the second film trying to spot and analyse the differences between the two –a task simplified by Quarantine’s perfectly justified decision to ape almost every single shot in the original and add to it.  To spoil my conclusions, they boil down to “overproduction”:  The sparse and clean elegance of Rec has been overlaid with a far busier lighting scheme and constant sound effects.  Helicopters shine spotlights and roar outside the building, adding to the creaking pipes that create much of the film’s soundscape.  Elsewhere, Quarantine’s bigger budget has both good, neutral and bad impacts:  Extra scenes have been added to flesh out existing and new characters, which doesn’t add or remove anything, except when Rec’s meticulously calculated rising tension is suddenly disrupted by two sudden deaths (the elevator attack and the death-by-camera) that feel too gruesome for where the plot is at that moment.  More happily, Quarantine gets to include two shots that should have been in the original film: A fleeting look at the situation outside, as well as a staircase fall that seems perfectly well-integrated in the action.  It all amounts to a fair remake, both taking and adding to the original without necessarily “betraying” anything: I may have been disappointed by some additions, but it’s very recognizably the same film with the same strengths, up to a point where Quarantine has few surprises for fans of the original.  The DVD contains an entertaining director/producer’s commentary and instructive making-of features that detail the film’s intense production scheme, it also wilfully avoids even mentioning Rec anywhere –an omission that becomes particularly maddening when it comes the time to discuss the story’s origin and the tweaks made for the American version.  Booo!

[Rec] (2007)

[Rec] (2007)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On DVD, December 2009) Now that Rec has been remade for American audience as Quarantine, you may think that there’s little reason to seek out a small-budget foreign horror film.  But there’s a reason why Rec was chosen for remaking, and the original film remains a strikingly effective piece of horror cinema.  Another first-person camera chiller, Rec proceeds from the elegant premise of a TV camera crew following firemen for a slice-in-the-life fluff program and then getting trapped in a building as increasingly disturbing events occur.  As this meticulously-paced film advances, we come to realize that the situation has escalated all the way up to a claustrophobic zombie thriller… and it just keeps getting worse.  Manuela Velasco is magnificent as a ditzy reporter stuck in an impossible situation, but it’s really co-directors/writers Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza who deserve the credit for a slick horror film that knows exactly what it’s doing: the bright clean cinematography is gradually stripped away, and the conceit of the filming camera is handled with a great deal of cleverness.  There are shocks, there is a growing sense of dread and the terrific final images are strong enough that they were co-opted for the entire American remake’s marketing strategy.  It’s nothing short of a perfect treat for the horror fan, even those tired of the current zombie craze.  If you can manage it, try to see Rec just before Quarantine for an instructive comparative lesson in how a lot more money thrown at a premise doesn’t necessarily result in a markedly better product.  The Canadian DVD contains the film in Spanish, French and English, but few other extras.

Hey Rube, Hunter S. Thompson

Hey Rube, Hunter S. Thompson

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Simon & Schuster, 2005 reprint of 2004 original, 246 pages, C$17.95 tp, ISBN 978-0-684-87320-6

So this is it.  Hey Rube marks the end of my 2009 Hunter S. Thompson Reading Project: All of Thompson’s work read in a year, marking twenty books, thousands of pages and fifty years of American history along the way.

A collection of sports columns written for ESPN’s web site between 2000 and 2004, Hey Rube marks a trip back to Thompson’s first job as a journalist, covering sports for a military newspaper.  It’s also a wrap-up of sorts, as it brings together many of the elements that defined his career: Digressing often in politics, his life in Woody Creek, excesses and celebrity friendship, the columns take on a more vital quality in the wake of 9/11, as Thompson was one of the first to see clearly beyond the fear and loathing that took over his country at the time.  When the going gets weird, the weird turns pro, and so in times of apocalypse, you could depend on Thompson to be the most reliable commentator.

For Thompson readers, this collection is 246 pages of indulgence.  Thompson’s writing tics have never been so obvious, what with the Capitalized Words, recurring exclamations (“Selah!”) & ampersands.  Only someone with his reputation and few editing restraints could get away with such quirks. As for themes, his columns often (and by often, I mean “nearly always”) turn to gambling, fictionalized stories of his life on the mountain, vicious rants against the Bush administration and a satisfied tone of “this world is going to hell, and I’ve told you so.”  Some of the material endures, although the sports references are instantly dated and the political references will soon follow as we shake memories of that bad decade.  It’s a book for Thompson fans, and it’s short enough to be considered a nice concluding volume.

Not that it’s likely to be the final word from Thompson: a third volume of his letters have been announced (and delayed many times, from a 2008 release to February 2011 as of this writing), while reading between the lines of his biographers it’s obvious that there’s enough material left in the Thompson archives to fill at least another collection of material.  Rumours abound about finished but unpublished manuscripts, from The Gun Lobby to The Night Manager to Polo is my Life to early novel Prince Jellyfish… and others.  Whether those are publishable is an entirely different matter, but like many cult writers, Thompson seems poised to be a more reliable author in death than in life.

Still, “Hunter S. Thompson’s last book” offers an opportunity to summarize what I’ve learned from my reading project.

The first is a cautious agreement with fans and biographers who say that Thompson’s golden age was a brief period between 1970 and 1974, sometimes between “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” and “The Great Shark Hunt”.  Sure, you would have to add Hell’s Angels (1966) and quite a few short pieces between 1975-2005, but much of the essential Thompson fits between four covers: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Great Shark Hunt, Hell’s Angels, and Fear and Loathing: On the Campaing Trail ’72.  After 1975, he became stuck in his own celebrity, content to turn the same tricks –or not write at all.  Drugs gave a lot to Thompson… but they may have taken much as well.

My second conclusion is that while Hunter S. Thompson is one of the great personalities of twentieth-century America, it’s clear that I really couldn’t have tolerated him in real life.  His profiles all describe someone unable to function in society, an aggressor who didn’t really care about other people.  How much of this was a legend designed to get other people to leave him alone was debatable.  Still, if you’re not convinced, you have your pick of essays.  Wenner and Seymour’s oral biography Gonzo is crammed with fantastic stories about him, while William McKeen’s Outlaw Journalist offers the best and more nuanced biography of him and Simon Cowan’s Hunter S. Thompson is a revealing look as seen by a close friend.  Read those and you too will be able to say whether you would have liked to meet the man.

My third Grand Statement about my year spent in Gonzoland is that through Thompson, I got to learn a lot more about America from the sixties to 9/11: Between 1965 and 1975, Thompson found himself at the epicentre of radical social changes and, though his coverage, was able to write down what it felt to be there at the time.  Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas endures even today as a great book because of this sense, and the portrait we get of America from Thompson’s fanciful gonzo journalism is perhaps more truthful than most objective accounts of the time.  If you start tracing connections from Thompson to other works and writers, you can get an unconventional crash-course in modern history.

There will never be another Hunter S. Thompson.  That, as much, is obvious.

Orphanage, Robert Buettner

Orphanage, Robert Buettner

ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

Orbit, 2008 reprint of 2004 original, 302 pages, C8.50 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-316-01912-5

I read a lot of science-fiction, but the field is so large that a lot of worthwhile stuff still passes by unnoticed.  For some reason, I completely missed Robert Buettner’s Orphanage and its first sequel when they were first published by Warner Aspect in 2004 and 2005.  It took then-Warner-now-Orbit’s re-edition for the series (now up to five volumes) to register, and I do regret having missed it when it was first published.  It’s more of a familiar comfort SF read than a top-notch example of the form, but it’s not as if we can get too many of those, right?

Orphanage is familiar from its premise on.  “Aliens attack!  Young troubled man enlists and grows up in a hurry.” has been a staple of military Science Fiction for decades, and every example of the form gets compared to Starship Troopers first, and The Forever War second.  The parallels get even harder to ignore as Buettner uses a chatty first-person narration and follows the usual structural arc from boot camp to first engagement with the enemy.  It’s not a case of imitation as much as it’s one of archetypical storytelling –there are only so many ways one can tell that story, after all, and it’s not as if we’re reading to see if the humans manage to win.  We already know how it ends; now we just want to see how it happens.

Since the details usually make or break this kind of story, it’s fortunate that Buettner knows what he’s doing.  Our narrator/protagonist Jason Wander is not the most admirable young man as the book begins, but those flaws only gives him opportunities to get better.  Perhaps the best thing about Orphanage is that it proves how the good-old-grunt story can still be adapted to a contemporary setting without turning too ridiculous: Wander is a modern teenager, and the world around him is recognizably ours a few years in the future.  While Buettner isn’t particularly adventurous in his future technology (hand-waving it not-so-convincingly with “the army is always a step backward, you nerds.”), this does add to the conventional, familiar charm of the novel where nearly every plot incident finds a resonance or two in earlier military SF books.

I suspect that this familiarity will work in one of two ways, depending on the reader: Those with vivid memories of Starship Troopers and The Forever War won’t find anything but an update here, while those who have yet to discover Heinlein and Haldeman will just enjoy the story.  Additionally, I suspect that the novel will find a loyal audience among men that are or have been involved in the military: Buettner’s direct prose and knowledgeable description of military life seems custom-made to reach infrequent readers who aren’t as susceptible to comment about originality or lack thereof.  The flip-side of this argument is that jaded readers who think they can’t enjoy military SF should be warned that there isn’t much more than a prototypical example of the form here.

There have been far more interesting updates of Starship Troopers since the fifties.  In the early eighties, Card’s Ender’s Game played manipulative ethical games with this premise.  More recently, Scalzi’s Old Man’s War twisted at least part of the formula and did well in presenting a going-of-age war novel written from a non-insider’s perspective.  Orphanage is far too conventional to take any such storytelling risks, but what it does have over Starship Troopers are sequels: four of them, taking Wander through an entire multi-decade career.  SF learns and adapts to its operating conditions, and if Haldeman was able to fit an entire interstellar war in a single thin novel in the seventies, current market conditions suggest otherwise.

I’m likely to give a chance to at least the first two sequels of the series in part because I’m hoping that the overwhelming familiarity of this first volume will go away (Wander can only attend boot camp once, one hopes) and be replaced by more original material.  That’s where the pacing and prose of Orphanage proves more promising than its plot or world-building: The plot can evolve, the imagined future can become more challenging, but the writing style and rhythm are tougher to upgrade.  Fortunately, if Buettner’s Orphanage may not be all that original, it does announce an engaging writer able to work with well-worn stories.  Now let’s see the ones he gets to invent by himself.

[January 2010: As expected, sequel Orphan’s Destiny is a great deal less derivative than its prequel: In fact, most of the novel takes place in peacetime, while our narrator returns to Earth and gets to see the world react to its skirmish with alien attackers. But then they come back, and there is desperate damn-the-system combat. It’s both more original and yet not as interesting. Go figure.]

[May 2010: My interest in the series has flatlined with Orphan’s Journey, a third volume that takes the action outside the Solar System. Alas, I can’t be bothered to care, and chances are that I won’t seek out the rest of the series.]

Quadrophenia (1979)

Quadrophenia (1979)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(On DVD, December 2009) Five minutes after this film started, I really wasn’t looking forward to the rest of the picture: mid-sixties Britain may have given us The Beatles, but in many ways it felt like a terrible place to live, and the prospect of spending even 90 more minutes there alongside a rebellious teenager really wasn’t appealing.  But through its protagonist, Quadrophenia ends up testifying about a way of living: There are echoes of A Clockwork Orange in there, but also an entire era in which Britain redefined itself.  By the time the film sets up its conflict between mods and rockers, the hook is in: While the self-destructive protagonist isn’t much more sympathetic, there’s a real drive to find out what will happen to him next.  But the film’s greatest moment is easily its lengthy sequence detailing an urban riot between mods and rockers set in Brighton.  The antagonism between the two groups may feel silly, but as a depiction of urban unrest in a densely-packed setting, it has few equals: Loosely based on real events that I ended up researching with wide-eyed amazement (read up on “Mods and Rockers” on Wikipedia and keep following the links), Quadrophenia ends up providing a window into an era that is still, in some ways, embedded in the modern teenage experience.  For a few moments, the film brings together a lot of threads about moral panics about teenage experimentation, the origins of a pop-cultural movements and the place of music in that matrix.  But don’t be frightened off by social analysis: Quadrophenia is perfectly enjoyable as a teenage drama, a musical opera (the soundtrack is amazing), a fount of obscure trivia (including a small but striking role for Sting) and a generally well-made film: The direction still holds up well even today.  For a film I wasn’t sure to keep watching five minutes in, it ends up being a minor classic of its era.

Armored (2009)

Armored (2009)

ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

(In theaters, December 2009) As far as B-grade action thrillers go, Armored has a number of things going for it.  Most notably, it adopts an unusual high concept (protagonist refuses to cooperate with his colleagues during a multimillion heist; finds himself trapped in an armoured truck while they scheme against him) and then spends an hour milking the premise for all it’s worth.  Much of it feels mechanical, but there’s no denying that the claustrophobic set-pieces are effective.  It feels just a bit fresher than many other thrillers out there, and the trio of familiar actors (Matt Dillon, Jean Reno, Laurence Fishburne) headlining this practically all-male film is a bit amazing considering that in almost all other aspects, it feels like a straight-to-DVD feature.  But the problem with Armored is that it simply doesn’t take things beyond the obvious.  The actors seems to be slumming in their roles, the character dynamics feel simplistic and contrived; the action sequences are not particularly spectacular and the plot is simple enough that alert viewers will figure out the next plot twist shortly before it occurs.  Add to that a number of credibility problems (traceable dollar bills, convenient bottom hatch, etc.) and it’s easy not to be impressed.  This is pure formula thriller filmmaking, and while it’s generally enjoyable (it will whittle away a lazy evening), it remains much less than what Armored could have been.  Moviegoers with long memories for French-Canadian thrillers will see the film with the added handicap of remembering 1987’s gutsier Pouvoir Intime as another take on a similar premise.