Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Slow Death by Rubber Duck, Rick Smith & Bruce Lourie

    Slow Death by Rubber Duck, Rick Smith & Bruce Lourie

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Vintage Canada, 2010 expanded reprint of 2009 original, 339 pages, C$19.95 pb, ISBN 978-0-307-39713-3

    One of the most depressing consequences of environmental awareness is the gradual understanding that it’s a never-ending battle.  You can remove the belching smokestacks, recycle the garbage dumps, stop dumping waste in the environment and stop clear-cutting forests, and the job still won’t be done.  In Slow Death by Rubber Duck, Rick Smith and Bruce Lourie eloquently demonstrate that even in our everyday life, there are still dangers from everyday products even though those products may be manufactured, shipped, sold and recycled more responsively than ever before.

    The analytical centerpiece of the book is the kind of analysis that can now be cheaply done to verify the levels of various toxic materials in our own blood.  Everyone today is tainted to some degree by heightened levels of products that don’t belong in our bodies.  We have all breathed dangerous metals, cuddled next to treated fabrics, used products made out of toxic products… and the cumulative effect of our daily lives shows in blood tests.  In eight chapters, the authors willingly subject themselves to common products to show how easy it is to poison ourselves.

    For instance, in the chapter “Rubber Duck Wars”, the authors seek out phthalate-containing products (phthalates being a handy industrial lubricant used in plastics and personal products, now thought to increase infertility risks) and willingly expose themselves to them.  Within days, before-and-after tests show how their levels of phthalates skyrocketed.  (The good news being that phthalates break down relatively quickly, meaning that returning to normal non-exposure quickly led to more normal toxin levels within a few weeks.  This is not the case with all contaminants.)

    Phthalates are an interesting case study given how, over the past decade, they were banned after consumer pressure.  Slow Death by Rubber Duck is a clever book in not only showing us the toxicity of ordinary products and the extent to which even normal exposure can quickly lead to elevated levels of blood toxins, but also in showing how concerted activism can have an impact.  One of the book’s best moments is found in Chapter Eight, “Mothers Know Best”, which shows how environmental groups were able to work with the Canadian Conservative government in order to announce a ban on the use of Bisphenol A (BPA) in products, and paving the way for other countries to do the same.  It’s this kind of result-based activism that steadily makes the world incrementally safer for everyone.

    Reading the book, there’s no doubt that regulation is the way to go for most of those environmental issues.  Smith and Lourie (plus Sarah Dopp, who gets third billing everywhere but on the cover) make a compelling (and recurring) case that many of these toxic products find their way in our environment thanks to industry marketing and pressures to solve minor problems with worse solutions.  We increasingly create our problems in response to relatively trivial concerns, and it takes us years to realize the error of our ways.  In the meantime, it is concerted action that leads governments (even by governments not known for environmental activism, as shown by positive Bush-administration actions) to take action and codify our understanding of biological science into industry guidelines.  Left to itself, the industry can’t really be counted upon to self-regulate –especially considering past examples such as the history of mercury use in dental filling and other hair-raising practices.

    Until regulations catch up to science, it’s really up to the individual citizen to start taking action.  Slow Death by Rubber Duck has a few recommendations to make in order to act as more responsible individuals.  The book ends on a series of recommendation that finally got me to stop cooking stuff in Tupperware, get rid of my old water bottles and trash the plastic shower curtain in favor of a fabric one.  Small things that amount to real changes, even while industries and government race to catch up to the latest science and tighten up manufacturing and importation standards.  Even-tempered, compelling to read and even funny at times, Slow Death by Rubber Duck has earned its national best-selling status.  Read the paperback edition for a new afterword describing the reaction to the book, and why the people complaining loudest about the book (the usual environmental deniers) may be the most compelling reason to read it.

  • Moneyball (2011)

    Moneyball (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, October 2011) Something isn’t quite right with this Moneyball, but it took me a reading through the original book to finally understand why.  As a sports drama in which underdogs defeat their opponents through cleverness and unorthodox thinking, it does manage to boil down a complex and dry subject into a narrative that most people (including those without much baseball knowledge) will be able to follow and enjoy.  Brad Pitt is surprisingly good as the Oakland Athletics’s general manager Billy Beane trying to make the most out of the small budget he’s given –hiring oddball players and constantly running the numbers game is one way that the story plays out in the good old underdog sports drama narrative.  But sometimes, it does too neat a job: While Michael Lewis’ book makes it clear that the sabermetrisation of pro baseball was (and continues to be) a lengthy process in which the 2002 season was just another step, the film condenses decades of thinking into a single year, and heavily dramatizes the events in such a way that they lose their intended meaning.  Sabermetrics is about squeezing a few percentage points here and there, enough so that statistically, you end up with better results at the end of the year.  So what’s Moneyball’s most triumphant sequence?  The complete statistical anomaly of winning twenty games in a row (and that last one on a heroic shot), something that actually undermines the argument made by the picture.  Once that twentieth game is won, the film has nowhere to go: while the team makes it to the finals, they lose their season.  Other teams would take ideas similar to Beane’s and run with them.  The elements that make Lewis’ Moneyball an interesting book aren’t necessarily those that make for a sports drama and the film occasionally suffers from the contradiction.  Still, it’s churlish to criticise the film for fairly esoteric reasons: On most aspects, Moneyball is a solid sports drama with enough comic relief to make it work, and it’s hard to overestimate the work that has gone in transforming the non-fiction original book into something that feels like a classic baseball movie.  The container, however, may be part of the problem.

  • Rubber (2010)

    Rubber (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, October 2011) I suppose that when a film begins with a monologue in which a character directly addresses the audience in explaining why it celebrates having “no reason”, it shouldn’t be surprising if the rest of Rubber is a mixture of meta-fictional experimentation and half-hearted genre thrills.  It could have been otherwise, though: As ludicrous a premise as “killer tire” can be, it would have been possible to turn it into a reasonably inventive horror/comedy hybrid.  Instead, though, director Quentin Dupieux dispenses with the thrills, adds a framing device that leeches energy away from the film, endlessly circles the same few ideas and seems inordinately proud of himself for screwing with viewers’ expectations.  Not all of Rubber is terrible: There’s some interesting work in making “Robert” more than a rolling tire telekinetically making heads explode, and there are a few meta-fictional elements here that, if correctly employed, would have been rich in possibilities: The observers/audience could have been an effective Greek chorus, or commentary on the craven nature of horror audiences –instead, they’re almost entirely thrown away too soon.  The conceit of actors making a movie that relies on viewer’s attention is similar, as is the basic horror structure of a tire killing people for “no reason”.  But those intriguing elements never gel, and they’re undermined by other more basic flaws: The film’s pacing is deathly, and what would have been impressive in a short ten-minute film here feel overdrawn and beaten to death in 85 minutes.  The excessive gore seems more immature than deserved in a film that can’t be bothered to deliver even the most basic movie-watching satisfaction.  Ultimately, though, the DVD supplements (more particularly a fake interview with backwards-running segments and blatantly wrong translation from French) confirm what the film suggests: A self-satisfied director with no discipline, no appreciation for the genre he has chosen to work in and quite a bit of contempt for his audience.  As much as I’m not opposed to films that go off the beaten track, this really isn’t the way to do it –I felt my enthusiasm for Rubber deflate steadily throughout.

  • The Ides of March (2011)

    The Ides of March (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, October 2011) As with many backroom political thrillers, The Ides of March tells the story of how a young political wunderkind loses his illusions while working for a star candidate.  If you’ve read Joe Klein/Anonymous’s Primary Colors or seen 1996’s City Hall, you have a rough idea of how this works.  But familiarity isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially as the similitudes taper off toward the end, and the result is a convincing look at the way American politics can work.  Ryan Gosling’s portrayal of a genius-level political operative makes for a sympathetic hero, and he more than holds his own against such notables as George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti.  (It’s one of the film’s interesting choices to use a star Clooney as a superstar candidate, character-actor darlings Hoffman and Giamatti as seasoned professionals and Gosling as an up-and-comer –a good example of Hollywood typecasting working as casting.)  Perhaps the best thing about The Ides of March is its pitch-perfect portrayal of the political process at the primary stage –the ground-level organizing, the dirty tricks, the high-level negotiations in dismal settings.  Director Clooney does a fine job as portraying the grey nature of mid-March winter in Cincinnati, and the film quickly becomes a must-see for American political junkies, who won’t cringe too much at the film’s faithfulness to reality as we know it.  It almost goes without saying that, despite being loosely based on a play loosely based on the Howard Dean campaign, The Ides of March is best interpreted as a what-if rather than an allegory of anything that really happened recently: despite the political in-jokes, if best to appreciate the actors working as character rather than caricatures.  It’s unclear whether the film will have much of a wide appeal beyond left-leaning politicos: like many political thrillers, it ends at a funeral, but unlike many it doesn’t feature a single raised gun, conspiracy or assassination attempt.  It’s this nominal adherence to a plausible version of reality (with a side-order of capable performances) that makes The Ides of March works well despite familiar ideas and a low-key presentation.  Sometimes, you don’t need car chases and explosions to have a thrilling time.

  • Gnomeo & Juliet (2011)

    Gnomeo & Juliet (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On cable TV, October 2011) I’m not sure what kind of warped creative process ends up proposing a comedy take-off on “Romeo and Juliet” starring garden gnomes and featuring the music of Elton John, but when it leads to amusing trifles such as Gnomeo & Juliet, it’s hard to second-guess the filmmakers.  A second-tier animated feature aimed at kids but amusing to adults, it’s a fast-paced romantic comedy with enough action sequences and musical interludes to satisfy just about every constituency out there.  The pun-filled dialogue may occasionally earn a few groans, but there are a few good Shakespeare-related gags here and there (I’m particularly fond of “Out, out! Damn spot!”) to satisfy the classics-spotter.  The animation is fine, and some of the creature design is lovely.  Gnomeo & Juliet isn’t too demanding if you don’t focus on the in-jokes hidden in freeze-frames, and the entire family is likely to have a bit of fun along the way.  Oh, and don’t worry: The original “Romeo and Juliet” ending has been altered for maximum comedy.

  • Moneyball, Michael Lewis

    Moneyball, Michael Lewis

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Norton, 2011 movie tie-in expanded reprint of 2003 original, 317 pages, C$18.50 pb, ISBN 978-0-393-33839-3

    Sport meets science in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, a fascinating case study of the way fact-based analysis is slowly replacing traditional instinct as a guide to a baseball team’s performance.  Written after Lewis was allowed behind-the-scene access to the Oakland Athletics’ 2002 season, Moneyball explains how the desire to improve performance on a limited budget, coupled with the willingness to adopt new analytical methods collectively known as “sabermetrics”, allowed a small team like Oakland to compete successfully with team with far bigger budgets.

    The keyword here is “money”: Lewis, after making a splash with Liar’s Poker and The Big Short, is best-known as a financial writer and this focus is never too far away from his topic matter as he explains the difficult situation of a poor baseball team in a league where other teams can easily outspend them.  Coupled with a renewed interest in number-based analytical methods, these constraints allowed Oakland general Manager Billy Beane to retool the usual scouting process.  Never mind studying players in the minor-leagues fields and filing reports based on scouts’ gut instinct: Beane’s analytical team would rather pore over seasons’ worth of numbers in order to find not necessarily the best players, but the ones that are undervalued by the market.  You can’t buy who you want when other teams have deep pockets, but you can get great bargains by targeting players who aren’t being paid what they’re worth.  Sabermetrics isn’t about having a huge advantage; it’s about working the margins until you can extract a few reliable percentage points’ worth of advantage, which ends up making a difference over the long run.

    Lewis blends this story (as exemplified by the 2002 Oakland season) with that of Bean, a talented baseball player who somehow never met the considerable expectations placed on him by major-league teams.  Beane, after a few mildly successful years in the major league, did what practically no one else did and decided to take up the management of a baseball team, re-starting from the ground up.  This sensibility led him to champion analytical methods developed from the mid-seventies by statistical nerds over the advice of seasoned scouts.

    In Moneyball, these innovations work: By being the first to pioneer the principles of sabermetrics, the Athletics get first-mover advantage, seeing easy bargains where other teams aren’t even looking.  It’s a temporary advantage as other teams, such a Toronto and Boston, eventually adopt similar techniques… but for a while, it works to the Athletics’ advantage.  (Hilariously, the centerpiece of the 2002 Athletics season is an unprecedented 20-game winning streak, a freak succession of victories that has almost nothing to do with the percentage points earned by sabermetrics.  Lewis explains this in the book, but the movie adaptation misses the point by using it as the film’s climax.)

    Thanks to Lewis’ vulgarization talents, Moneyball will find an audience far beyond numbers-minded baseball fans.  The book is a joy to read, and even casual baseball observers will find plenty of good material to chew upon.  (There are exceptions: a chapter on trading is so deeply steeped in traditional baseball jargon that casual readers will find it nearly impenetrable.)  It’s a story about how cleverness can defeat brawn, or how facts can check instinct and as such is likely to appeal to science-minded readers.

    This “revenge of the nerds” plotline is more fully explained in the paperback version’s afterword, which describes the controversy with which the book was received by traditional old-school baseball managers and fans.  To hear Lewis tell it, the sabermetrics principles were threatening because they upset an entrenched scouting system largely made up of ex-players seeking to uphold their own tradition: Having back-room math analysts tell them that they were making bad decisions wasn’t the kind of news warmly received.  And it may serve to explain why, even almost ten years later, the Athletics are still doing well in implementing sabermetrics: not every team administration may yet be willing to understand how letting go of traditional methods can improve their results.

    In short, it’s a story very similar to the kind of competitiveness that has taken over Wall Street, with trained scientists and engineers seeking minute percentage advantages over their rivals.  Blending the two American passions of baseball and money in one easy-to-read package, there’s a good case to be made for Moneyball as a quintessential American non-fiction book.

  • The Room (2003)

    The Room (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, October 2003) I didn’t want to see Tommy Wisseau’s The Room as much as I was morbidly curious about it.  Having recently acquired some kind of cult notoriety as one of the worst movies ever made, The Room has spawned a few Internet memes and toured the continent in special audience-participation screenings à la Rocky Horror Picture Show.  Alas, the first thing that comes to mind while watching The Room is that we don’t have the cult classics we used to have.  Amateurish and incompetent in nearly every facet of moviemaking, The Room has the feel of a vanity project gone horribly wrong, possibly thanks to a producer/writer/director/actor (Wisseau) unable to tell between good and bad, and unwilling to listen to saner heads.  Pick an aspect of movies, and The Room sucks at it.  The premise presupposes entities without recognizable human emotions.  Dialogues feel like the first draft of a first student project.  The tone of the film changes from one line to another.  The direction is flat.  The acting is uncontrolled, starting from Wisseau’s constant ha-has.  Even the scene blocking is worse than the average local theater company.  The pacing grinds to a halt whenever it hits one of the four too-lengthy soft-core love scenes.  Subplots are raised and then never mentioned again.  Whatever nice things one may say about the stock San Francisco exteriors are destroyed by their tone-deaf usage as scene transitions.  And so on.  The issue here isn’t that the film is terrible: I’m sure that there are plenty of other terrible movies buried away somewhere.  The real wonder here is The Room’s unexplainable notoriety as an Internet phenomenon.  Granted, the so-bad-it’s-good crowd self-selects itself out of any kind of artistic rationale.  Still, the fairest way to describe the movie is dull: I started watching it with the best of intentions, and eventually idly started surfing the web as the rest of the movie played without too much surprise or variance in quality.  At least I can now place “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” or “Oh, hi Mark” in their proper, incomprehensible context.  Given that Wisseau is riding the film’s newfound popularity as an incompetent comedy by showing it in theaters, those of you still convinced that The Room can’t be missed will have trouble renting it or even buying it online; all I can say is that this is the universe’s way of telling you that you’re better off doing something else.

  • Drive (2011)

    Drive (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2011) Every so often, genre thriller fans are asked to confront moody art-house versions of familiar crime stories.  Here we have a stunt driver / mechanic moonlighting as a getaway driver.  He meets a single mother and her son; gets embroiled in a heist when her husband gets out of prison; is forced to defend himself once the heist turns bad and he ends up with a lot of money that other people have acquired in ways that would get everyone killed.  Having read (and re-read) James Sallis’ thin novel on which the film is based, I can say that the adaptation is both loose and faithful: The plot is there, the motivations are entirely different but the mood is just as laconic and borderline pretentious.  There are fewer details in the film about the protagonist’s life as a stuntman, but the details surrounding the main plot are far better developed (in particular “Irene”, much more fully rounded from the novel’s “Irena”).  Still, the film itself feels stuck in-between genre conventions and dramatic pretention: The languid pacing alone is a tough sell to thriller audiences: Drive often feels like lengthy silences loosely connected together and the editing seems happy to linger on characters as they stare wordlessly into space to the sound of eighties-inspired music.  Ryan Gosling’s nameless character is either a straightforward revenge-driven hero, or an enigma without dialogue; I had certainly imagined a scrappier protagonist from the novel.  Meanwhile, art-house audiences may not feel entirely with the Grand Theft Auto-inspired subject matter, or with the unnecessary flashes of extreme gore.  Director Nicolas Winding Refn is far more interested in dramatic beats than action sequences, which gives a particular off-beat flavour to the film’s more intense moments: they likely won’t satisfy action junkies, but they do bring something unusual to the table in terms of visual presentation.  (The opening pre-credit sequence is remarkable.)  Los Angeles itself gets to shine either through glorious night-time helicopter shots, or through the presentation of seedy run-down apartments in which the characters live.  This kind of in-between location comes to define the rest of the picture as well, and if there’s enough interesting material in Drive to warrant a look for those who enjoy style clashes, the film itself may be a bit too self-involved to be fully successful.  Cut fifteen minutes of the film, and we’ll see again.

  • Filthy Lucre, Joseph Heath

    Filthy Lucre, Joseph Heath

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Collins, 2009, 338 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 978-1-55468-395-6

    Given the importance of money, it almost goes without saying that a good understanding of the world goes hand-in-hand with a good grasp of economics.  “Follow the Money” isn’t just good for crime thrillers: it’s a solid way to figure out what’s really happening around us.  Unfortunately, economics isn’t called the dismal science for nothing: often politicized into uselessness, the study of money has attracted, well… people with money, intent of using the results to further their political aims.  As a result, activists from the right and the left now come with preconceived notions about economics that are actively harming any rational policy discussions.

    To truly understand economics, argues Joseph Heath in Filthy Lucre (subtitled, somewhat incompletely, as “Economics for people who hate capitalism”) we have to let go of a few myths, cherished preconceptions and long-held statements of faith about economics.  To this end, he presents and demolishes twelve fallacies about economics: six that are favoured from a right-wing perspective, and six that are usually held by the left.

    Heath isn’t an economist; he’s a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto and already well-known in Canada as one of the country’s most interesting intellectuals after a few well-received books such as The Efficient Society and The Rebel Sell.  He’s a skilled rhetorician, and Filthy Lucre is at its best when it starts poking at beliefs that have been ingrained in us through lazy consumption of political debates.  (His metaphors aren’t always convincing, but he can usually offer further sources for readers who would like a deeper understanding of his arguments.)

    In the first half of the book, he demolishes a few right-wing fallacies: Libertarianism is the first target in explaining why capitalism isn’t natural.  In successive chapters, he argues that incentives aren’t all that matters, that competition isn’t always better, that taxes are usually at their optimal level, that international competitiveness isn’t required and that moral hazard doesn’t necessarily embed morality into economics.  Game theory figures heavily in his metaphors and readers are almost guaranteed to come away from this section with a better understanding of economics in general.

    What’s more interesting, however, is the second section which takes aim at economic fallacies cherished by the kind of left-leaning readers most likely to pick up a book on “economics for people who hate capitalism”: Here, Heath serves some tough counter-examples to people who still believe that prices must be set by governments, that the pursuit of money is evil, that capitalism is doomed, that equal pay is an ideal, that all wealth accumulates to the top or that equality is more desirable than efficiency.  If the book’s first section is fun to read, this second half makes the book even better, because it forces equality-minded left-leaning readers to confront their own prejudices with colder facts and ponder the trade-offs required to get to their shiny progressive utopia.

    Anyone who’s familiar with Heath’s previous work will find a continuity of argument in Filthy Lucre: Heath may be writing from a deep and self-acknowledged left-wing perspective, but he’s remarkably successful at explaining the status quo, its advantages over most alternatives and the wonders of steady incremental changes.  The book argues for a keener, more nuanced understanding of the current system before setting out to improve it, and it’s hard to argue with such even-handed reason.

    After The Efficient Society and The Rebel Sell, Filthy Lucre also marks a third great popular book in a row for Heath.  If anyone has missed his work so far, don’t wait for another excuse: Read the books and wait for his next one –he deserves a spot on anyone’s must-read list.

  • Apollo 18 (2011)

    Apollo 18 (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, September 2011)  As a certified space exploration geek, I have to admit that as much as I don’t like the conspiracy-mongering mockumentary intent of Apollo 18, the notion of a secret mission to the moon does hit a sweet spot somewhere in my brain.  I’m unaccountably fascinated by stories blending hard-SF with horror (see Event Horizon, Blood Moon, etc.) and Apollo 18 adds another layer of interest by choosing to show its story using found footage.  Unfortunately, interesting doesn’t always go hand-in-hand with good and as the film ended after merely 85 minutes, I felt as if I had spent more time second-guessing the director’s choices rather than enjoying the film itself.  The biggest problem, obviously, is the script: From the pedestrian lines of dialogue, the mortally slow first act, the lack of twists and turns (save for one unexpected lunar lander), ridiculous threat and a conclusion that ends like most found footage horror movies have done since The Blair Witch Project, this is a thin, weak and predictable film.  Even in terms of secret space program science-fiction, it has fewer good things running for it than the first ten minutes of Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (and I don’t praise the Transformers series lightly)  But even allowing for a script that’s more promising than well-executed, it’s really the film’s pseudo-documentary approach that kills it.  The opening and closing title cards are annoying in their insistence that What you saw was real (yeah, like anyone could miss a secret mission to the Moon), and the subjective-camera thing becomes a problem more than an advantage: It places a filter on the experience of the film that a more conventional direction would have eliminated.  (It doesn’t help that by the final five minutes, we’re seeing camera angles that can’t exist, and that the conclusion makes it impossible to answer the question “Where did they get the footage from?”)  So, yes, don’t be surprised to find yourself constantly wishing for the film to have been made another way.  It makes Apollo 18 a curiosity, perhaps even a marginal recommendation for SF/horror fans, but certainly not a good film for the ages.  Parts of it are ingenious, though, and there aren’t that many other films with a cast list of merely three people.

  • Contagion (2011)

    Contagion (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2011) There are many things to admire about Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, but the one that sticks in mind is his attempt to tell a story about something that’s basically unstoryable.  Modern-day epidemics do not lend themselves to the kind of heroics best shown on-screen: They involve many people doing their job, they turn into public policy debates, they don’t spare the righteous or punish the guilty, they peter out rather than climax and they present a diffuse threat rather than a clear antagonist.  Faced with those constraints, most movies about epidemics crank it up to zombies (28 Days Later, etc), borrow from science-fiction (The Andromeda Strain), or can’t help but throw in car chases and explosions (Outbreak).  No such narrative sleigh-of-hand here, as Contagion keeps to a fairly realistic depiction of a massively contagious and highly deadly epidemic.  Hopping all around the globe, bringing together half a dozen narrative strands, Contagion adopts a quasi-documentary look without forgetting to indulge in the occasional spectacle of a world gone wrong.  It doesn’t take that many shots of people touching things to let the film unnerve viewers, and Soderbergh’s assured direction does the rest.  Among other not-so-subtle touches, he not only kills off two characters played by Oscar-winning actresses, but has a graphic autopsy scene featuring the head of one of them.  Much of the script feels reasonably credible, with enough technobabble to set the tone.  Of course, trying to tell an unstoryable story eventually takes its toll.  Not every subplot is equally compelling (The second half of Marion Cotillard’s trip to China feels dull, whereas Jude Law’s character is annoying enough to create resentment when he escapes death) and the third act gradually diffuses itself as the epidemic runs its course.  Soderbergh’s tendency to tell a story in selective bits and pieces can occasionally be frustrating, given the potential here for a slicker film.  (Although the anti-chronological coda is a nice ironic touch.)  But given the film’s success in so many areas, in telling a familiar story in a way that sticks closer to the real world, Contagion ends up being a modest success; it’s perhaps Soderbergh’s most accomplished melding of art-house instincts in the service of broadly popular entertainment.  Amusingly for a filmmaker who’s been known to push for day-and-date direct distribution, at a time where movie theater attendance is dropping and video stores are closing, there may be no better argument for internet streaming/downloading that seeing Contagion and indulging in a bit of paranoia at the thought of human contact.

  • Un Prophète (2009)

    Un Prophète (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2011) A lengthy but rarely uninteresting sit at nearly two hours and a half, Un Prophète is essentially a look at the life of a young Arab man during his year-long incarceration in a French prison.  It plays out quite a bit more entertainingly that a simple statement of the premise will suggest, though: Within moments, our protagonist is manipulated by a bunch of Corsican prisonners into murdering an incarcerated witness, and the protection he earns in this fashion propels the rest of the action.  Part of the film’s pleasure is seeing the quasi-defenseless protagonist, ably played by Tahar Rahim, grow into a wheeler, schemer and eventually win over his opponents.  After a few disjointed minutes in which the quasi-documentary cinematography calls attention to itself, the film’s narrative arc progresses along nicely, adding and removing threats as it advances.  It makes for compelling viewing, especially as the film moves away from its initially bleak and uncompromising tone to a somewhat more hopeful conclusion.  Less happily, the film occasionally indulges into a bit of magical realism in which reality is bent to ghostly advice and artful foreshadowing (hence the title) –much hidden depth is suggested by the film’s artful flourishes, but it does take away from the more reality-based bulk of the film.  Still, that’s not enough to take away much of the impact of this big, full, engrossing film: Un prophète is a look at a reality most will hopefully never experience, but it’s also a terrific story about someone working with the cards he’s been given.  Most disturbing, perhaps, is the non-judgement of the camera –the criminal as a hero, obviously, with the disappearance of his ghostly conscience a minor loss when he manages to work the system to his end.  The final images of the film suggest that a happy life will never be possible, and that he will always be followed no matter how he tries to escape.  Deservedly nominated for an Oscar, Un Prophete offers a dazzling mix of allegory, thematic depth and pure old-fashioned storytelling.  It’s worth the sit.

  • Tropa de Elite [Elite Squad] (2007)

    Tropa de Elite [Elite Squad] (2007)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2011) It’s really unfair to compare Elite Squad to City of God, given the latter’s well-deserved reputation as one of the best films of its time.  But the comparisons go beyond the fact that both movie come from contemporary Brazil: Both of them, after all, have been written by the same screenwriter, and if City of God was more interested in the criminal and bystanders, Elite Squad takes a look at the elite police forces fighting to clean up the corrupted mess that is modern-day Rio de Janeiro.  But don’t think for a second that the focus on the police forces makes for a kinder, gentler film: Even the protagonist seldom hesitate to gun down suspects, torture persons of interest or indulge in a bit of gratuitous cruelty.  Unusually structured, the film is narrated by a retiring police officer as he tries to pick a successor from two promising, but uneven recruits.  Wagner Moura is sympathetic as the narrator, but it’s André Ramiro who captures the film with a performance that sees him go from a good-natured intellectual to a revenge-driven warrior.  The solid script may skip over some of the transitional states, but it opens with an effective bit of structure, and ends at the perfect moment.  The cinematography lushly captures the moden favelas, and a few action sequences help lift this dramatic thriller into more exciting territory without necessarily sacrificing the themes of the film to a purely action-driven film.  A pretty good example of why even populist filmgoers should pay attention to world cinema, Elite Squad is a fascinating look in a very different culture where crime and punishment play out differently.  It’s a damning indiction of police corruption and the endless cycle of violence that seems to grip the area, but mostly it’s an entertaining police drama with a heavy dose of moral relativism.  The picture never bother to punish transgressions, in part because it’s so difficult to see who never goes beyond moral decency.

  • Super Troopers (2001)

    Super Troopers (2001)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2011) I watched this while in the mood for some dumb silliness, and got what I wanted: Super Troopers’s big comic premise is to transpose frat-boy antics onto a police context: Bored patrolmen playing head games with motorists, dumb policemen flying off in a rage, duelling corps trying to one-up each other.  There really isn’t much more to this film.  On the other hand, well, it does manage to be sporadically funny … and ten years later, Super Troopers still live on in internet pop culture in a series of memes and in-jokes. (“meow”, “mother of god” and “enhance –just print it” are the three that come up from time to time)  Anything with even the slightest bit of pop-culture relevance after ten years is worth a quick look.  The Broken Lizard comedy troupe that conceived Super Troopers is uneven: writer/director Jay Chandrasekhar is very funny, but many of the other either struggle to make an impression, or make a negative one.  Production notes suggest that the budget of the film was ridiculously low, but it doesn’t show too much: while this is a low-budget film, its lack of funding doesn’t feel all that obtrusive.  Perhaps the best thing about Super Troopers is that, for all of its self-indulgence in showcasing a comedy group in a deliberately dumb setting, it’s decently structured and, as a result, survives without too much trouble even a decade later.  Small praise, but we can all remember far dumber comedies that are nigh-unwatchable even with the best viewers’ intentions.

  • Oldeuboi [Oldboy] (2003)

    Oldeuboi [Oldboy] (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2011) I really should have seen Oldboy earlier: Not only had it gotten widespread praise everywhere I looked, but I should know more about a popular director like Park Chan-wook.  Oh well; there’s a time for everything, including watching Oldboy.  From the get-go, we’re in interesting territory.  Much like Quentin Tarantino, Chan-wook can’t help but play around with the grammar of cinema, and even the more familiar moments of the story have a cinephile kick to them.  Not that there are many familiar moments, given the unusual premise: A seemingly ordinary man is held prisoner in a room for fifteen years, then abruptly released and encouraged to seek vengeance.  The identity of the captor is a brief mystery as he quickly reveals himself to ask the hero to find out why he’s been held fifteen years.  It’s easy to see why Oldboy got so much praise, with its mysteries upon mysteries, with a stylish sense of storytelling and a conclusion that upends the vengeance motif.  Slickly executed and filled with odd little moments, this is a movie whose foreign origins make even better, as we’re plunged in contemporary South Korea for a thriller that would play just as effectively anywhere else.  If, at times, it’s hard to differentiate between cultural barriers and the film’s elliptical sense of storytelling, it wraps up decently and doesn’t leave too many loose ends lying around.  (On the other hand, the plot does get more and more far-fetched as it progresses, but given the premise, that’s to be expected.)  Oldboy does live up to its great reviews; don’t wait as long as I did to see it.