Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Revenge of the Nerds (1984)

    Revenge of the Nerds (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, On DVD, February 2011) The early-to-mid-eighties saw their share of college-set comedies, but few of them became part of popular culture.  If Revenge of the Nerds is any exception, it’s probably because of its outright pro-nerd message: Nerds have the fortunate tendency to take over the world’s technical infrastructure, and so it’s no accident if the film would be fondly remembered during an era where the Internet has made intellectuals kind of admirable.  (Nah, I kid: it’s all about the underdog, and everyone thinks they’re the underdog.) As a film, Revenge of the Nerds isn’t much to celebrate: everything about the production shows its age and low-budget origins and the direction is no better from countless other B-grade comedies.  In terms of subject matter, however, the screenplay is clever enough to marry geekery with college debauchery and underdog plotting (sometimes coming a bit too close to trivializing the plight of other minorities): the result hasn’t aged well, but it has held up a lot better than other films of its era.  There are even a few surprises in the casting, from John Goodman as a bullying coach, to James Cromwell as the protagonist Robert Carradine’s very-nerdy dad.  Dramatically, the film falls a bit flat toward the end without a clear climax (the beginning of the third act seems tighter than its end), but with such an amiable film, who’s to nit-pick?  Die-hard nerds may quibble at the questionable nerdiness of some of the members of Lambda Lambda Lambda (and their readiness to take up ordinary college antics), but that’s part of the film’s inclusiveness: Everybody’s a nerd now!  The “Panty Raid Edition” DVD contains the kind of audio commentary track that reflects the good times the filmmakers had in making the film, as well as a few featurettes to reinforce the feeling.  More amusingly, it also has a wretched sitcom pilot from the early nineties that shows everything that’s wrong with cheap scripted TV comedy.

  • Broken Arrow (1996)

    Broken Arrow (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second Viewing, on DVD, February 2011) I hadn’t seen Broken Arrow since its opening weekend in theatres, but I’m not really surprised to see that it has held up so well as an action film.  The mid-to-late nineties had some fantastic examples of the form (Speed, The Rock, Face/Off, etc.) and Broken Arrow still holds the distinction of being one of John Woo’s better American features.  Structured around a script by Graham Yost, Broken Arrow features a pleasant mixture of military technology, criminal activity and all-out action indulgence.  Christian Slater is forgettable as the hero and baby-faced Samatha Matthis looks completely lost as an action heroine, but John Travolta steals the show as a charismatic scenery-chewing villain, coolly charming as a killer with the best dialogue in the entire film.  (From the seminal “Ain’t it cool?” (dot-com) to the clenched-teeth “Would you mind not shooting at the thermonuclear weapons?”)  Planes, helicopters, trucks and trains are all destroyed along the way, but the clarity of the film’s action sequences still holds up as a fine example of the genre, especially after the erosion of action filmmaking during the last overly-edited decade.  Here, every shot seems meaningful, and we get to appreciate both pending dangers and minute developments.  A few of the night-time effect shots look dated, but the rest is still technically impressive.  Broken Arrow doesn’t make too much sense and definitely feels contrived, but it still carries an action-packed charge with a smile and presents B-grade action films as they should be more often.  The 2010 DVD re-release, sadly, is not even enhanced for widescreen TVs and offers no other features than the trailer –a real shame considering the documentary material available to a logistics-heavy action film.

  • The Silver Bear, Derek Haas

    The Silver Bear, Derek Haas

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Berkley, 2010 reprint of 2008 original, 215 pages, C$9.99 pb, ISBN 978-0-515-14763-6

    Reviewing books is one of my favourite things in life, and the evidence for that is everywhere on this site, which has seen something like eight book reviews per month for years.  There are times, however, where even the fun hobbies can feel oppressive.  You’re not seeing any sign of the problem here because I’m back-dating my reviews like crazy, but I spent most of February 2011 reading one unreviewable book after another: Lengthy tomes that left me feeling nothing; non-translated French novels with no audience for an English-language review; humour books that I enjoyed but couldn’t comment at length.  As I found myself reading but not reviewing, my backlog grew and I entered March without having met my reviewing quota from January.  I lost patience with lengthy books that had no obvious reviewing hooks; was exasperated by pleasant but vapid comic books that couldn’t sustain 600 words of commentary; and started wondering why I was reaching so far in my stacks of books to read when I could just go grab something new and comment-worthy.  (The answer to that last question, incidentally, is “reading old stuff to make way for new stuff in the piles.”)  Suddenly, spending a week and a half to finish a single 1,600-page French novel in two volumes didn’t feel like such a good idea.

    At some point, in bleary existential anguish, I started remembering the wisdom of more grizzled reviewers.  Which White Dwarf reviewer had made a comment about his brain shrinking to the size of a white dwarf after reading so many routine Science Fiction books?  Who was it who said that after reviewing for pay for years, short books looked more and more attractive?  Was it the same reviewer who said that after a while, they stopped grabbing the fat books if they had deadlines to meet?

    In any case, I found part of my reviewing-mojo back in Derek Haas’s The Silver Bear.  Picked up a year ago partially because it had been misfiled in the SF section, partly for the novelty of seeing such a thin book published as a mass-market paperback, The Silver Bear is a short thriller with a lot of style.  It’s not that good, but it’s an entertaining read –and you can polish it off in two commutes even if you read slowly.

    While The Silver Bear is a first novel, Derek Haas isn’t a first-time author: His credits as a screenwriter include familiar action films such as 2 Fast 2 Furious, Wanted and the somewhat more respectable 3:10 to Yuma.  That his name is recognizable and marketable explains why such a short novel made it to bookstores: Given contemporary publishing economics, few publishers would take such chances in publishing a slim, expensive novel from an author with no track record.  In fact, the last time remember such a slim book in paperback, it was Steven Bochco’s Death by Hollywood.

    (Intermission note, since I’m padding this review: Reviewers shouldn’t make assumptions about publishing, fame and marketing.  A lot of stuff happens when Hollywood and New York publishers intersect, and only a minority of it actually make sense.  Agents can do wonders, as do promises of returns against favours.  Less cynically, there’s also the possibility that, you know, good novels get published no matter who wrote them.)

    But what The Silver Bear doesn’t have in length, it has in attitude.  A first-person narrative detailing the formative years of an assassin in-between his preparation for a high-profile hit, it’s a novel that chooses to be snappy and efficient.  The antihero’s no-nonsense narration is clipped and to the point, while the plot moves swiftly in-between the flashbacks and the details regarding the life of a professional assassin.  You can check off the tropes:  Organized crime; the use of a contact point; forbidden romance; affectless professionalism; rivalries between competing assassins… On some level, this is very familiar stuff: the kind of building blocks many movies (including Haas’ Wanted adaptation) have used in the past.  But the down-to-earth nature of the details is convincing (our assassin’s path through the Chicago underworld is gritty) and the very dark world Haas needs as a backdrop to his novel is credible enough.

    It almost makes up for the sketchy nature of the novel’s plot to be found in-between the flashbacks and the conventional nature of the narrative.  The been-there-done-that feeling of The Silver Bear weakens a final revelation that doesn’t seem all that consequential.  It’s always tempting, when considering novels written by screenwriters, to speculate as to whether the story would have been best-served on-screen, or if there’s a shelved screenplay somewhere with the same title.  Chances are that, at a different time, The Silver Bear wouldn’t have seemed as compelling as it does to me at the moment.  But I’ll take the small reading pleasures I get, and right now this novel is exactly the length I needed, with pretty much all the ingredients I needed for a punchy read.  Now let’s go on to weightier material.

  • Waiting… (2005)

    Waiting… (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, February 2011) There’s been a welcome eclipse for gross-out comedy since the turn of the century, and Waiting is enough to remind us that even a foul-mouthed slacker comedy can dispense with references to genitalia.  But since one of the first significant laughs of the film comes from the line “If you want to work here, in this restaurant, I really think that you need to ask yourself one simple question: How do you feel about frontal male nudity?” it’s not as if we haven’t been warned.  The nominal plot engine is how a slacker-with-prospects (played by Justin Long) comes to reconsider the time he has spent working at the local “Shenaniganz” chain restaurant outlet.  But the ensemble casts brings together a bunch of oddball characters all having their own fun.  Ryan Reynolds is the most compelling as a hilariously deviant waiter who’s seen everything: It’s a scum-ball character, but he plays it with a winning smile and the film weeks weaker during its third act when it has to spend time away from him: few other actors could have earned such sympathy with that role.  Luis Guzman is another highlight as a restaurant worker obsessed with his own kind of fun and games.  Chi McBride, Alanna Ubach and Vanessa Lengies also make an impression in smaller roles, but everyone has their role to play in making sure that this workplace comedy ends up clicking.  Never mind the inevitable spitting-in-food scene (whose best laugh comes from the relatively innocuous “We almost had to switch to the ten-second rule.”): there’s more fun to be had in the acerbic repartee between workers and the blank-faced realization that much of the served food in America is handled by people waiting for a better life.  The two-disc DVD seems ridiculously loaded with extra features given the triviality of the film itself, but they’re good for a few extra laughs.

  • Haeundae [Tidal Wave] (2009)

    Haeundae [Tidal Wave] (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, February 2011) One of the dangers in trying to review a foreign film is trying to figure out what’s a real weakness and what gets lost in translation.  To western reviewers used to firm tone unity within films, Asian cinema’s genre-blending can be a struggle to appreciate.  While South Korea’s Haeundae aspires to present an experience much like the typical American disaster movie, this may not be obvious from the first hour, which feels like an incoherent comedy featuring far too many ill-defined characters.  Comedy doesn’t always travel well, and it’s an even more difficult sell when the film doesn’t seem in any hurry to get to the disaster, or even tell a story efficiently.  The titular disaster strikes after 70 minutes, and the next fifteen are remarkably enjoyable in depicting a coastal city battered by a tsunami: There’s a series of sequences featuring a cargo ship and its containers that makes no sense, but is awe-inspiring in the ways only stupid action movie sequences can be.  But don’t count on any lasting triumph, because the closing moments of the film are taken up with lengthy body counts of characters that don’t necessarily deserve any retribution.  The end result feels like an incoherent blend of broad comedy, manipulative drama and dumb action: Haeundae lacks focus and direction.  The relatively copious DVD supplements of the US edition are hit-and-miss, but they reveal the filmmaker’s comedy backgrounds and their intentions to do something different.  The result, alas, speaks for itself: sometimes entertaining but generally incoherent, leaving audiences guessing.  How much of this is due to cultural differences and strange translation choices is something else worth reviewing.

  • Carriers (2009)

    Carriers (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, February 2011) One of the best things about Carriers is the way it wisely dispenses with the usual first act of most post-apocalyptic thrillers.  As the film begins with public displays of bad driving and other asocial behaviour, the ultimate pandemic has already happened, leaving only a few scattered survivors fearing for their lives.  While the tricks you in thinking that this is Chris Pine’s film due to a flashy performance, Carriers is really the story of someone else in their four-people group as they travel and see how badly society has deteriorated.  There’s not much of a point to the film but a few disconnected adventures and a gradually decreasing list of characters: as another example of how nihilistic the post-apocalyptic genre can be, it’s hard to do better.  Still, for such a low-profile horror thriller, Carriers is generally well-executed (some of the camera work is very good), and written with a few flourishes of interest: The misdirection in terms of protagonist is gradually revealed and (somewhat unusually for the zombies/infected genre) the film leaves behind more characters than it kills graphically.  Heck, it’s probably the first time I have liked Piper Perabo in a film.  While Carriers never becomes anything more than a disposable, redundant post-apocalyptic film, but it’s not too bad within the confines of that genre.

  • Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer, Vern

    Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer, Vern

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Titan, 2010, 420 pages, C$18.95 tp, ISBN 978-1-84856-371-1

    Let’s put it as straight as Vern would: If you’re a reasonably smart moviegoer and you’re not reading outlawvern.com, then you’re missing out on one of the best movie reviewers writing today.  His self-assigned beat is, basically, “movies for guys”: action movies, horror movies, thrillers… but it’s always a treat to see him occasionally venture out of that demographic segment.  He combines a deep knowledge of film with serious analytical skills and an entertaining online persona.  He may still make intentional use of faux-dumb neologisms as “filmatism” and “web sights”, but there’s a lot of keen intelligence behind the plain-speaking outlaw façade. (Accordingly, his only recorded use of the word façade is in a review he has since half-disavowed.)  With Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer, you too can get a selection of his best online writing in one handy paper package.

    Ignoring the possibility that “Vern” is a pseudonym for someone with an established track record, this is Vern’s second professionally-published paper book: His first was Seagalogy, a surprisingly worthwhile book-length study of the film of Steven Seagal.  This time, most of Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer is material reprinted from Vern’s web site, bringing together more than ten years’ worth of content in one handy package that makes for perfect bathroom reading.

    Despite the obvious jokes about paying for content you can get online for free, there’s an obvious added value to collections of online content.  On an obvious level, Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer comes with a generous amount of organizing, contextualizing, footnotes amending the original text and a bit of copy-editing as well.  The book is divided in sections prefaced by original introductions, and the familiar typography is certainly easier to read than outlawvern’s default white-on-black-with-red-highlights site layout.  But there’s also a less-obvious value in selecting content for print publication, picking the best or most representative pieces in one single package.  The cognitive savings in not having to navigate a web site in order to read scattershot reams of content are usually underestimated by the why-pay crowd: Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer offers a controlled reading experience, coherent mini-theses and the opportunity to send a few honest bucks (um, cents) to the hard-working author.

    Divided in thirteen sections, Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer starts and ends firmly in action-movie territory, as the Die Hard-inspired title may imply.  When you start a book with a review of 300 and end it with a section dedicated to one Bruce Willis, it’s hard to argue that the book doesn’t deliver for action fans.  But there are plenty of big and small delights in-between.  Vern is able to write entertainingly about obscure films; few other reviewers can make readers hunt down long-forgotten movies as effectively as he does.  (I suspect that his commentaries are more entertaining that some of the movies he describes, but that goes without saying.)  Even in discussing films far from the “movies for guys” beat, Vern is reliably entertaining: His takes on films such as Crash (2005), Garfield and The Real Cancun show what happens when a reviewer brings his acknowledged biases to a different kind of film and writes for an appropriate audience.  From time to time, his reviews are springboard to larger concerns (such as the place of the American male in contemporary society, or the debate about the Hostel-inspired Torture Porn horror craze).  Some sections of the book are meant to form a sustained argument: After suffering through Transformers and being aghast at the “summer movies aren’t supposed to be good” argument, Vern revisits some of the best summer genre movies of the past and, in doing so, pretty much demonstrates that laziness from filmmakers and viewers is no excuse.

    The result is quite a bit more valuable than a reprint of online reviews: It’s a great time in company of an articulate, sympathetic and knowledgeable critic who wants, in his own fashion, to raise the level of discourse surrounding popular genre movies.  Even in discussing movies that are -at best- forgettable exploitation films, Vern can be counted upon to make one or two observations worth our time.  Trust me on this: You want to be reading outlawvern.com, and there’s no better introduction to Vern than Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer.

  • Gasland (2010)

    Gasland (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, February 2011) In looking at environmental issues, there’s often a naïve and comforting tendency to believe that the worst excesses are behind us, somewhere in distant history.  Surely, no one will be stupid enough again to build unfiltered smokestacks leading to acid rain, or expand a residential neighbourhood over buried toxic landfill like what happened at Love Canal.  So it is that one of the most depressing facets of Gasland, Josh Fox’s Oscar-nominated exploration of natural gas extraction by hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is the realization that this has all happened in the past ten years.  Helped along by a deregulatory framework approved by the Bush administration, tens of thousands of fracking sites have been established and Fox takes us on a damning tour of some of them.  The process upsets natural geology to such a degree that it contaminates drinking water with industrial waste and escaping natural gas, condemning ordinary people to pay for alternate sources of water, fall sick to neurological diseases, live under the threat of explosions or see their rural neighbourhood turn deadly for wildlife.  Much of this is happening on public lands, or within tranquil rural communities once people accept payoffs (er, “mineral royalties”) for what’s happening underground.  Fox’s elegantly mournful tone is unexpectedly effective in creating pure outrage, and part of the film’s effectiveness is seeing Fox become more self-assured both in content and in presentation as the film advances.  The natural gas industry is ineffective in presenting a credible defence: on the other hand, Fox traces a clear path between government deregulation, industry lobbying, environmental degradation and grass-root consequences: He build his case from the ground up, and we can’t help but think that one of the reasons why fracking has become such a problem in such a short time is that for the longest time, its consequences have been on isolated and rural ordinary people, far away from the urban centers of environmentally-concerned citizen.  It remains to be seen what can be done to turn this practice around: Official government entities aren’t doing much; some politicians seem comprehensively paid-off by the industry; and there seems to be some outrage fatigue in the US after the overwhelming Bush years.  And that’s not even going into the various ways the US government is structurally corrupt by design.  Even the conviction that natural gas industry executives are due for a heck of a karmic retribution won’t help anyone in the short-term.  On the other hand, Gasland may still help people outside the US: there’s been a lot of discussion about shale gas extraction in Quebec lately, and the wind is definitely blowing toward far-stronger environmental regulations.  Gasland, which circulated widely in 2010 (excerpts of it even being shown on mainstream TV news about shale gas extraction) may have helped.  It’s not much and it’s far too late to help US citizen, but faced with such a bleak portrait of public environmental degradation, it’s best to take all the good news we can find.

  • Shine, Edited by Jetse de Vries

    Shine, Edited by Jetse de Vries

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Solaris, 2010, 453 pages, £7.99 pb, ISBN 978-1-906735-66-1

    Sometimes, when I get bored reviewing books, I take on self-imposed challenges.  Many of them are self-defeating.  Some are just silly.  A few have gotten me in trouble.  But some are interesting style exercises, such as Can you review a themed anthology without saying anything meaningful about any of the individual stories?

    Most of the time, that’s simply not possible.  As much as anthologists would like us to appreciate all of their hard work in delivering themed anthologies with carefully-picked stories, there’s rarely more to see in the package than stories around a common, sometimes arbitrary theme.  “Oh, some Sherlock Holmes mysteries”.  “Oh, a book of cat-detective stories.”  Shine is different.  It’s “an anthology of near-future optimistic science-fiction”

    It says a lot about the current state of SF that we’re at a point where this kind of theme would be noteworthy.  Simplifying outrageously, SF as a literary genre tends to be manic-depressive, with phases of excitement alternating between cycles of depression.  The manic excitement of cyberpunk may have followed the dour catastrophes of the seventies, but the genre currently seems stuck in a gloomy phase, reeling from the aftershocks of the Bush administration and associated traumas.  In-between milestones such as The Windup Girl, The Road and one-note symphonies of gloooooomy “Year’s best SF” anthologies, the fact that an anthology of optimistic near-future SF would get people excited is itself noteworthy, and a welcome push-back against the prevailing atmosphere.

    We’re also lucky that this someone would happen to be Jetse de Vries, an oversized personality who managed to transform his vision in a coherent book.  Thanks to his introduction (in which he clearly outlines the goal of his anthology) and individual notes on each story detailing how he got in touch with the authors, de Vries transforms Shine from an anthology to a sustained think-piece, each story flowing into the next.  If Shine can be discussed without paying attention to the stories themselves, it’s because it feels like a substantial piece of work by itself

    It probably helps that the universes imagined in Shine’s sixteen stories end up sharing quite a number of common assumptions.  I don’t think that’s an accident: Today’s fears about the future are clearly defined, and so are our best hopes for salvation.  As a result, the fiction collected here is heavy on globalization, social equality, environmentalism as a way of life, tightly-connected communication networks and a long-term vision that goes beyond the next quarterly report.  I’m pleased, after years of having internalized the notion that “there’s no common future any more”, to discover that there can actually be a vision for a better tomorrow… and that it doesn’t look like classical Science Fiction as much as a trawl through interesting blogs.

    That’s as good a reason as any to discuss Shine’s list of contributors, and how it doesn’t look like the usual slate of suspects you can find in other SF anthologies.  Flipping through the list of authors, I notice only two established SF writers, may up-and-comers, a lot of non-Americans (this is significant), a few scientists, some bloggers (heck, even a regular commenter on blogs I read) and others whose biography escapes any easy categorization.  At a time where genre SF is contemplating its own insularity, this too is a welcome change.

    This diversity of voices goes hand-in-hand with de Vries’ up-to-the-moment use of social media tools to solicit stories and draw support for the anthology.  Since the project’s beginning, de Vries has been updating a web site and tweeting, getting in contact with newer authors in this fashion.  (I’m probably breaking my vow to not say anything substantial about individual stories by pointing out that one of them is written Twitter-style.)  The impression that de Vries’ enthusiastic use of modern communications suggests is a demonstration of his own thesis: there’s still a bit of wonder in seeing how an individual can assemble not just an anthology of this global reach, but a social community of like-minded people by using tools freely available to all.  (And lest you think that this was just a promotional effort, note that the Twitter feed is still active as of February 2011, nearly a year after the release of the book.)  In some ways, Shine is the first true major twenty-first century SF anthology, inconceivable and impossible even ten years earlier.

    The flip-side of such a strong editorial presence and crisp premise is that the project can overshadow the stories to a point where a review can dispense of discussing them entirely.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing for the project, or the anthologist himself, but the poor authors may have to read other reviews in order to get their kudos.  Fortunately, thanks to our bright current future, that too is just another web search away…

  • The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, Don Thompson

    The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art, Don Thompson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Anchor Canada, 2009 reprint of 2008 original, 268 pages, C$22.00 tp, ISBN 978-0-385-66678-7

    One of the reasons why I’m reading and reviewing mostly non-fiction books these days is that the real world seems to have, in its quasi-infinite diversity, a lot more to offer than the well-trodden pathways of fiction.

    For instance, it’s hard to imagine a fictional universe more irrational than the high-end contemporary art market.  What could possibly motivate otherwise intelligent and accomplished people to drop a few million dollars on objects of dubious artistic value?  Damien Hirsch’s titular artwork, after all, is £50,000’s worth of dead shark, preservation fluid, glass and steel.  Why would it be worth so much more to collectors, galleries, auction houses and dealers?  As contemporary art becomes baffling to the average viewer, why does it continue to fetch such high prices?

    The simplest answer is a variation on “It’s crazy!”  But that’s the kind of explanation made to annoy every professional economist, trained to believe in the rationality and efficiency of the marketplace.  In other words, it’s a perfect research opportunity for academic economist Don Thompson, who sets out to understand the business of contemporary art in less than three hundred pages.

    The $12 Million Stuffed Shark ends up being a far more revealing journey than anyone could expect.  If you want to start somewhere, go with the buyers and collectors.  One of the smartest passages of the book illustrates just how rich big-time art collectors actually are: Twelve million dollars, at their level of income, is something like a week’s salary –substantial, sure, but not crippling.  The buyers are from all around the world, and many of them are on a quest for social respectability.  How best to prove their upward mobility and refined artistic tastes than to display a work from a familiar name?  Some buy sight-unseen; others will borrow the work for a few weeks to see how it fits in their décor.  Other will buy for investment opportunities, but even Thompson (who has since joined the staff of The Art Economist magazine, a periodical aimed at art collectors/investors) cautions that overall, most art never sells for more than it was bought at.

    Most artists, after all, reach a plateau; most art ends up stored somewhere; museums have more art than they can display (leading to a credible argument for museums selling work); and most would-be investors never see a return on most of their investments.  This makes art a risky investment, but not a hopeless one, because some work from some artists do appreciate, and everyone is in a race to identify the next hot artists before they hit big-time prices.

    From that starting point, we get to explore art auctions, auction houses, the dance between dealers and their competitors, the increasing importance of art fairs and the artists that are getting most of the attention nowadays.  Get ready to distinguish your Saatchis from your Christies and maybe even appreciate some work from Jeff Koons and other contemporary artists.  One of the best chapters in the book explains the curious psychology of auctions in a wonderful wealth of subtle details that show how people react in constrained situations.

    Even fast readers shouldn’t be surprised if they remain glued to the book for a while.  Thompson covers his subject through anecdotes, interviews, historical information, plenty of money figures and a few illustrations along the way.  Avowedly inspired by Freakonomics, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark becomes a layman’s introduction to contemporary art from a non-artistic perspective.  Thompson doesn’t spend a lot of time on quality judgement, except to suggest that if there is considerable disagreement as to what is a good art piece, it’s easy to quantify what is an expensive art piece.  This should make most artists and connoisseurs wince, but it’s an essential assumption if the book is to explain the field as it is rather than how it should be.

    Ironically, Thompson’s book feels like dense reading in part because it doesn’t skimp on telling anecdotes, biographical profiles and preliminary conclusions on the state of the field.  I found it to be absorbing –I didn’t want to miss anything, so I ended up reading it very slowly to be sure to keep up with Thompson’s thorough exploration of the relationships between the various players involved in the field.  Perhaps more tellingly, I bought this book in the wake of the excellent “Pop Life” exhibition of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Canada, and now regret that I can’t go back to the gallery to see a few Warhols, Koonses, Hirsches and other darlings of the contemporary art market.  Thompson may have focused strictly on the economics of the market, but he may be able to stoke up a continued interest in the art.

  • Incendies (2010)

    Incendies (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, February 2011) French Canadian cinema is best-known for comedies and historical pieces rather than globe-spanning dramas, and that’s a good part of why Incendies feels so satisfying.  Spanning thirty years and two continents, the film is kicked off by posthumous revelations that send Montréal-based twins to the Middle East (specifically Lebanon, although the film is careful to invent place names and never specify countries) where they eventually piece together a set of terrible family secrets.  While borrowing a few tricks from the thriller playbook (Guns! Explosions!  Torture!), this is a serious drama more than anything else.  Bouncing in time between the contemporary odyssey of the twins and the events of their mother’s life, Incendies has scope, dramatic depth and feels like a world-class production.  The actors are exceptional (Lubna Azabal is particularly good, but it’s also hilarious to see Remy Girard show up in another Oscar-nominated film), the direction is solid and the film features some wide-screen cinematography along the way, despite a comparatively small budget and source material adapted from a stage play.  This is a film to chew on for a while, in its operatic themes of redemption and blinding truth.  Deservedly nominated for an Academy Award, Incendies also marks an odd development for Quebec cinema: a film that uses Montréal as a framing device for a story that takes place elsewhere.  It’s good to see the local film industry look outside once in a while.

  • The Discovery of the Titanic, Robert D. Ballard

    The Discovery of the Titanic, Robert D. Ballard

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner Books, 1998 reprint of 1987 original, 287 pages, $13.99 tp, ISBN 0-446-67174-6

    I know that Titanic-mania is so 1997-1998, but there’s no expiration date for good books.  I’ve had Robert Ballard’s The Discovery of the Titanic in my to-read stack for nearly forever and now seems as good a time to read it as ever.

    An account of the discovery of the Titanic shipwreck by the oceanographer in charge of the expedition, The Discovery of the Titanic sometimes feels like a throwback to the heroic era of exploration.  It’s not much of a stretch to point out that less than six months elapsed between Roald Amundsen’s December 1911 expedition to the South Pole (the Earth’s last great unexplored frontier) and the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912.  A frontier opened even as another one closed, as generations of curious observers wondered about the exact location of the wreck.

    It wasn’t as simple as looking somewhere near the approximate location of the Titanic’s last know position.  Given the depth at which the ship sank, no attempt could be made until technology improved.  Several expeditions simply couldn’t find the wreck.  Meanwhile, popular culture spun its own tales: As a kid, I remember being told fanciful tales of how the wreckage of the ship was still traveling underwater, moved by underwater currents to circle the world.  As amazing at it may sound, it wasn’t until nearly sixty years later, in 1985, that the wreckage was found once again –four kilometres down on the Atlantic ocean floor and broken up in two pieces six hundred meters apart.  Overnight, historical accounts of the ship’s sinking were revised, as common wisdom until then (As reflected in such things as Clive Cussler’s overblown thriller Raise the Titanic!) held that the ship had sunk in one piece.

    The discovery of the wreck, far from dampening interest in the story of the ocean liner, revived interest in the matter and eventually led to James Cameron’s blockbuster 1997 movie.  A minor boom in Titanic-related publishing occurred to coincide with the film’s success, and this re-edition of Ballard’s 1987 book, revised to take in account the latest discoveries, was part of the mania.

    Still, discounting fads, there’s little doubt that this is one of the essentials on every bookshelf dedicated to the Titanic.  While it doesn’t seem to be in print at the moment, it’s a first-hand account of the discovery of the wreck by the lead discoverer himself, has been favourably reviewed, frequently cited by latter works and is still fascinating to read even a quarter of a century later.  There are better accounts of the sinking itself, and more complete examinations of the wreck (some of them by Ballard himself), but when it comes to describing the moment of the discovery itself, this is the source.

    The book does feature a summarized account of the sinking; just enough to set the scene, provide context and prepare readers for the discovery.  Ballard also provides an overview of the previous failed efforts to find the wreck, not sparing one or two barbs at his predecessors.  Describing his own attempt to put together an expedition of his own, Ballard is notably coy about the now-known deal he made with the US Navy to get funding in exchange for exploring US nuclear submarines wrecks prior to his own search for the Titanic.

    The world had to wait until a French/American 1985 expedition, using what was then state-of-the-art technology, for the wreck of the Titanic to be found. Ballard’s account of the discovery, in the wee hours of the morning, remains the book’s best passage.  He’s also candid in describing the aftermath, the way the discovery escaped in the press before they had a communication strategy to go along the scientific agenda, and the difficulties dealing with the media circus that accompanied his return to shore.  Ballard’s factual description of the debris found in the field underneath which the Titanic sank is curiously effective in describing the human element of the tragedy.  The book comes with a full-color insert showing beautiful illustrations showing the state of the wreck in 1985.

    The Discovery of the Titanic also explain why, as discussed in the afterword of the 1995 edition, Ballard did not raise any artefact from the site –a decision that eventually let others take possession of the wreck under maritime salvage law.  As of this writing, the Titanic wreck is property of a for-profit company putting together traveling museum shows, the debris field has been picked clean of artefacts and numerous visits to the site have left the wreck in far worse shape.  We may want to enjoy the thought of having access to the wreckage site, because chances are that it will be gone, rusted beyond recognition, within a few more decades.  Isn’t it remarkable to realize that the Titanic may have a shorter life as a known site than a lost legend?

  • Barney’s Version (2010)

    Barney’s Version (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, January 2011) As much as I like supporting Canadian Content (and there’s nothing more CanCon than an adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s last novel, filmed and set in Montréal), there’s something just subtly off about Barney’s Version.  It’s an accumulation of small annoyances that damage the film, from a scatter-shot episodic narrative to flat performances to overly sentimental moments.  I’ll be the first to note that presenting forty years of a man’s life on-screen isn’t the simplest screenwriting challenge: As an adaptation of a dense and thick novel, you can perceptibly feel the loose threads running over everywhere and be frustrated at the amount of extra detail missing from the screen.  That’ll explain the way the film doesn’t quite seem to hang together.  While Barney’s Version revolves around Paul Giamatti’s exceptional lead performance and Dustin Hoffman’s unrecognizable turn as his father, actors surrounding them are far less credible.  Most of the female characters seem played either without subtlety (I once thought I could watch Minnie Driver all day, but her one-note shrill performance tested that assumption) or without affect (Rosamund Pike, sedated throughout): even assuming that the film is from Barney’s subjective perspective isn’t enough to excuse it.  Humorous in the details and tragic in the whole, Barney’s Version runs off in all kinds of directions, and it’s not in its nature to finish neatly with a big finale.  It’s best, then, to appreciate its small quirky moments, its Montréal atmosphere and the occasional Denys Arcand cameo.  It is, as is the case with so many middle-of-the-road Canadian dramas, amiable but unremarkable.  Barney’s Version is good enough to make Canadian audiences feel better about seeing it, but it’s not worth much commentary otherwise.

  • Winter’s Bone (2010)

    Winter’s Bone (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2011) There are films I won’t see unless they’ve been nominated for Academy Awards, but Winter’s Bone goes father in being a film I wouldn’t have seen all the way to the end unless it had been nominated for an Academy Award.  Taking place deep in the rural Ozarks area, the film is set in a desperately poor way of life where petty crime and family loyalty override more wholesome values: this, clearly, isn’t the virtuous middle-America lauded by social conservatives.  It’s in cold weather that our wise-by-necessity teenage heroine sets out to discover where her missing father has gone, despite violent warnings, the quasi-certitude of illegal activity and the bone-chilling landscape of winter in hillbilly hell.  What could have been an intriguing criminal investigation set against an unusual setting instead turns into an experience of endurance as the film quickly becomes a trek through a place that I desperately wanted to escape.  The harsh naturalistic cinematography, coupled with ugly characters, desperate circumstances and bleak landscapes, does everything to repulse viewers.  Meanwhile, the slow pacing, lack of plotting and repellent circumstances only prolong the agony.  While there are a few nice sequences in the film (the lake scene is brilliantly gruesome), an interesting inversion of the usual city=bad; rural=good clichés, and Jennifer Lawrence is a solid anchor for the film, much of it feels like an endless nightmare: I spent most of Winter’s Bone thinking Get me out of here… even as I was doing something else at the time.  Goodness helps those who see this without distractions.

  • Secretary (2002)

    Secretary (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2011) In certain circles, Secretary is often held up as a mainstream-friendly introduction to the dominant/submissive mindset –not your usual fare for romantic comedies, and certainly its most enjoyable trait.  Whatever shortcomings the film may have, at least it’s willing to celebrate its kinkiness: The main characters don’t play by the usual rules, and neither does writer-director Steven Shainberg: From the first few moments, Secretary delves deep into kink and makes it feel like a perfectly understandable lifestyle.  As a depressive young woman (Maggie Gyllenhall) falls under the spell of her unusual boss (James Spader, patron saint of proud deviants), the film becomes both stranger and more self-assured.  Despite the added spice of dominance and submission, the core of the film is a solid romance between two characters whose psychological issues complement well.  It’s fun, charming, often cute despite some unpleasant material and absolutely non-threatening.  There are a few problems with the third act, which seems to falter and lose control by going for an overly-public absurdist resolution.  Still, it manages a tricky balance for a difficult subject and it ends on a happy note that pleasantly wraps up everything.  Gyllenhall is mesmerizing in the lead role –nearly ten years later, this is still her career-best performance.  Secretary may not be a particularly great film, but it’s certainly striking, unexpected and confident in the ways it dares celebrate its lack of social convention.  No wonder many people still think of it fondly.