Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Immortel (ad vitam) (2004)

    Immortel (ad vitam) (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, August 2010) I’m usually the first one to complain when a film’s visuals take over its story, but I can sure make an exception when it comes to Immortel (ad vitam), an eye-popping French Science-Fiction movie that teases as much as it satisfies.  The first few sequences sets the tone, with Egyptian gods discussing philosophy in a pyramid hanging over 2095 New York.  A blue-haired woman, an escaped cryogenic prisoner and a bizarre mixture of mutants and aliens quickly follow, setting up a visually dense film that nonetheless manages to tell a story in-between divine possession, political intrigue, dystopian exploitation and a dash of eroticism.  But never mind the adequate story, since the plentiful visual effects thoroughly dominate Immortel.  The film, largely shot against green screen, incorporates digital sets with CGI characters and real-life human actors.  The effect is strange and wonderful even when the quality of the animation doesn’t quite reach beyond the uncanny valley.  The number of quirky background inventions is impressive, and they’re thankfully not all explained as soon as they are introduced: as a result, Immortel feels more alive than countless other SF films.  The quirky dialogue isn’t without its charms either, most of the highlights taking place in conversation between the human hero of the story and his possessor Horus.  In the end, it’s this delightfully weird sensibility, adapted by co-writer/director Enki Bilal from his own graphic novels, which makes the film work even when it shouldn’t: if nothing else, it’s another eloquent proof that French SF cinema tends to be quite a bit more visually adventurous than its US counterparts.  Any serious media-SF fan should make an effort to track down this one.

  • The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)

    The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, August 2010) I realize that I’m fifteen years behind the rest of the world in (finally) seeing this charming Australian comedy, but then again you would be horrified at some of the other curious omissions in my personal film-viewing record.  Suffice to say that hindsight has advantages of its own: It’s hard to see The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert now without spotting Hugo Weaving, Guy Pearce and Terence Stamp in fearless performances that are remarkably different from the kind of roles for which they have become best known.  (Go ahead; make a joke about Agent Smith in drag: “Mis-ter An-der-son, you look… fabulous”.)  The film itself has aged remarkably well: While social attitudes toward queer issues represented in this film have hopefully evolved, the exuberant quality of the characters does a lot to bring audiences into their colourful reality.  By the end, the film reaches a quasi-idyllic acceptance that acts as inspiration.  But social issues aren’t the reason why the film has become such a self-confident camp classic: You just have to look at the astonishing visuals of a scene in which a bus drives across the desert featuring a rooftop performance by a drag queen draped in long billowing silver drapes to realize how awe-inspiring this film can be.  The Australian outback makes for a spectacular background, and the script deftly moves between emotional tones without losing track of its goals.  It’s all very impressive, and you don’t have to be interested in LGBT issues to appreciate the cinematography, the script or the fun of the bus ride.

  • Walkabout (1971)

    Walkabout (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, August 2010) Something really strange happened to me during Walkabout: As the initial look at the metropolitan bustle of early-seventies urban Australia became a surrealistic outback reverie, I started dreading the rest of the movie: I don’t respond well to non-narrative films, and the idea of spending another hour and a half in a daze of dream-like images held a limited appeal.  It got worse as the bare essential of the plot were carelessly established: a female teenager and her kid brother, stranded in the Australian outback.  Narratively, the film never holds up: characters act in painfully unrealistic ways, the visual and thematic strangeness of the film undercutting any serious attempt at establishing narrative tension as they float from one situation to another with nonsensical dialogue that never reflects the danger of their situation.  But that’s when the strangeness occurred, because rather than fight the film for what it wasn’t trying to do, I let myself slip into the oneiric state of mind best suited to appreciate the incredible cinematography, symbolism and atmosphere of the film.  It’s not about two kids returning to civilization thanks to the help of an aborigine teen: It’s about superb pictures, meditations upon nature versus civilization, teenage sexuality, the impossibility to communicate, the way we’re set in our own limitations and the longing for rites of passage.  At least that’s what I got out of it, in-between the film’s often-surprising non-sequiturs and often-audacious editing.  What does it mean?  You tell me, in between excerpts of a meteorologist sex comedy, in-your-face juxtaposition, page-flipping, moody skin-bathing, suicidal characters, animals harmed during the making of this film and a coda that almost wraps everything together.  Some reviews of the film will promise you that no one who ever saw Walkabout ever forgot about it and this, for once, doesn’t feel like hype: In the state of mind created by the film, I gasped aloud at two particularly striking shots and couldn’t help but marvel at the impeccable depiction of the Australian Outback wildlife.  If the preachiness of the film hasn’t aged very well, its impeccable images and Jenny Agutter’s performance as a teenage girl have stood the test of time.  It’s a very zen-like film: don’t expect it to make sense and it just may start doing so.

  • The Expendables (2010)

    The Expendables (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, August 2010) It’s said that films should be judged on the basis of their ambitions, and the least one can say about writer/director/star Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables is that it really wants to be a gift to 1980s action movie fans.  The ensemble cast is among the most extraordinary ever assembled for an action film, in between Stallone, Jason Statham, Mickey Rourke, Dolph Lundgren, Jet Li and others, with great cameos by Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Unfortunately, the cast (Statham in particular) is about the only thing going for this film, which is so successful in recreating the eighties that it has forgotten that most action films of the era were deathly dull.  Reviving Regan-administration Latin-American politics, the film is mired in a dull banana-republic setting where only Americans can kill the right people to restore peace and deniable capitalistic hegemony.  But even worse is Stallone’s action direction, which cuts away every half-second in an effort to hide that the actions scenes don’t have a lot of interest.  The explosions are huge, but the rest is just confused: in-between the excessive self-satisfied machismo of the film, it’s not hard to grow resentful at the stunning waste of opportunities that is The Expendables.  A perfect example is a dock strafing sequence that could have been great had it actually meant something: instead, it just feels like the gratuitous hissy fit of a pair of psychopaths.  But the nadir of the film has to be found in its script, especially whenever it tackles perfunctory romance: Sixty-something Stallone may helm the film, but it’s no excuse to slobber over a girlfriend half his age.  Another dramatic monologue delivered by Rourke stops the film dead in its tracks and sticks out as the endless scene that doesn’t belong.  Too bad that the script doesn’t know what to do with what it has: despite the obvious nods and little gifts to macho cinema, The Expendables quickly indulges in the limits of the form.  Guys; don’t argue with your girlfriend if she wants both of you to see something else.

  • Pygmy, Chuck Palahniuk

    Pygmy, Chuck Palahniuk

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday Canada, 2009, 241 pages, C$29.95, ISBN 978-0-385-66629-9

    Ever since discovering Chuck Palahniuk’s brand of outrageous fiction a decade ago, I have sometime wondered what it would take for me to really dislike one of his books.  Once you’re suitably jaded at the violence, perversion and generally antisocial behaviour of his novels, it’s hard to raise an eyebrow at his ever-increasing outrageousness.  Palahniuk is a professional provocateur, and there’s an ongoing game between him and his readers to see who blinks first.

    Now, with Pygmy, I know what makes me blink… and it turns out to be bad grammar.

    From the distance of a plot summary, there’s little in Pygmy to scare away Palahniuk’s usual fans: As the novel begins, a young trained assassin from an unspecified totalitarian regime lands in America to be adopted by a typical American family.  But this turns out to be one facet of Operation Havok, a plan to place sleeper agents in American cities where they can directly attack the Midwest way of life.  Our narrator knows everything worth knowing about America, Americans and how to kill them: He’s got intricate martial arts training, the ability to smell people down to their most intimate secrets and the equivalent of a post-graduate degree in terrorism.  Now imagine him dealing with a typical High School and you can imagine the fun.  Raised in a totalitarian regime to despise everything America stands for, it’s not a surprise if our narrator describes suburban life in utterly alien terms.

    It wouldn’t be a Palahniuk novel without the usual amount of blood, sex and over-the-top personal behaviour.  Never mind the adoptive mother’s unquenchable passion for vibrators: Barely three chapters into Pygmy, our narrator takes revenge on a bully by brutally sodomizing him –thus unleashing a latent homosexual passion that, once spurned, leads to a high school shooting midway through.  This is fairly tame material for Palahniuk readers, who have come used to far more disturbing stuff.  It helps that Palahniuk never forgets to be intensely (if darkly) funny in most of what he writes: Pygmy has a splendid opportunity to comment on modern Americana and makes the most out of it.  Perhaps the best sequence of the book is a Model United Nations featuring a bunch of horny teenagers, leading to such instant-classic lines as “Sri Lanka says Afghanistan has the biggest crush and could totally jump the bones of Morocco.” [P.84]

    But one of the reasons why this sequence works is that you can actually understand much of it.  Otherwise, Pygmy is narrated in approximate broken English, a stylistic choice which quickly goes from odd to exasperating.  Eventually, as the narrator develops his own way of describing suburban normalcy, we’re asked to decode paragraphs such as this one:

    For official record, additional reside aboard bench cushion vast breathing cow, host father.  Twitching chicken, host mother.  Dual host parent unconscious splayed wide limbs spread, neck muscles lolling heads loose until rest own shoulders, lips loose, trickling long ropes translucent saliva.  Unconscious, breathing prolonged liquid inhales, loud sputtering exhales. [P.101-102]

    This is irritating enough in small doses; now imagine an entire 240-pages book of it.  Reading Pygmy gave me horrible flashbacks to my abortive attempts to read James Joyce: my eyes skipping from one familiar word to another and my brain rejecting any attempts at making sense of the sentences, eventually resolving meaning from loose associations and accumulated context.  It’s unpleasant like little of Palahniuk’s fiction has been so far –and I kind of liked “Guts”.

    Add to that the usual Palahniuk recurring motifs used with ever-lessening effect (Repeating periodical table elements?  Now you’re reaching), the uneasy tension between the satire and the dirt-serious mechanisms of indoctrination, the too-brief usage of the book’s best character (a “cat sister” worth an entire book by herself), the often-lazy satire and the flaws of the book don’t accumulate as much as they multiply… and the result seems to confirm Palahniuk’s sliding standing ever since 2007’s Rant.  There are rewards in this novel, but they’re slight and unpleasant to decode.  Maybe it was a good thing if Pygmy waited a year in my to-read pile before being revealed as a disappointment: Now I can jump over to follow-up Tell-All and hope that it gets better in a hurry.

  • Eden Log (2007)

    Eden Log (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, August 2010) Words fail to explain the sheer tedium felt while trying to watch this film.  An ugly mix of black-and-blue cinematography, trashy set design and muddled plot elements, Eden Log at times feels like a deliberate attempt to antagonize as many members of the audience as possible.  A mostly-silent film in which one speaking actor (Clovis Cornillac, good despite the film) navigates a run-down environment in a succession of slow and moody vignettes, it’s best watched with a far more interesting book in hand, so that you can spend your time doing something useful while the thin mush of SF elements glacially drips out during something pretending to be a plot.  Never mind the misogyny, misanthropy, paranoia and lack of imagination of the script: Eden Log is a series of atmospheric set-pieces featuring one guy caked in mud.  As such, at often works pretty well, especially given what feels like a dollar-store budget: The oppressive feeling of the film is powerful enough to be repulsive in general.  As a narrative, though, it’s twice (maybe thrice) as long as it needs to be, and so never kindles along any kind of lasting interest.  French SF movies often have the tendency to look good while not actually being any good: Eden Log is no exception, albeit it is definitely weaker than most other recent French-SF films.  (It shares many problems with near-contemporary Dante 01, including a bad script co-written by SF writer Pierre Bordage)  And if you’re hoping for a longer review, forget it: I don’t even want to think any longer about this movie.

  • Dante 01 (2008)

    Dante 01 (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, August 2010) It’s surprising how quickly promise can turn to pretention: While the first minutes of Dante 01 promise a stylish horror/SF hybrid set on an isolated space station (one that is dedicated to hosting mentally unstable criminals, no less), this promise soon turns to nonsense as the pseudo-profound dialogue piles up and the film devolves into repetitive hocus-pocus.  With acclaimed cinematographer Marc Caro directing and writing (along with French SF writer Pierre Bordage), it’s no surprise if the film often looks interesting: Despite what feels like a small budget, there are a few interesting visual ideas in the mix.  Sadly, they are not founded on anything nearly as interesting in terms of story: The protagonist is sort of a mute/amnesic magical mystery box with powers that pop up whenever needed, precipitating (after many repetitive cycles) a ridiculously overlong metaphysical ending that really wants to echo 2001: A Space Odyssey without deserving it.  The last two minutes are a loop of three sequences (two of them mirrored) repeated over and over again in the hope to pummel the audience in an unquestioning stupor.  It’s… daring, but it doesn’t work, much like the convoluted freshman-grade hellish references that pepper the script, or the dull jabs at a corporate medical conspiracy.  As far as SF/horror hybrids go, Dante 01 isn’t even as good as Supernova, let alone anything better.  Its visual polish ensure that it’s not completely uninteresting, but home viewers may find themselves gravitating toward more interesting things to do while the film repeats itself tediously over 90 minutes.

  • Rogue (2007)

    Rogue (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, August 2010) I have no particular fascination for giant crocodiles, but I’m always interest in a a well-made monster movie.  So it is that Rogue, despite having been released straight-to-DVD in North America after a successful theatrical run in its native Australia, is a surprisingly efficient horror movie pitting humans against one particularly vicious croc.  The first pre-horror section of the film, ironically, may be its best as directory Greg McLean gives us a gorgeously photographed guided tour of Northern Territory nature, complete with so many dangers that our boatful of tourist characters should really start to worry.  Things don’t remain as credible as a series of mishaps shipwrecks our protagonists on a small island in the middle of a giant crocodile’s habitat.  Sam Worthington has a significant early role as a cocky redneck, but it’s Michael Vartan who becomes the thinking man’s action hero as the tide rises and their options grow smaller.  Never mind the obvious objections and plot-holes in stranding characters on an island twenty meters away from relative safety: Crocs seemingly can’t walk on land in this film, and the reward in suspending our disbelief is seeing a few good suspenseful sequences.  It doesn’t work as well late in the film as the action moves to a studio-built lair in time for a straight-up man-against-nature fight.  But Rogue is sufficiently successful by then that it doesn’t matter as much as you’d think: It’s meanly efficient most of the time, and enjoyable for the rest of it.  Tourists heading to the Australian wilderness may think twice before seeing the film and adding to their worries, though.

  • Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010)

    Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2010) For a movie that only highlighted how truly old I am getting, I enjoyed Scott Pilgrim vs the World from beginning to end.  Transforming a fairly ordinary post-teenage romantic comedy into an mythological epic through fantastical devices such as videogame combats given life, Scott Pilgrim becomes a relentless, sometimes exhausting blend of action, romance and comedy gold.  Given that director Edgar Wright is best known for manic comedies Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, the whip-fast editing, witty dialogue and reality-defying direction should come as no surprise.  What is a bit more unusual, however, is the way Wright plays along with the grammar of cinematic storytelling, telescoping scenes together, taking fantastical flights of fancy in the middle of grainy indie dramatic scenes, or varying his approach just to keep things fresh.  This third successful film only highlights how Wright is pushing the envelope of comedy directing, daring older audiences (cough-cough) to keep up.  As a fan of the Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel series, I had a clue about what was in store.  But I couldn’t predict how cleverly the script would condense, simplify and amplify the storyline of the comic book into something that feels even more grandiose.  Streamlined to make the hero’s final success feel even more rewarding, Scott Pilgrim vs the World should please most fans of the original, while allowing newcomers to grab the graphic novels and find further delights in them: the way material from the book is rearranged in a new plot will keep fans of both versions entertained.  The resemblance of some actors to their graphic equivalent is astonishing, and their delivery of the dialogue, in a mixture of arch line readings and mumbled deadpan quips that I find irresistible, is often far funnier than the material would suggest.  I’m still only half-sold on Michael Cera as Pilgrim, but the supporting cast is strong and notable performances include Kieran Culkin as the cool roommate and Ellen Wong as a hot-tempered high-schooler.  But even better yet is the way Toronto plays itself as a big city capable of hosting cool stories: The script’s Canadian references are not only hilarious, but on-target as well.  Still, it’s not all fun and games as Scott Pilgrim has a few things to say about urban romance during post-teenage years (there are practically no older adults in this film, nor any need for them), or the way modern personal mythmaking comes from genre-dominated gaming rather than older sources of inspiration.  It all amounts to a hilarious, heartfelt, dynamic film that appealed to me in ways that felt very personal.  I’m not sure it could have been any better.

  • Step Up 3D (2010)

    Step Up 3D (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2010) There are times when I find myself in a movie theater with no clear idea of why I have chosen to see the film in front of my eyes.  This wasn’t one of those times: Despite my scepticism for the 3D movie craze and my complete lack of knowledge in the field of dancing, the trailer for Step Up 3D mesmerized me as much as it made me laugh.  But what it promised more than anything else was an experience: Dance films have a physicality that approaches that of action movies, and the thrill I get from seeing good dance cinematography isn’t dissimilar to that of a well-mastered martial art sequence (also see; parkour).  I also suspected that many of the self-conscious devices characterizing 3D movies wouldn’t be half as annoying in a format halfway between a film and a concert.  I was proven right on almost all accounts: Step Up 3D is an exhilarating time at the movies for what it shows as soon as the music starts.  As a narrative experience, it’s as basic at it can be with paper-thin plotting, amiable characters, a few stereotypes and no surprises whatsoever.  But never mind the story as long as it strings along the dance sequences: that’s when Jon Chu’s direction takes flight and the film soars.  While the film’s three showcase sequences are the dance battles between rival groups, Step Up 3D also has time to sneak in some ballroom dancing and a number that could have been lifted straight out of a classic musical comedy.  Other highlights include a waterlogged dance sequence and a mesmerizing robot-rock performance by “Madd Chadd” Smith (Go ahead, watch it on YouTube).  But the sequence that really sold Step Up 3D to me is a sweet and charming street-dancing sequence taking place in long uninterrupted shots, a sequence so full of joy that it does what countless other serious movies have failed to do: make me happy to be human and to live in a world where such scenes exist.  There’s a primal joy in seeing other people move in extraordinary ways, and for once my lack of knowledge in a field paid off as I saw the film’s dancing from an unprejudiced eye.  I half-expected to like Step Up 3D; I didn’t expect that I would like it that much.  The 3D, for once, helps a lot in correctly putting us in the universe of the film: the artificiality of 3D efforts pays off when the dancers are purely playing to the camera, waving their hands in our faces.  For once, I’m not sure if the film will be as effective in 2D.  No matter, however: I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a theatrical experience as much since Grindhouse.

  • Horns, Joe Hill

    Horns, Joe Hill

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2010, 370 pages, C$27.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-06-114795-1

    Joe Hill is one of the most brilliant new horror writers, one who justifies the recent migration of genre horror novels from mass-market paperbacks to hardcovers.  His second novel, Horns, follows in the footstep of his debut Heart-Shaped Box in showing how, unlike some of his more gore-oriented colleagues, Hill seems to be using horror as a mechanism through which damaged characters can work out personal issues, rather than an end in itself.

    Hill’s stories usually begins with an intriguing character, and our protagonist Ignatius Martin Perrish (“Ig” for most of the novel) is an interesting guy: Physically frail, member of a rich and influential family, blessed with the love of a good woman, Ig saw his good fortune disappear when his girlfriend was found murdered a year before the novel begins.  Immediately suspected of killing her, Ig was never formally charged… but in small north-eastern towns, it doesn’t take paperwork for a community to condemn someone.  As Horns begins, Ig has spent a year in purgatory, consumed by grief, unable to work and ostracized even by his family.  On the first anniversary of the murder, Ig goes out, gets drunk and indulges in minor desecration.  The following morning, he wakes up with horns growing out of his forehead, and an uncanny ability to make other people blurt out their darkest, deepest desires.

    The story begins with a bang the moment Ig stares into the mirror and sees the horns.  Within pages, strangers tell him things no one should ever share: confessions of gluttony, lust and wrath.  Ig just has to be in their presence for secrets and desires to be expressed.  But as soon as he turns his back, people forget both about his horns and their own revelations.  Soon, Ig can’t help but learn everyone’s true opinion about him and they are damning: Everyone thinks he killed his own girlfriend, and used his family’s influence to avoid charges.  But confession by confession, Ig also learns clues that allow him to piece together the identity of the murderer, and the revelation is nothing short of shocking.  As his horns grow and his devil-like qualities develop, Ig also learns the fine art of revenge…

    Horns has a lot of things going for it, but none of them are as potent as its mixture of clear prose, attention to character and ability to ground its fantastical premise in believable details.  Ig’s personal history is gradually revealed in detail, allowing us to understand the tapestry of loyalties, betrayals, guilt and cover-ups that have so affected his life.  Horns could have used its premise in a very different fashion, but it ends up become one character’s journey to understanding and ultimate expiation.

    Which isn’t to say that Horns is a perfect novel.  Many of the clever devilish puns and references only makes sense to those steeped in Judaeo-Christian mythology and North-American cultural references: I wonder how much sense the book can make to someone coming from other contexts (or even someone who hasn’t paid attention in a while to religious teachings about hell and the devil.)  More seriously, the novel’s structure is generous in multi-chapters flashbacks, and the roaring opening doesn’t accurately reflect the rest of the novel as it soon takes on a more contemplative quality.  At times, the story seems to meander off-track to such an extent that we’re left wondering how much better it could have been if it had been published as a novella.  As it is, the novel never misses out on an occasion to explain in great flashback-reinforced detail almost all of the passing references that could have been left alone.

    But novellas don’t sell, and Horns’ accumulation of explanations ends up sketching a remarkably lived-in background for the protagonist.  There’s a fundamental pleasure in the kind of character study that Hill delivers with this novel, and it’s different from the one we can get from a straight-ahead horror thriller.  Horns may look like the latter at the end of its first few chapters, but it’s a different beast by the end of it.

    Most of the elements that made Heart-Shaped Box such a success are just as skilfully used in this second novel: The down-on-his-luck character, the fascination for music (including a Morse code tip-of-the-hat to an obvious musical inspiration on the book’s endpapers), the sly humour, the interest for personal atonement, the precise prose… it places Hill somewhere between the literary mainstream and the thrills of the horror genre: a great niche for such a promising writer.

  • The Secret, Rhonda Byrne

    The Secret, Rhonda Byrne

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Atria, 2006, 198 pages, ISBN 978-1-58270-170-7

    Yes, your honour, I am possibly the worst possible person in the world to review The Secret.

    As I stand before you explaining what would motivate me to write about a book that I found obnoxious and exasperating, I confess that I am guilty of crass materialism in all facets of my personal philosophy.  I believe that hard work and self-confidence are the way to get what we deserve.  I don’t place any trust in purveyors of pseudoscientific woo-woo.  I am allergic to much of the self-help literature.  I don’t even watch Oprah.

    I have read The Secret.  I found it at a used book-sale.  The type of book sale where they weigh your box, charge you by the pound and don’t ask to see what’s inside.  I can’t imagine that I paid more than a dollar for it.

    Well, maybe a bit more, given how it’s printed on heavy paper.  Amazon tells me that it has less than 36,000 words, but they’re all set on glossy photo-paper, and every page has a faux-scroll background, with color icons to introduce every contributor and full-color pictures of them at the end.  This is a really well-designed product.  It’s not a book as much as it’s a slick piece of Da Vinci Code-inspired marketing designed to sell other derivatives of itself.  Most of those derivatives, I assume, must try to sell the book in return.

    Oh, yes, your honour, I have understood The Secret.  The Law of Attraction is nothing more than wishing hard enough to make things come true.  Was that a spoiler?  Well, what can I say: You can probably read any page in the book and grasp as much, given how it just keeps repeating its basic points over and over, adding up potentially fraudulent, delusional or bias-confirmed anecdotes until they’re meant to look like data.  It’s all wrapped up in quantum pseudo-science spouted by professional cloud-peddlers –including my own favourite crackpot Fred Alan Wolf, who provides a telling link between The Secret and What the Bleep Do We Know?

    You could describe my overall reaction to the book as a mixture of exasperation and cackling sarcasm.  It’s actually intriguing in how it sets up a delusion that makes The Secret seem so important and all-powerful: It’s linked with safely dead figures such as Einstein, Shakespeake and Mother Theresa, then puts up a baroque system of negative belief meant to immunize believers against skeptics: According to the book, harbouring any doubt at all about wishful thinking will make it fail.  It’s then your fault if it doesn’t work.  If that’s not a cult-like indoctrination device, I’m not sure what is.

    In fact, I would propose that The Secret is a really handy pseudo-religious device to keep the proletariat down.  It’s a straight-up money transfer from the readers to TS Production LLC, and a way to keep the dissatisfied wishing for more.  If it doesn’t work, it’s not because the universe doesn’t work like that: It’s because their own faith in The Secret isn’t strong enough.  They can either reinforce it by buying another TS Production LLC product or blame mysterious elites for keeping The Secret a secret.

    What annoys me the most about The Secret is that it actually trivializes a lot of useful behavioural techniques.  Self-confidence is always a performance-booster, positive thinking can help in identifying opportunities and moving expertise from the conscious to the subconscious is a mainline to mastery… there’s a lot of common-sense in here, but it’s wrapped in pseudo-conspiracy theories, slick marketing packaging and insidious memetic content.  The Secret is probably not dangerous in that it reaps its rewards from the same people periodically picked clean by other new-age money-grabs… but it’s always a disappointment to realize that despite the demonstrable rewards of hundreds of years of rational thought, there is still a substantial appetite for such nonsense.

    Now, I understand that I’m about four years behind the times in blathering indignantly about The Secret.  People have moved on, much like copies of The Celestine Prophecy are gathering dust on so many bookshelves.  But, you know what?  When The Secret was hot, I wished for a way to read it without paying any money at all to the hucksters at TS Production LLC.  I could have borrowed it from the library, mooched it from a credulous friend or gone digging through recycling bins, but I just waited and the Universe sent a copy ripe for picking at my favourite book sale.  HOLY CRAP IT WORKS!

    Never mind, your Honour, I rest my case.

  • The Other Guys (2010)

    The Other Guys (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2010) I don’t usually enjoy Will Ferrell’s brand of semi-retarded adolescent-grown-old comedy, so my expectations going into The Other Guys were as low as they could be.  That explains my surprise at this generally successful buddy-movie cop comedy.  Of course, everything will look great after the disaster that was Cop Out earlier in 2010; still, The Other Guys has a lot of fun cataloguing, tweaking and subverting an entire list of action movie clichés.  It starts with a treat of a cameo, as Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson play bigger-than-life parodies of the action-movie cops we’re used to see on-screen.  Then it’s back to “the other guys” who fill the paperwork and do the actual investigation that goes on behind the usual action sequences: Will Ferrell as a nebbish cop with a wild past and normally-staid Mark Wahlberg as a competent policeman held back by a mistake.  The film comes with half a dozen of respectable action sequences, and a steady stream of hilarious moments.  Of course, it doesn’t always work: The danger is subverting conventions that exist given their storytelling power is that the subversion often robs the film of its story. At times, The Other Guys is too scattered and less satisfying than it should have been.  Another problem is that the material is so broad that it’s often uncontrolled: a number of scenes run too long and feel too dramatic in the middle of so much silliness.  (The credits, for instance, wouldn’t feel out of place in a Michael Moore film.) Those tonal problems can be annoying:  While the film generally takes place in a recognizable reality, it also occasionally slips up and spends a few moments in a far more fantastical Simpsonesque universe, and the shifts between both tones only reminds us of realism’s dullness.  But the advantages of such a scatter-shot approach are that sooner or later, another good moment will come along to make everyone forget about the latest dull sequence.  A number of eccentric characters all get their moment in the spotlight (few more so than Michael Keaton’s father-figure captain or Eva Mendes as a supposedly-plain wife), much as a few standout sequences really pop, such as a bullet-time sequence of wild debauchery tableaux, continued abuse of the protagonist’s poor Prius and a purely indulgent slow-motion boardroom shootout.  The Other Guys isn’t focused and runs out of laughs toward the end, but bits of it are clever and its overall impact is surprisingly charming.

  • Suck it, Wonder Woman!, Olivia Munn & Mac Montandon

    Suck it, Wonder Woman!, Olivia Munn & Mac Montandon

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin, 2010, 269 pages, C$28.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-312-59105-2

    Amazon’s recommendation engine usually has a good understanding of what I’m looking for.  It has served me well in exploring the world of books about food, leading me from Pollan and Bourdain to Rayner, Sheehan and others I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.  But it’s not perfect and when it starting suggesting Olivia Munn’s Suck it, Wonder Woman!, I should have been a bit more sceptical.

    My first warning sign was asking Who is Olivia Munn? It turns out that Munn is a popular entertainer who has become something of a geek celebrity over the past few years: She has a growing number of small roles in TV show and feature films but also, crucially, co-hosts a geeky cable show named Attack of the Show! and shows up regularly at Comic-Con.  Her attractiveness explains the endless stream of pictures that shows up above her Wikipedia profile in a casual Google Search.

    Welcome to the age of the micro-celebrity, then: Munn has found herself a rewarding niche in the universe of young actresses by claiming the geek flag for herself.  Suck it, Wonder Woman! is a slight attempt at an autobiography crossed with a humour book.  Subtitled “The Misadventures of a Hollywood Geek”, the book quickly shows its true colors as soon as it’s out of the Amazon packing box: Not content with a front cover design that highlights Munn’s cleavage, the back of the dust jacket urges us to discover the “Surprise on the other side”, which is to say a full-color pinup in a bikini and naval cap.  Look inside the book and you will see that, aside from the photo-insert chapter introduction and occasional galleries, Munn can also be seen on every single bottom-right page corner doing a flip-book dance.

    So, yeah: Cheesecake for so-called geeks.

    I’m not going to comment upon Munn’s shtick as a sex-symbol for geeks: That’s a line of thought that quickly veers into misogyny.  If Munn claims herself as a geek, then welcome aboard.  I’m not even going to insist on how geek standard for sex-symbols don’t include many more requirements than “female with a pulse and no visible scowl at unwanted male attention”: It’s a good insulting line to get a rise out of geeks, but it also fails to acknowledge that Munn does stand out as an attractive woman no matter the surrounding crowd.

    But what this book drives home are the reasons why I occasionally want to get as far away as humanly possible from the modern hyper-packaged definition of “geek”.  It used to be that geeks were incredibly driven people with strong technical skills and weaker social graces: In any case, it’s their attitude toward the world that counted.  Geeks were the high-school larval stage of more fully-rounded individuals who would learn how to fit in society, but would always keep their attitude of gentle manners and frequently intense curiosity about the world.

    Fast-forward to 2010, however, and “geek” has become another marketing category for the entertainment-industrial complex.  Comic-Con has become Ground Zero for the co-optation of the geek: Now, the word has become synonymous with the mindless consumption of dull comic-books, lousy genre movies, loud video games and lightweight books written by pretty girls who know which buttons to press in order to rouse their audiences.  It used to be that geeks could be counted upon to know some valuable technical knowledge of interest to the world at large: Now, just buying Lord of the Rings figurines is enough to qualify as a Hollywood-approved geek.  Newsflash: video-game trivia and glass shelves for Star Wars memorabilia don’t translate by themselves into useful contributions to society.

    I am, obviously, overreacting: It’s in the nature of geeks to be picky, and nothing forbids me from charting my own brand of nerdiness.  But as I was reading Suck it Wonder Woman! and taking in its assumed pandering, I ran mind-first into the contradictions between my own conception of geekiness and the now-approved cultural stereotype.  Geeks may be socially inept, but that shouldn’t translate into a universe in which every video-game, comic book or genre movie representation of a female seems to feature enhanced pneumatics, plastic skin and personalities tailored to appeal to male interests.  There’s something wrong if I either want to wash myself with bleach or send a neutron bomb to San Diego every time I dig into Comic-Con coverage, gaming advertisements or so-called geeky forums.  My conception of geekiness, obviously, has a lot more old-world gentlemanliness than I first suspected.

    But to return to the book I’m supposed to discuss, I’m not necessarily immune to Munn’s considerable charm: Her tales of growing up as an ethnically-mixed outcast in Midwest America touch a chord, as do her adventures as a nice girl abruptly thrown into the Hollywood cesspool.  There’s a heartbreaking chapter midway through the book that tells us about the worst day of her life, and some of her relationship advice is amusing in a way that doesn’t necessarily relate to anything geeky.  But her co-written book (take a bow, Mac Montandon, even though you barely rate a mention in the acknowledgements) doesn’t have much more content than half a dozen good blog entries.  It’s thin, breezy and empty: rather the opposite of what I would be looking for as, ahem, a geek.

    Obviously, the best possible reader for the book is someone who can answer the question Who is Olivia Munn? without having to resort to Wikipedia.  Otherwise, accidental Munn readers are going to confront a lot of unpleasant questions about contemporary geek culture, and how it relates to women.  I forget whether current feminism says it’s OK to get down with the boys as a trash-talking Princess Leia lookalike and, in doubt, would have to agree with anyone willing to fit into a brass bra.  But much like there’s a reason why I prefer referring to myself as a nerd rather than a geek (never forget the etymology of both words), I also choose to opt out of the geek marketing segment if it leads to a half-empty shell of a book whose selling points include a dust jacket that reverts to reveal a photoshopped come-on.  My ideal cheesecakes can seduce me with their minds.

  • The Last Airbender (2010)

    The Last Airbender (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2010) I haven’t seen the original anime series, so I can only judge the film on its own merits rather than as an adaptation.  By this yardstick, The Last Airbender is a mess of breathless mythmaking, indifferent characters, repetitive CGI, terrible dialogue, fuzzy motivations and sometimes-spectacular visuals.  It’s practically impossible to care about a film that spends so little time fleshing out its lead characters that a romance is established by voice-over narration.  (And that’s saying nothing about the blank hole of charisma that is the film’s titular protagonist.)  The story jumps frantically from one scene to another with minimal transition, never giving life to any lasting interest in what’s happening beyond the special effects.  Even by the climax of the film, it’s still explaining what we need to know in order to understand what’s going on.  It’s inept film-making with a stunning budget, but even in describing how much The Last Airbender doesn’t work, it’s hard not to notice that a few things do: The world-building is intriguing enough to make me me interested in the original series, whereas for all of his increasing faults as a writer, M. Night Shyamalan still has a few skills left as a visually ambitious director.  Some of the lengthier battle shots, in particular, are almost wonderful.  But little of this matters once the Typical Fantasy Big Battle is over: By the time The Last Airbender sets up a sequel, all that’s left to viewers is a dull shrug of the shoulders.  As far as hopeless first-instalment-in-planned-fantasy-trilogies go, this is barely above Eragon and quite a bit worse than even The Last Compass.  I saw the film in 3D by accident (no, really: who knew the local dollar theater had more than one 3D screen?) and not only does it add absolutely nothing to the experience, but it may even be taking away some of it.