Author: Christian Sauvé

  • The A-Team (2010)

    The A-Team (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, June 2010) Having no particular knowledge or affection for the eighties TV series from which this film is adapted, I can only judge it on how well it performs as an action movie.  Fortunately, The A-Team delivers all the expected thrills: Writer/director Joe Carnahan finally gets a decent budget, and the if the result frequently mocks plausibility, it’s good enough to make The A-Team a perfectly acceptable action movie.  While a few longer shots would have been helpful in keeping the tension high, Carnahan’s visual style here is heavy on anachronistic back-and-forth between planning and an execution that places a lot more emphasis on speed than grace.  It benefits from grand-scale CGI stunts: how else to portray a bunch of shipping containers falling down like matchsticks?  By the time the characters are flying a tank via its main cannon, I couldn’t have been happier: Action insanity plus echoes of Grand Theft Auto 3!  This intensity, combined with an engaging ensemble cast of characters, does a lot to compensate for a script that never quite seems certain when to start: The A-Team delivers two successive origin stories before we get the sense that the film is truly underway, and even then the entire film seems like a pilot episode for its own sequels.  But why complain when Liam Neeson is slumming with cigars and cackling grins?  Why nit-pick when Bradley Cooper makes for an irresistible con-man?  Finally, what about Jessica Biel, back on the big screen as a competent military investigator?  I’m always on the market for an over-the-top action comedy if it’s made with intelligence, speed and charm.  The A-Team at least gets good grades on speed and charm, and substitutes kinetic cleverness in lieu of intelligence.  I’ll take it.  After all, I love it when an action movie comes together.

  • Killers (2010)

    Killers (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, June 2010) Likable actors, a promising high concept, action-packed plotting and the ever-enjoyable absurdity of an assassin trying to settle down in bland suburbia.  What can go wrong?  Well, start by explaining why this so-called comedy struggles so much to earn even indulgent chuckles.  Killers starts slow with an overlong prologue that tells too much and wounds the picture before it even gets going, only to restart again three years later.  Overstaying its welcome before it even starts, this film simply never clicks. It doesn’t help that boy-hero Ashton Kutcher is never believable as a potentially murderous psychopath: even in action sequences, he seems to be preening in front of the camera, too self-absorbed to make us believe in his character.  If you ever want to know what went wrong with Killers, start with the lead casting.  On the other hand, there are a few good actors elsewhere in the movie trying their best to deal with what they’re given: Tom Selleck is great as a moustachioed dad, Catherine O’Hara does what she can as a boozy mom (how droll…) while Katherine Heigl –in-between high-pitched squeals—gives viewers a splendid excuse to look at her in low-cut outfits and gratuitous lingerie.  None of them can save the film, but they rescue it from a complete lack of interest.  The script is about one rewrite away from passable, placing far too much trust in actors who don’t have good comic timing.  With so many problems, it hardly seems fair to nit-pick the plausibility of the plot, the horrible moral evasiveness of the conclusion of the preposterousness of the setup.  The direction isn’t any better, wasting two otherwise promising suburban car chase through lawns and backyard fences.  Killers is so good-natured that it does escape variations on “I hate this movie”, but it’s so bland, unfocused and a waste of its own potential that it can’t even reach the level of a marginal recommendation.

  • If Chins Could Kill, Bruce Campbell

    If Chins Could Kill, Bruce Campbell

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    L.A. Weekly Books, 2002 updated edition of 2001 original, 344 pages, C$19.95 pb, ISBN 0-312-29145-0

    If you’ve read one actor’s autobiography, you’ve read them all.  They’re all ghost-written, self-serving and bland enough not to offend any fans, no matter their political or social persuasion.  Dull childhood narrative until the actor gets his first major role; a few plates of photos sandwiched in the middle of the volume; a conclusion that always makes it sound as if success was inevitable and the best is yet to come.  It’s entirely possible that they’re all coming from the same factory, a search-and-replace program being used to insert the proper names, small towns and movie titles

    But as Bruce Campbell tells readers in the introduction, If Chins Could Kill isn’t that kind of book.  For one thing, the pictures are generously scattered throughout.  For another, it’s really not boring.  You know how those celebrity biographies are usually dull until they hit the big-time?  Not so here, as Campbell talks about making home movies (with, among others, Sam Raimi), entering the world of theatre, struggling through a variety of menial jobs and raising money for a film that would eventually be known as The Evil Dead.

    The shoestring shooting of the film itself is detailed in all of its masochistic glory: A tiny budget and a lengthy backwoods late-fall shoot involving a bunch of nonprofessional actors can only end in painfully amusing anecdotes, and Campbell’s skills as a storyteller get a workout in telling us about fake blood, freezing conditions, an ever-smaller crew and the perils of balancing ambitions versus a budget obtained from dentist investors.  Those who primarily know Campbell as the square-jawed hero of the Evil Dead trilogy will learn a lot more about his role behind the scenes of the films.

    But Campbell has the added advantage of being a cult celebrity, which means that his approach in “telling all” is quite a bit closer to ordinary readers than most stratospheric superstars.  His self-effacing charm and constant outsider’s relationship with Hollywood (even today, he lives one state away from Los Angeles) lead him to talk frankly about the meagre financial rewards of acting, the scourge of studio interference and the tradeoffs in the business.  The highlights of the book are the making of the three Evil Dead movies, but there’s a lot of fascinating material about other projects and almost-projects.  His description of shooting the Hercules and Xena TV shows in New Zealand is just as entertaining to read as his big-budget features experiences. (Although he tends to be more scathing in telling us about studio projects from Crimewave to Congo, including his almost-was starring role in The Phantom.)

    Campbell’s style is superbly entertaining, unpretentious and has the hallmark of a seasoned raconteur.  There’s seldom a dull moment, and the feel from the book is very different from the usual celebrity “autobiography”.  This being said, there are still a few noteworthy lapses here and there: we know that Campbell doesn’t live near Hollywood, for instance, but the book doesn’t dwell a long time on the reasons that led him to Oregon –or the issues that such a home location presents for him.  But he’s writing to please fans, and the book does tackle most of the subjects that they must have been wondering about.

    The autobiography is considerably enhanced by the savvy design of the book, which blends photos, mementoes and diagrams alongside the text.  (As the back-cover claims, “If the book sucks, at least there are gobs of pictures, and they’re not crammed in the middle like all those other actor books.”)  This paperback edition includes a one-year-later afterword about the hardcover’s publicity tour.  Unfortunately, from 2010 the book itself doesn’t have the extra nine years’ hindsight over Campbell’s career, a decade that saw a typical mixture of B-movie roles going from the critical acclaim of Bubba Ho-Tep to the somewhat less successful Alien Apocalypse.  I’m sure that Campbell must have another decade’s worth of stories in him: I’d read a sequel without asking any questions.

  • Splice (2009)

    Splice (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, June 2010) This may be a horror movie featuring a monster, but it’s not just a monster movie.  Taking the well-worn science-fiction and horror clichés of scientists creating artificial life and then seeing it do horrible things, Splice is noteworthy for the thematic weight it manages to carry around, and how rarely it succumbs to cliché, starting by a delicate inversion of movies premises where scientists engage in mad science to substitute for parenthood.  While Adrian Brody is fine as the male half of the protagonist couple, it’s Sarah Polley who gets most of the attention as his girlfriend/lab partner: Few actresses can play smart in a convincing fashion, but Polley can just act as her own bright self.  Neither of the protagonists comes out particularly heroic during the events of the film, but it’s interesting to see how each one alternates in the “who’s acting most despicably” derby.  That, added to how Splice delves decisively into unpleasant plot developments, make it both a good horror film and one that many won’t want to watch a second time.  The grimy depressing Toronto snowy outdoors won’t help either.  It all amounts to a film that sounds like just about every single other straight-to-DVD monster movie ever released, but really isn’t: Splice isn’t quite as cheaply anti-science as you’d think (there’s a montage that actually makes bioengineering look hip and fun), it goes places that lesser scripts wouldn’t dare touch, it incorporates some really good special effects, and does quite a bit with a small cast.  While it can’t escape a few predictable sequences (including an ending that is telegraphed well in advance), the result amounts to an unpleasantly good little surprise, and another small success for Toronto-based writer/director Vincenzo Natali after a fairly lengthy absence from the big screen.  Hopefully, this will pave the way for more films from him.

  • Party Favours, Warren Kinsella (writing as “Jean Doe”)

    Party Favours, Warren Kinsella (writing as “Jean Doe”)

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Collins, 1997, 227 pages, C$28.00 hc, ISBN 0-00-224562-0

    As a political junkie working in Ottawa, I’m more interested than most in Canadian politics and the idea of a roman-à-clef describing mid-nineties power struggles in the capital is the kind of thing I’m predisposed to like.  That it comes from one of my favourite political operatives is a bonus… although it wasn’t possible to know that at the time the book hit bookstores twelve years ago.

    Party Favours was published in 1997 as from one pseudonymous “Jean Doe”.  It describes a civil war inside the then-reigning Liberal Party of Canada, between the factions of a populist French-Canadian Prime Minister and a scheming “Liberal-in-name-only” upstart who wants to be the PM in lieu of the PM.  Any half-aware Canadian political observer could see that this was a thinly-veiled fictional take on the rivalry between the Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin camp as of the mid-nineties.  Given the novel’s overwhelmingly positive portrait of Prime Minister “Bobby Laurier”, it seemed obvious to most that Party Favours came from a Chrétien loyalist.  But which one?  When it was revealed that “Jean Doe” was none other than the “Prince of Darkness” Warren Kinsella, a Liberal strategist and staunch Chrétien loyalist often compared to the US’s James Carville, few were shocked.

    The Canadian political/journalistic complex being so small and vicious, the book was savaged upon publication.  And, in some ways, it deserves its knocks: From a purely narrative viewpoint, Party Favours isn’t all that refined:  An umpteenth political thriller about a semi-innocent protagonist who comes to understand how things truly work in the world, the novel doesn’t break any new grounds nor narrative twists.  Our hero is a likable young journalist who works on a government-shattering scoop, finds love and manages to bring down those who deserve it.  In the conclusion of the story, he is apparently naïve enough to be shocked –shocked!– at the way he has been used by political antagonists… after spending an entire novel cynically explaining the nature of what happens to journalists in Ottawa.  Elsewhere in the book, the narrator takes an actual guided tour of the city to tell us about it (subtle!), large portion of the narrative just give way to exposition and the identity of a mysterious source is so obvious that it’s embarrassing that a mystery is made about it at all.  This is not an accomplished novelist’s masterpiece.

    But where Party Favours shine far more brightly is in its insider’s commentary about Ottawa and the people who go there to seek power and/or glory.  Kinsella has a lot of fun taking on lobbyists, journalists and politicians, not to mention public servants in one of the book’s most amusing passages:

    “The pools [seen from the airplane] conjured up an image of the classical Ottawa bureaucrat: an overweight white male killing time as an information systems analyst somewhere deep in the shadowed recesses of Statistics Canada, let’s say, scrambling home at 3:30 P.M. every July afternoon to slouch by his pool.  He carried a briefcase, purchased at the Bay, that almost always contained little more than his lunch and the Ottawa Sun.  He drove to and from work in a dented three-year-old Pontiac Sedan.  He voted Liberal. He earned much more than I did.  And he had a swimming pool nestled alongside his suburban split-level, where he and his wife and their offsprings congregated in the muggy Ottawa summer.” [P.16]

    Perfection itself.  (And I refuse to tell you how much this description matches me, because it’s too close for comfort.)

    The above paragraph being the worst thing in Party Favours about me and my place in the national capital, I was free to enjoy the rest of the novel for what it was: a splendidly entertaining chainsaw job on political Ottawa.  For a country with a vigorous publishing and political industry, it’s surprising that there haven’t been that many political thrillers and satires –although the grants that most Canadian publishers receive from the government may be enough of a cynical answer for that mystery.  Suffice to say that Party Favours in an entertaining book, even when it doesn’t work as a novel: Kinsella had fun writing it, and readers without grudges (and with a good working knowledge of mid-nineties Canadian politics) will enjoy at least good chunks of it.

    The added advantage of reading it now is that we now know who, in the great Chrétien/Martin face-off, ultimately won.  Hint: It was the guy who won three successive majorities.

  • Shrek Forever After [Shrek 4] (2010)

    Shrek Forever After [Shrek 4] (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, June 2010) I practically wrote off the entire Shrek series somewhere during the third film (which I can barely remember seeing), so it’s a bit of a surprise to see that the franchise still had a enough life in it for a fourth instalment.  Shrek Forever After even begins on a self-awareness binge, as Shrek realizes the price to be paid in boredom for a “forever after” ending: Always the same days, always the same jokes, always the same comic frustrations.  His character and the series have become one in looking for something different.  One parallel-universe reboot later, we get a sideway look at a few familiar characters (including a Fiona that looks quite a bit like an R. Crumb woman), more action and enough sentiments to hopefully wrap up the series.  There are a few clever moments in the mix, including an energetic Pier Piper sequence that brought back the fun of the series’ musical high points, and an ingenious chain contraption late in the film that visually reinforces a partnership theme.  Also notable is the relative lack of pop culture jokes, even though the musical choices still sound like a mix tape.  The familiarity of Shrek Forever After (including its predictable character arcs) does little to bring it up above adequacy, but the result feels like a way to save the story’s dignity and just enough of an echo of past glories.  Now, can we agree that there’s no need for a Shrek 5?

  • The Trade of Queens (Merchant Princes #6), Charles Stross

    The Trade of Queens (Merchant Princes #6), Charles Stross

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2010, 303 pages, C$29.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-7653-1673-8

    When Charles Stross says he’s going to destroy something, believe him.

    If The Trade of Queens is notable for something, it’s the finality with which this sixth volume upsets the nice fantasy universe introduced at the beginning of the Merchant Princes series.  As the narrative has moved away from comfort-fantasy elements to a harder-edged techno-thriller mode (not your usual genre-shifting progression!), Stross seems determined to eradicate his starting premise with a vengeance…

    …but a more general assessment seems appropriate before touching upon spoilerrific considerations.  As the sixth entry in the Merchant Princes series, and the fourth-and-final volume of the current story arc, The Trade of Queens is pretty much all payoff for the various subplots launched in the series so far: It begins with the nuclear destruction of a large portion of downtown Washington, and then moves on to bigger things as the US government, motivated by the political calculations of a surprisingly influential figure, moves to definitely retaliate against the Gruinmarkt.

    As an arc-closing volume, it ties together a number of threads while leaving readers begging for a follow-up a few years down the line.  The most immediate problems are resolved (sometimes less-than-favourably), even though larger issues still have a lot of potential for exploration.  There’s an offhand description of a few new parallel worlds that packs a lot of ominous ideas in a few sentences, but those new universes will have to wait until another volume for exploration, as The Trade of Queens seems justifiably preoccupied with taking care of what’s happening in the known ones.  The techno-thriller tone of the series grows even stronger this time around, as it tackles political fiction and a strong critique of US foreign policy during the past decade.  As a nod to savvier Nobel-winning fans of the series, its thematic underpinning (the “development trap”, or what enables some societies to advance more quickly than others given the availability of superior technology) is even explicitly stated late in the narrative.

    Even though Stross has to juggle dozen of characters, a handful of parallel Earths, an apocalyptic scenario and the conclusion of a four-book cycle set in a six-book series, most of the characters of the series get a payoff of sorts.  Miriam finally comes a little bit closer to the forefront as the one who best understands what’s happening and how to react: it helps that she grows more comfortable in the new identity that has been pressed upon her for the last few volumes.  The conclusion is satisfying in a very dark fashion, and it does mark a reasonably comfortable stopping point for readers wondering if they can start reading the series so far.

    Now that the entire cycle is available, one notes a weaker third quarter (The Revolution Business) due to overwhelming plot-juggling and a somewhat linear fourth quarter that inexorably leads to its concluding passages.  Still, the overall success of the series is undeniable: I found it impossible to let go and finished most volumes of the series on the same day I began them.  This is delicious high-end SF, smart and compelling.

    In more spoiler-laden territory (turn around now if you don’t want to guess), I was gobsmacked at the way Stross goes about destroying the comfortable fantasy universe he could have milked for several more volumes.  Or, as I thought toward the end of The Trade of Queens: Wow, I’ve never even imagined a thermonuclear carpet-bombing before.  The science-fiction fan that I am can’t help but impose a gleeful reading of “fantasy worlds delentia est” over events that upset the nature of this series forever.  For all of the apocalyptic nature of this fourth volume (there’s an affecting side-show description of a major nuclear exchange midway through the book), it’s satisfying in its uncompromising nature… and it helps that a good chunk of the series’ sympathetic characters don’t exactly win, but certainly live to fight another day.  The scathing criticism of the Bush administration mindset is another layer of enjoyment that may not be equally appreciated by US readers, making it all the more amusing for everyone else.

    While I wish the second arc of this series would have been delivered as one massive book (which may have helped with some pacing issues), The Trade of Queen is a volume that wraps things up as well as it can, while promising much for an eventual follow-up.  There’s a reason why I look forward to every new Stross book, especially if they leave entire worlds destroyed in their wake.

  • Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)

    Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, May 2010) It’s hip to dismiss Hollywood summer blockbusters, but there’s nothing quite like the feel of a good well-made escapist fantasy.  Forget about the video game origins of the film, or the loose historical allusions in the title: this first Prince of Persia movie works best as an action adventure fantasy, any kind of verisimilitude joyfully sacrificed on the altar of entertainment.  Disney and producer Jerry Bruckheimer obviously aim to replicate the atmosphere of the first Pirates of the Caribbean, and while it’s not perfect, it works generally well at taking us from one action/effects set-piece to another.  Jake Gyllenhaal makes for a credible action hero while Genna Arterton is almost impossibly sassy/cute in the film’s only noteworthy female role, but it’s Alfred Molina who ends up the film’s standout oddball character as a quasi-modern parody of a libertarian.  Not that he’s the only charmingly anachronistic element in a plot that is based on a middle-eastern invasion motivated by false reports of weapons of mass destruction.  But never mind the politics when the film mixes swashbuckling adventure, an Arabian fantasy setting and an intriguing fantasy plot device.  You can see the end of the story coming from the film’s first twenty minutes (which is probably a good thing, given its reset-button nature), but it’s the telling that’s the charm here.  Not that it’s a complete success like its piratical predecessor: Prince of Persia sometimes feel a bit too long, sorely misses more female characters, could have used another dialogue re-write, has no cultural legitimacy (See “Persia, Prince of”) and often feels driven by incredible contrivances.  But, you know, I’m already looking forward to the sequel.  After all, I’ve just seen Robin Hood: I’ve had my inoculation shot against excessive realism.

  • The Revolution Business (Merchant Princes #5), Charles Stross

    The Revolution Business (Merchant Princes #5), Charles Stross

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2009, 320 pages, C$27.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-7653-1672-1

    I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: If you’re going to start reading Charles Stross’ Merchant Princes series, don’t crack open the first volume unless you know you can get every other book in short order.  Not only is it the kind of addictive storytelling that makes it difficult to stop reading once things get underway, but the combination of high-concept genre-blending, plot twists, large cast of character and complex intrigue makes it essential to keep going as so to keep the entire story alive in our heads.

    I am writing this with some experience in the matter: I made the mistake of reading the first four volumes of the series in rapid succession in 2008, marooning me two books away from a satisfying conclusion.  I managed to restrain myself when the fifth volume appeared last year, but now that the sixth is in stores and concludes the series’ current story arc, I had to face the daunting prospect of re-immersing myself in a complex series two years later.

    It’s an uphill climb at first, because The Revolution Business picks up briskly after the events of the fourth volume: The Clan of world-travelers previously introduced is besieged by enemies in two different worlds: Stuck in a civil war on a parallel Earth, they’re being viciously hunted down on this side by the US government after a failed attempt at nuclear blackmail by a renegade element.  The already slim chances of negotiation between our heroine Miriam and the elements of the American government charged with tracking down the world-walkers are getting slimmer as Miriam is trapped by the actions of her family and the US discovers that the Clan has stolen six portable nuclear weapons from its military inventory.  Things escalate steadily over the course of the novel until no less than two nuclear bombs are detonated before the last page is over.

    After two years away from the series, I won’t try to claim supernatural powers of recognition: It took me about a hundred pages in The Revolution Business to be comfortable once more with the lengthy cast of characters, their multiple agendas and their unfolding plans.  Miriam, the character through which we entered this universe and with whom we spent so much time during the first two volumes of the series, gets very little screen time as Stross is busy moving the various pieces of his plot in place for the conclusion in the next book.  If The Revolution Business has one problem, it’s that it’s very obviously the third quarter of a longer four-book arc and, as such, is stuck in the narrative trap of escalation.  The wild inventiveness of the first three volumes, which introduced one new parallel Earth per book, slows down considerably: this may be Stross’s least idea-driven book so far, so busy is it with the plate-spinning mechanics of storytelling.  In fact, The Revolution Business spends nearly all of its length setting up the fourth volume, and doing so through about a dozen character streams.  Sometimes, it feels as if there is a lot of activity for the characters, but little actual progress in the overall plot.  On the other hand, the payoff is breathtaking: The last paragraph alone kills off one major sympathetic character and destroys a major city.

    As you may guess, this isn’t a particularly hopeful passage in the Merchant Princes series.  A cycle that started off as fantasy before being revealed as Science Fiction gets remade in techno-thriller mode as more attention shifts to the American government reaction to the parallel-world intrusions.  As a terrifyingly creepy character takes over the reins of the official response and comes up with increasingly sophisticated devices to replicate the world-traveling capabilities of the Clan, the stakes get higher and higher.  Add to that the evidence of civil war between the Clan and the conservatives of the Gruinmarkt and no wonder this series gets darker at every page.  Some chilling snippets of intercepted conversations hint at even more depressing events to come.

    Still, grimness can be exhilarating in Stross’ hands and part of the appeal of the series as it starts winding down is to wonder at how far he’ll push it.  This is an author who has already destroyed the world a few times in other stories: we can justifiably be concerned for his characters as they try to escape from events spinning out of control.  Now that the nuclear genie has been uncorked twice by the end of this volume, it’s anyone’s guess where this will go.  What seems clear is that the narrative arc started in The Hidden Family is ready to wind down, and I defy anyone who’s made it so far in the series not to start reading volume six as soon as they’re done with The Revolution Business.  If you’re about to start reading the series and you don’t have it nearby, don’t tell me I haven’t tried to warn you.

  • MacGruber (2010)

    MacGruber (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, May 2010) Incompetent secret agents are fast approaching cliché after Johnny English, Get Smart, OSS-117 and many others, so MacGruber has a few other issues to worry about aside from its thin inspiration from Saturday Night Live sketches.  Sadly, what we get is a coarse, violent and generally unpleasant satire on the action-movie genre.  It’s not exactly terrible (it certainly earns its share of laughs), but it could have been quite a bit better.  MacGruber, played by SNL’s Will Forte, is not just incompetent but blustery, crass and with few redeemable qualities: He’s a full-time annoyance and sadly he’s in pretty much the entire movie.  Bland co-star Ryan Phillippe does a bit better, although Kristen Wiig is so conventional in her portrayal of the obligatory love interest that I gladly would have seen her switch roles with the always-cute Maya Rudolph.  But character flaws aren’t the biggest of MacGruber’s problems, which betrays its SNL origins by padding 30 minutes’ worth of jokes into an hour and a half of lazy pacing, pauses for laughs and diminishing-returns call-backs to gags that weren’t funny in the first place.  (“I’ll do anything to get back on the case?”  Funny for ten seconds, not forty.  Celery?  Never funny.)  The direction is hampered by a low budget, which the disjoint editing seems to make even worse.  Fortunately, there is about one dumb laugh every ten minutes (how dumb?  Well, I was unexpectedly amused by subtitles on “You’re loco, man”), which still places MacGruber a cut above many other comedies out there.  It’s not a disaster, but the sense of missed opportunities here feels overwhelming.

  • Robin Hood (2010)

    Robin Hood (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, May 2010) The chequered development process that led from a script called Nottingham to this stone-faced “historical” take on Robin Hood may explain a lot about the deadened result, but as viewers we can only see what’s on-screen and wonder what went wrong.  The first bad idea is the pretence of a “historical” look at a legend: It didn’t work in the dour and grimy King Arthur, and it’s not any more pleasant here. (To compare and contrast, the similarly-themed The Last Legion wasn’t very good either, but it had the good idea of being a lot more fun).  This isn’t director Ridley Scott’s first foray in pseudo-realistic historical action, and Robin Hood is just as dirt-dominated as similar sequences in Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven: you can practically feel the plague coming just by watching the film.  But the realism is just surface deep: By the end of the story, in which Robin Hood saves Maid Marian from unexplainable danger during a D-day like French invasion off the cliffs of Dover and then practically writes the Magna Carta from notes left by his lost-lost father, well, we’ve left realism buried somewhere in the copious dirt.  (It won’t take a military strategist to find something suspiciously wrong about an invasion force picking a narrow stretch of beach right in front of impassable cliffs as a landing area.)  While Russell Crowe is fine as Robin Hood and Cate Blanchett can do no wrong as Maid Marian, the film too often feels like a school assignment sucking all the fun out of reasonably entertaining source material.  After watching this joyless take on Robin Hood, I felt a sudden need to go and re-watch Costner’s now-old-enough-to-be-classic Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves all over again.

  • Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede, Bradley Denton

    Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede, Bradley Denton

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avonova, 1992 reprint of 1991 original, 290 pages, C$5.50, ISBN 0-380-71876-6

    I don’t know much about anything, but one thing I’m starting to understand as an avid reader is that over a sufficiently long time, there isn’t such a thing as “the book that got away”:  Whatever books captured my imagination back when I didn’t have enough money to buy them all keep popping up in the strangest places.  As long as I’m patient enough, chances are that I will end up reading every book whose cover ever struck me as interesting.

    So it is that I’ve been fascinated by Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede for a long time, on the sole strength of its title.  Never mind the content of the novel itself and contemplate the title once more.  Isn’t it wonderful?  Isn’t it the kind of title that lodges itself in your brain and pops up occasionally to roll off the tongue?  Can you imagine Christopher Walken gravely intoning “Buddy Holly… is alive… and well… on Ganymede”?  Even if you can’t or won’t imagine such a thing, you at least have to admit that any novel that sports that title is worth a look.

    It begins in 1989, as one regular guy named Oliver Vale sets down to watch TV and finds out that all channels are showing the same thing: Buddy Holly, strumming his guitar while telling people that he’s stuck on Ganymede, and that Oliver Vale is the one who can explain why.  Vale takes it in stride: after all, he’s been conceived to the sound of a Buddy Holly song on the radio, at the very same time the singer died in a plane crash.  Raised as a rock-and-roll messiah by a single mom with seemingly crackpot ideas about aliens, Vale knows that he’s not the most stable of people, and his first reaction to the TV broadcast is to congratulate himself on the inflated self-esteem of his hallucinations.  But when the telephone starts to ring, it turns out that all channels around the world are showing the same thing… and that everyone has heard Vale’s name and address.  Now they want answers, and Vale doesn’t have a clue what to tell anyone.

    It gets weirder.  Much weirder, what with Vale riding his motorcycle to Buddy Holly’s grave site, being pursued by his own psychotherapist, mobs of unhappy TV viewers, a ruthless enforcer from the FCC, two sets of aliens and a cyborg dog.  (The dog belongs to one of the alien couples, which explains at least one thing.)  Every chapter alternates between Oliver’s first-person narration and third-person viewpoints: the technical juggling of those points of view in portraying the story as it happens is impressive, especially given Vale’s frequent flashbacks to his childhood.

    An extended chase sequence set in the American Midwest, Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede is the kind of novel that ends up delivering an experience no one even imagined they wanted.  It’s fun, it’s pleasant to read, it’s inventive and it seldom stops for breath.  The characters are memorable (just wait until you meet Grechen), the prose is delicious and the tone is an unusual blend of light-hearted whimsy, pop nostalgia and a few surprising action scenes.  The lead character manages to be sympathetic despite a grab-bag of issues, something that largely owes to Denton’s affectionate attitude toward his characters.  It ends curiously well.

    For a narrative that features a lot of references to fifties rock-and-roll music, Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede is nonetheless accessible to readers who may not recall the era or the music first-hand.  Even the messy conclusion doesn’t do any damage to the impression left by the rest of the story.  The result is an interesting time-capsule of a comic SF novel, something worth reading even today –and a confirmation that the 1991 Campbell jury was on to something when they named it the best Science Fiction novel of the year.

    I ended up finding my copy of Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede in a small used bookstore in Winnipeg after nearly 17 years of not-so-assiduous looking, but you don’t have to wait that long: A fact-checking Google trawl ended up revealing not only that a movie adaptation is slated for release sometime soon, but that the entire content of the novel has been freely made available online under Creative Commons licensing.

  • The Sheriff of Yrnameer, Michael Rubens

    The Sheriff of Yrnameer, Michael Rubens

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pantheon, 2009, 269 pages, C$27.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-307-37847-7

    Science Fiction comedy is rare partly because it’s difficult to do well.  For every Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (a book that even Adams found hard to top), there are ten other guys who think that slapstick in zero-G is enough farce to go around.  The best comic SF comes from setting the strengths of the genre against each other, most frequently by using ridiculous iconoclasm to undermine the more sublime tendencies of SF.  Adams understood this (perfect example: the Babel Fish), and embraced the national British notion that underplaying something is quite a bit more enjoyable than being a buffoon mugging for laughs.

    But it’s really unfair to compare anyone to Adams, except when it tells us something about when a story doesn’t work.  As it happens, Michael Rubens’ The Sheriff of Yrnameer does work, but not without a soft reboot, some error-correction and a bit of indulgence.

    It took me two attempts to really get into the story.  A first read ended less than fifty pages in, stuck on a complete lack of interest.  Something about a deadbeat adventurer, a debtor who wants to use his body as an incubator and a flurry of tedious detail.  Stop.  Shrug.  Go back in the to-read pile.  Blame the weather.

    Things went much better the second time around.  The Sheriff of Yrnameer follows the adventures of an engaging rogue named Cole, who is seriously, unarguably, dangerously in debt.  A temporary reprieve from a very competent bounty-hunter creditor named Kenneth –who can’t wait to find a living body for his eggs and has an ovipositor ready to go past the first indebted eyeball– only buys him enough time to hijack a space freighter and have a few adventures before crash-landing on Yrnameer where he’ll get to help a small town threatened by criminals.

    If nothing else, The Sheriff of Yrnameer is competent funny SF: The tone is ridiculous, Rubens plays with a few classic SF concepts (I was particularly fond of the sentient AI who’s too stupid to trip the sentience-destruction routines) and while the laughs are few, the book at least manages to earn a semi-permanent grin.  The narration is charmingly elliptical, slyly undersells the jokes and rarely mugs for attention.  There are a few good characters in the mix, and their interactions become increasingly more important at generating the punch-lines.  Never mind why such a competent bounty-hunter as Kenneth would hang around a dead-end planet for weeks at a time: He gets one of the best lines of the book with “there’s no need to keep saying ‘Hello, Kenneth’ each time you enter a new room.” [P.223]  If the story wraps up a bit bitterly for the hero, there’s always the chance of a sequel to make it up to him.

    What the novel doesn’t master so well is sustained build-up.  There are three broad acts to The Sheriff of Yrnameer and each one seems at best semi-linked to each other.  While the first-third setup of Cole’s troubles tortuously leads to a midway sequence set on a training station where corporate drones have been turned into zombies, there’s a clear cut between those first two-third and the last act spent defending a small town from bandits.  It explains why the novel’s sub-genres also keep switching on us: The SF-heavy first scenes eventually lead to horror parody and then to western comedy.  This tendency to punch the reset button every ninety pages weakens the novel by making it a string of disconnected vignettes more than a sustained narrative.

    It’s noteworthy that this is a science-fiction comedy novel published outside the usual genre publishers and, as far as I can tell from a casual trawl through blogs, didn’t get much attention from SF genre readers.  There are a few explanations for this (Rubens hails from comedy TV writing, not genre fiction) but no real excuses.  While it’s true that the SF elements in The Sheriff of Yrnameer play off generic devices and so have very little to contribute back to the SF genre discourse, it’s still a fairly entertaining take on elements that should be dear to SF readers.  Still, even though a familiarity with dystopian space operas, egg-laying parasites, corporate zombies and far-west bandits certainly doesn’t hurt, Ruben’s first novel is also a book that should appeal to readers who aren’t necessarily steeped into genre conventions.  No matter how you look at it, it’s a book that reaches its own expectations and delivers a good time along the way.  Not every book can be a new Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; sometimes, it’s just fine to make references to it.

  • Who’s Your City?, Richard Florida

    Who’s Your City?, Richard Florida

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Random House Canada, 2008, 374 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-307-35696-3

    If you don’t like where you live, maybe it’s not you, but where you are that’s the problem.  Go ahead and leave!

    That, in a nutshell, is where Richard Florida leads readers with Who’s Your City, a book that not only argues that globalisation makes physical location even more important than ever, but that we should expect to move from one place to another according to our interests, or even our stage in life.

    As ideas go, this is relatively uncontroversial.  Alvin Toffler discussed nomadic lifestyles decades ago in The Third Wave, whereas most college-educated North Americans are well-acquainted with the phenomenon of leaving home to go study at post-secondary institutions, and then relocating in yet another city to find gainful employment.  Anyone interested in certain industries knows that the best place for movies is in Los Angeles; that book publishing jobs are in New York, that computer geeks cluster around San Francisco or Boston, that oil executives can opt for either Calgary or Houston, that political wonks end up in Ottawa or Washington.

    It takes a few dozen pages of statistics for Florida to make his point, but once he’s done the statistical evidence looks unarguable: Geographical location is crucial even despite modern telecommunications, and the tendency for super-clusters is to become even more specialized as people move to take advantage of this specialization.  In this context, why ignore the evidence that moving to another city may make you happier?  Grab Florida’s evaluation criteria and go pick your city off the menu of available choices!

    It doesn’t mean that I have to like his thesis, mind you: In Florida’s jargon, I’m one of those “rooters” who have settled down somewhere and won’t even think of leaving.  I’m pretty happy in the Ottawa area, which combines a right-sized city with easy access to both Montréal and Toronto, with weather I like (yes, even the snow), a close relationship to nature, a well-educated population from which I can easily make friends, and an opportunity-rich environment for my chosen profession.  I’ll let others speculate on how much Ottawa has shaped me versus how much of a fit I would have been for other cities had I been raised elsewhere, but what I know is that the more I travel, the more I find myself coming home knowing why I like it.  I may not be a rooter as much as Ottawa fits my own list of things that I consider essential to my daily happiness; in other words, I may be living Florida’s thesis despite not liking its implications.

    My other personal lesson from Who’s Your City is that Florida’s work confirmed a few impressions about why, as a tourist, I liked some cities more than others.  Apparently, if I can’t identify with the urban density of Ottawa (in Denver or Calgary), can’t enjoy the combination of smarts and money (in Boston or San Francisco), can’t benefit from the superlative quality of world-class cities (in New York or London) or can’t see plenty of nature (in Vancouver), then I’m liable to start turning on my host city like I did in Los Angeles, Miami or Winnipeg.  Again, this tends to prove Florida’s work more than I care to admit: Much like people, cities have personalities.

    More seriously, I do wish that Florida had spent less time telling people where to move and more time discussing the potential pitfalls of self-segregating urban areas.  We can study Detroit as a dramatic illustration of what happens when smart rich people do pick up and leave for better pastures.  Brain drains are serious business, as is the political stratification caused by the clustering of like-minded people.  Red states, blue states, anyone?  What about well-balanced social classes?  Aren’t the upper-classes always more mobile than the lower ones?  Florida’s “pick up and go” triumphalism is less than useful to people who are either too poor or too stuck in obligations to leave; there is some acknowledgement of all of those issues, but not quite enough when balanced against the latter “Escape Kit” portion of the book that is meant to help readers pick a better city for themselves.

    As you may gather from a “review” that’s two-third musings and personal confessions, there is a lot food for thought in Who’s Your City?, which only confirms something that’s already obvious to anyone with friends and family who moved elsewhere.  It’s well-researched (although focused almost exclusively on the US), accessibly written and provocative in its conclusions.  Don’t necessarily start poking at real-estate ads in other states yet, but think about it: What if your city really wasn’t the city for you?

  • Rework, Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson

    Rework, Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Crown Business, 2010, 279 pages, C$26.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-307-46374-6

    The 37signals blog Signal vs. Noise is an interesting read, one of the few corporate blogs worth reading even if you don’t even want to use the company’s products.  37signals has made its reputation providing simple but well-designed web applications and they take delight in doing thing contrary to fashion.  When competitors offer more features, 37signals offers fewer but makes sure that the ones they have are working as well as their customers want.  They have stayed small, shared their accumulated knowledge widely and focused on their core expertise rather than branch out too quickly.  To put it simply, they do things differently.

    So when comes the time to offer advice in the form of a business book, they also do things differently.  Rework weigh in at a slim 27,000 words, padded to 279 pages by use of iconic illustrations, big font size, generous line-leading, wide margins and content chunked in nearly 90 chapters.  (The original length of the book’s first draft was about 59,000 words, we learn at the end of a passage on why it’s better to build half a great product than a complete product with half of what it needs. [P.70])  But don’t dismiss the book because of its size: Rework is about staking counter-intuitive claims and letting minds free to imagine better business models.  A longer, more soundly documented book wouldn’t have been any better.  In some ways, this is a book-sized blog post of ninety counterintuitive ways businesses can improve by rejecting conventional wisdom.  Holding fewer meetings; ignoring the competition; letting customers go; avoiding being a hero; refusing outside investments; ignoring résumés: Rework tells us that everything we think we know about business is wrong.

    Such attention-getting claims are, of course, 37signals’ mode of operation.  As long as it has worked once for them, it can become a triumphant new way of doing business from now on.  (Perhaps my favourite story from the book is how when 37signals launched their flagship program Basecamp, they didn’t even have a billing system: “Because the product billed in monthly cycles, we knew we had a thirty-day gap to figure it out. So we used the time before launch to solve more urgent problems that actually mattered on day one.  Day 30 could wait.” [P.93])  Of course, 37signals isn’t an ordinary company.  Free from manufacturing, it can exist as a fully virtual organization, adapt its business process to the online application model and operate on smaller budgets than many other companies.  They don’t conform because they don’t have to conform.  It’s good to take their self-serving advice with a grain of salt.

    But then again maybe not a whole salt shaker: While Rework is best enjoyed as 279 pages of bite-size motivation smothered in special counterintuitive sauce, it’s also a thought-provoking collection of ways in which prevailing wisdom can be questioned.  Following all of their advice to the letter is probably disastrous, but by showing ways to think outside the box, Rework’s authors are enabling business thinkers to be less comfortable with the status quo.  Much of their suggestions (“Send people home at 5”, “Forget about formal education”) leads to a better, more respectful workplace that places more value on the individual strengths of each employee.  Rework is also a refreshing business application of the Unix philosophy of “Write programs that do one thing and do it well”, one that runs counter to the kind of corporatism fever that leads to conglomerates doing too many thing not very well.

    It’s also very entertaining.  I started reading Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline at roughly the same moment as Rework, and finished Rework before I was done with Senge’s first chapter.  The tone of the book is conversational, compelling, and impossible to put down even though this is a book best read in small doses fit for contemplation.  It’s better not to adopt all of 37signals’ advice in all situations, but with Rework they make an interesting contribution to business culture, and their book will impress even those who can’t stomach most business books.