Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Battle Los Angeles (2011)

    Battle Los Angeles (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, March 2011) Some movies are difficult to appreciate on their own rather than as references to something else, and since Battle Los Angeles is so derivative, it feels natural to keep rubbing it against other movies to see how it compares.  There’s such a glut of alien-invasion films at the moment that seeing marines fighting alien invaders in Los Angeles feels more redundant than interesting: Even in trying to blend the attitude of Independence Day with the aesthetics of Black Hawk Down, Battle Los Angeles basically becomes a hackneyed collection of war movie clichés with alien taking over the role of the unrepentant enemy.  It certainly doesn’t qualify as serious Science Fiction: The film buries itself in nonsense every time it tries explaining what’s going on, from alien coming to Earth for its water to them having military tactics so naïve that they would get them kicked out of West Point freshman year.  From a thematic point of view, it’s tempting to put Battle Los Angeles in a cultural zeitgeist in which Americans are realizing the limits of their imperial reach and transposing this fearful guilt against an enemy as powerful to them as they are to countries that they have invaded, but that subtext is lost in the film’s gung-ho hoo-rah attitude.  The emphasis here is on the combat scenes, the shakycam feeling of being in a firefight and the nobility of its warrior-characters.  Threadbare narrative arcs, largely indistinguishable characters, functional writing and incoherent editing don’t do much to make this film likable.  Other than the end battle and an interesting freeway sequence, most of the action scenes are too grimy and disconnected to sustain interest: Like many contemporary action directors, Jonathan Liebesman needs to know when to calm down and provide sustained long shots.  Meanwhile, Aaron Eckhart is solid as the square-jawed hero, while Michelle Rodriguez does what Rodriguez does best –and there’s nothing wrong with that, even though it reinforces the feeling that we’ve seen all of this before.  On the other hand, especially measured against recent downbeat alien-invasion films such as Monsters and quasi-brethren Skyline, Battle Los Angeles has the considerable merit of ending on a triumphant note, and delivering much of the good old-fashioned heroics that we’d expect from this kind of film.  It doesn’t make the film any good, but it makes it satisfying once the end credits start rolling.

  • Smokin’ Aces 2: Assassins’ Ball (2010)

    Smokin’ Aces 2: Assassins’ Ball (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2011) Direct-to-video sequels aren’t usually good news, especially when their connection to the original film isn’t much more than a few minor characters and a rehash of the premise.  The original becomes the sequel’s worst enemy in becoming the standard against which the latter effort is evaluated.  So it is that Joe Carnahan’s original Smokin’ Aces may not have been much more than a cheap and slightly insane action thriller.  P.J. Pesce’s sequel doesn’t fly any higher, although it’s a bit better than many other DTV features.  It’s easy to see the limits of the film’s budget: the CGI explosions whose destruction isn’t seen in latter scenes, the limited number of locations, the unfamiliar actors, etc.  The script is similarly poorer, going straight from explaining the premise to blowing up the sets without much in terms of writing refinements.  Plot-wise, nearly every scene feels like a contractual obligation, and few of the characters earn our sympathy along the way.  Worse: the excessively gory mean-spirited nature of the film (why simply kill someone when you can send chunks of flesh fly?) makes it feel even cheaper and less enjoyable than the original: there’s an ick-factor to the R-rated gore that doesn’t mesh well with the amiable way such action films best present themselves.  Even the various assassins feel more annoying than anything else –especially compared to the original.  On technical grounds, the film is sometimes on thin ice with its occasionally-incomprehensible dialogue mixing and an overly stylized visual design that feels incoherent.  Still, there’s a lot worse in DTV land, and Smokin’ Aces 2 has a few positives going for it.  It’s not very long; it’s got an ambitious visual style that clearly aspire to match Carnahan’s work on the original, and some of the forward rhythm can be interesting.  But even singling out a number of interesting elements -the film’s attempt to claim some political relevance, Martha Higareda, the surprising final shot- is really a cue to complain that they weren’t executed as well as they could: The political relevance feels late and pretentious compared to the rest of the film; Higareda’ character is unceremoniously taken out of the film, and the last shot is best appreciated as a nod to other, better movies.  But even with occasional moments of energy, this is still a better-than-average direct-to-video sequel.  Call it a middle-grade exploitation film: It won’t appeal to many more people than the fans of the original.

  • It’s the Crude, Dude, Linda McQuaig

    It’s the Crude, Dude, Linda McQuaig

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday Canada, 2004, 346 pages, C$35.95 hc, ISBN 0-385-66010-3

    As the Bush years recede in the back-mirror like a feverish nightmare, much of the activist non-fiction of the time is starting to date.  Or is it?  Because the factors that allowed the Bush administration to overreach still exist.  Society hasn’t changed all that much; the same people are still active in other roles; and it’s not as if the new US administration has made spectacular changes to correct many systemic excesses.  The United States is still an imperial economic power (a soft one, but still…) no matter the party in the White House.

    So when Linda McQuaig, from the vantage point of 2004, asks whether oil was the reason the United States invaded Iraq, it’s not a provocative question that somehow stopped being relevant the moment Obama took office; it’s a prism through which we can look at the global oil industry, how it reached its position of political prominence and whether there’s anything to be done before the oil runs out.

    (The answer to the original question, to just about any non-Republican, is: Of course it was about the oil.  Just as the invasion was about power projection, about shock capitalism, about ideological proof-of-concept, about showing off military capabilities, about daddy issues, about pure domination after the humiliation of 9/11: All of those reasons are true (including “bringing democracy to the Middle-East”)… and there’s no reason that only one of them would be valid.)

    The title of the book gives away McQuaig’s answer, and her demonstration runs through the book along three lines of argument.  The first and strongest thread details public evidence that oil was very much on the White House’s mind when it planned the invasion of Iraq.  A map, showing Iraq’s oil fields in great detail, in unearthed from the documents prepared by the task force on energy formed during the summer of 2001 –a task force headed by none other than Dick Cheney, perhaps pointing the way to a quick and easy way for the US to assert direct control over vast reserves of oil.  Few non-Americans ever really believed the official reasons for going to war; McQuaig’s book (published in the US two years after first appearing in Canada) may be preaching to the converted, but it does so with evidence.

    The second line of argument demonstrates the western world’s complete reliance on oil.  A chapter dedicated to the SUV may seem like an odd digression, but it, too, is a way to study the way North-American political interests have been subservient to the oil lobby.  The SUV, born out of a regulatory loophole allowing those vehicles to avoid the energy-efficiency standards set for cars, is a symbol not only of the excesses of its host society, but also the way the oil industry usually gets what it wants in preserving its sources of profit.  Nothing new here for those who have paid attention (McQuaig’s mention of Canada having passed the Kyoto accord echoes sourly considering what happened since 2004), but still well-argued.

    Finally, the third strand of the book is a historical overview of how oil has been used politically since its rise as an energy source.  From the takeover of Middle-Eastern energy reserves by parochial western interests to the rise of OPEC, McQuaig describes in detail the kind of nasty realpolitik that happens once you strip away all pretence at kindness from diplomacy: When oil becomes essential to the survival of a nation, it will do whatever it takes to control it.  In this light, the invasion of a country for its oil reserves seems like a continuation of foreign energy policy by other means.

    From the viewpoint of 2011, not much has invalidated McQuaig’s conclusions.  Numerous oil shocks and a steady rise in the price of gas have shown the western world’s overreliance on the stuff.  At long last, however, we’re finally seeing the first glimmers of hope.  Kyoto may be dead, but the electric-powered Chevrolet Volt won “Car of the Year” awards.  The results of America’s adventure in Iraq may not have been a success for US oil interest after other countries snapped up Iraqi oil contracts in 2009… but this would be the first time US efforts in Iraq didn’t quite turn out like first intended.

    If this sounds preachy, well, it is.  But you can guess from the irreverent title that It’s the Crude, Dude is not dry nor too pretentious for a book of its kind.  Both the first and the last page of the book contain well-chosen profanity, and McQuaig, a journalist/columnist with six previous books to her credit, knows how to write entertainingly.  Sure, it’s a book for left-leaning readers… but as such, it does its job.

  • Inside Job (2010)

    Inside Job (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2011) Don’t go near this film unless you’re ready for a concentrated dose of seething rage.  A thorough and intelligent exploration of the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job steers clear of MichaelMoorish grandstanding and keeps an even tone throughout, but it’s this reasonable delivery that allows viewers to be outraged on their own cognition.  Directed with surprisingly high visual ambitions for a talking-head documentary (the opening credits alone, featuring aerial photography of New York, are very impressive), Inside Job works hard at making a complex subject accessible, and succeeds through the usual mixture of info-graphics, interviews, voice-over narration (from Matt Damon) and a tightly-constructed script.  Following No End in Sight, Ferguson confirms how adept he is at presenting public-policy issues in an accessible format.  Keep up with the dense accumulation of facts, and you will learn something about the way the financial industry has managed to escape regulation and avoid any effective policing of its actions… with consequences for the rest of us.  Spanning the globe, Inside Job draws clear connections between the obnoxious cowboy mentality of the financial class and the repeated crises that they engineer through shared greed.  It’s also clear that the US political system has been systematically corrupted by its influence –especially when other government prove more adept at responding to the situation.  Unfortunately, Ferguson isn’t able to offer much in terms of comfort: the picture comes closest to accountability when, challenged by a defensive Glenn Hubbard to “Give it your best shot”, it brings down a damning accumulation of conflict-of-interest charges against an academic seduced by money and political power.  It’s only a small illustration of the collusion between finance, government and academia (Even disgraced ex-prosecutor Elliot Spitzer has a poignantly ironic moment in reflecting on how the personal flaws of finance workers haven’t been used to get them to turn state’s evidence), and viewers shouldn’t feel surprised if they feel as if something has to be done in order to avoid another crisis.  The DVD contains engaging supplemental material, describing how to make an ambitious global documentary on a small budget, and what goes into tightening hours and hours of footage in a finished product.  This is one documentary DVD that has the intellectual heft of a good book: don’t miss it.

  • Rango (2011)

    Rango (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2011) From a distance, Rango feels like a family western: a stranger comes to town, fights evil and drives the bad guys away.  Plot-wise, no need to look for a complex structure or a complicated sequence of twists and turns.  But everything’s in the details and it’s in its execution that Rango becomes interesting to older viewers.  Director Gore Verbinksi has an unusual track record for off-kilter projects, and this one is no exception: Filled with references to other films, torn between comedy and action, often breaking the fourth wall and leaving full place to Johnny Depp’s equally-offbeat personae in a scrawny animated chameleon body, Rango surprises as much as it delights in surrealistic interludes, caricatures (most will recognize Clint Eastwood; nearly as many will catch the quick reference to Depp as Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), throwaway gags and quirky character portraits.  ILM’s first fully-animated film features top-notch animation; it’s a shame, however, that the cinematography and character design are often a bit too busy (and brownish) to be instantly enjoyable.  Still, it’s the film’s constant oddness that makes it a small delight to watch, keeping us alert rather than carried along comfortably by a well-worn plot.  It’s the first film of 2011 that’s not only worth watching, but re-watching a few months later.

  • Zoo City, Lauren Beukes

    Zoo City, Lauren Beukes

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Angry Robot, 2011 reprint of 2010 original, 413 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-85766-055-8

    Given the tottering stacks of stuff to read that I’ve got looming over me like so many unfulfilled obligations, it’s not as if I’m actively looking for reading recommendations.  I’ve got enough reading fuel in the basement to last me for years; why should I pick up something new?

    Because new is cool, that’s why.  When the 2011 Arthur C. Clarke shortlist was announced, the only book on the list that intrigued me was Lauren Beukes’ Zoo City, and the drumbeat of a few fervent fans within the SF blogosphere was enough to convince me that I should check it out.

    The number one reason given by its fans was that the book was different, and they’re not exaggerating.  Set in an alternate world’s Johannesburg, Zoo City is a fresh take on urban fantasy: In a world where serious criminals are made conspicuous thanks to the visible presence of an animal familiar that grants them special powers, our narrator investigates the disappearance of an up-and-coming pop-star.  Narrator Zinzi December is neither wealthy nor virtuous: not only is she confined to the titular ghettos where despised “zoos” end up, one of her many sidelines involves writing 419 scams for credulous first-worlders in order to pay her drug dealer.

    As far as contemporary fantasy takes on noir plots go, Zoo City is a bit of a gem.  Beukes being South African herself, the setting of the novel is vividly rendered, and quickly comes to become one of the novel’s most appealing aspects.  Her journalistic training also serves her well in depicting the various overlapping classes that make up Johannesburg, and how they interact.  Our heroine Zinzi may not be wholly original in the urban fantasy subgenre, but she comes close: poor black South African women with attitude aren’t exactly familiar protagonists, and her inner monologue is refreshingly different from anything else published lately.  Even considered purely on its non-fantastic aspects, Zoo City does very well as a thriller set in an unfamiliar environment.

    But the point of the novel is that it’s fantasy, and it’s Beukes’ treatment of her premise that makes Zoo City equally satisfying as a genre novel.  Not much of the premise is over-explained, but thanks to hints left in the narration and pieces of world-building scattered in the interstitial pieces between chapters (including one of the most creative use of a fake IMDB listing I’ve seen so far), we gather that something strange happened during the nineties, and that semi-sentient animal companions suddenly started appearing next to criminals.  The specifics of the change remain poorly understood (something that may annoy readers unwilling to completely let go of their disbelief), but two things are clear: familiars give their owners special powers, and if the familiar dies… the owner dies as well in a spectacular fashion.  For SF&F readers who enjoy playing with an idea in their head, there’s plenty of interesting material here to think about.  (Worry not; genre precedents such as Pullman are explicitly name-checked in acknowledgement.)

    Fortunately, Zoo City doesn’t make the mistake of letting the concept being the novel’s sole reason for existing.  This isn’t one of those pocket-universe SF novels where the plot ends up tied to the fantastic premise and where mysteries about the world are solved at the same time as the protagonist finds the solution to a smaller scale enigma: Zinzi just deals with the world as it affects her, even as her investigation lands her in dangerous situations.  She’s got plenty of complicated relationships, and those play out convincingly even in a world where animal familiars are commonplace.

    Still, there’s little else to say here but: Good story, well told.  Plenty of imaginative elements, slick writing, interesting plotting and a satisfying combination of unusual setting, clean prose and matter-of-fact social relevance.  It’s both new (in atmosphere and ideas) and comfortingly familiar (in plotting mechanism and writing style): I had a really good time with this novel (despite a far more conventional ending than I expected) and gladly join the small army of Beukes fans.  I’m thinking that Zoo City deserves a few nominations, that Beukes is fast coming up as a writer to watch, and that I ought to read her first novel Moxyland in a hurry.  And that, fellow readers, is why we shouldn’t let our stack of things to read dictate what we actually end up reading.  There’s a lot of new stuff out there, just waiting to be discovered as soon as we step off the beaten path.

  • Monsters (2010)

    Monsters (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2011) Some movies are best admired than enjoyed, and someone simply watching Monsters won’t get as much out of it than after finding out how cheaply the film was made.  Reportedly shot for under half a million dollars with mostly-improvised dialogue in existing settings supplemented by computer imagery put together by the director, Monsters is more impressive for what it achieves under the circumstances of its production than what it actually delivers to a demanding audience.  It’s also more interesting as another of the no-budget SF thrillers made possible by cheap digital cameras and cost-effective CGI: Following Paranormal Activity and Skyline, we’re seeing a reinvigorated line of B-movies that allow individual creators far more creative freedom in presenting their concept on the big-screen with decent production values and fantastical thrills.  What’s more unfortunate is that their scripts are often even less polished than their blockbuster brethren: While improvised dialogue allows directors to shoot fast, cheap and “fix it in post”, the trade-off is a thin plot that meanders along a generic story with little depth and none of the intricate payoffs that strong scripts can deliver.  Writer/director/effects-supervisor Gareth Edwards’s Monsters features some breathtaking cinematography, an intriguing look at the normalized aftermath of an alien invasion and some arresting visual effects… but it also feels repetitive, inconclusive and even meaningless.  (The film takes its alien-invasion cues from pandemics and environmental degradation rather than failed imperialism, making “victory” an illusion from the first few moments.  Even survival is a dicey proposition.)  Those who realize that the first scene is the climax of the film won’t necessarily feel better than those who see the film as open-ended.  The protagonist couple may be married in real-life, but little of this chemistry carries through to their performances: even by the end of the film, they still feel like two strangers thrown together by circumstances, and this standoffishness doesn’t help make the film better.  It all amounts to an interesting, but not really enjoyable film.  Science Fiction fans interested in the increased democratization of SF movies will certainly want to take a look at the film and then lose themselves in special features of the two-disc DVD set.  Anyone else may want to ask themselves if they really want to spend 90 minutes watching a meandering and pessimistic look at an alien invasion that nothing is ever going to stop.  On the other hand, keep an eye on Gareth Edwards’s next effort, whatever that might be.

  • The Eyes of the Dragon, Stephen King

    The Eyes of the Dragon, Stephen King

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Signet, 1995 reprint of 1987 original, 380 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-451-16658-2

    When it was first published in 1987, Stephen King’s The Eyes of the Dragon seemed like a significant departure for the author.  Occasional exceptions aside (such as the first novel in the Dark Tower cycle, or The Talisman), audiences had been conditioned, through the first fifteen years of King’s career, to expect adult horror fiction, not a fantasy fairy tale seemingly aimed at younger readers.  Now, of course, King’s brand is associated with a variety of dark fantasy subgenres; The Dark Tower did much to expand his perceived repertoire, and it’s no accident if that series is closely related to The Eyes of the Dragon, all the way to a common antagonist.

    And yet, nearly 25 years after its first publication, the distinctiveness of The Eyes of the Dragon remains, and so does its interest.  From the first sentence (“Once, in a kingdom called Delain, there was a King with two sons”…), we understand that this is going to be a different kind of reading experience: The story is told as a fairy tale, by a narrator whose presence couldn’t be more obviously felt.  Taking place a long time ago in a country far away, this is a story of a weak king, an evil magician, and two princes.  Tired of waiting for his chance at power, the mage eventually frames the good prince for his father’s death, sets up the weaker prince on the throne and set about to take from the kingdom of everything of value.  Fortunately, a cunning plan is in the works…

    But plotting isn’t the main feature of this novel, which is best appreciated as a storytelling exercise.  Reportedly adapted from stories King told his children, The Eyes of the Dragon sometimes feels like a self-imposed dare: different subject matter, different tone, and different rhythm.  The narration becomes its own reason to read the book, as King spends the first half of the book providing us with the backstory, the characters and the motivations.  The narrator is omniscient, but only to a point: He frequently addresses the readers to tell them that he has described everything as it happened, but the audience should make its mind as to what it means.  Meanwhile, the story is told with its own special charm, and the novel quickly gains the trust of its readers from the start.  It is, in other words, a lot of fun to read.

    It’s also misleading to keep referring to this as “a fairy-tale for kids”: While the setting, vocabulary and sentence structure may seem destined to a younger audience, King doesn’t limit himself to simple sentiments or emotions in the telling of the story.  The words are simple but the thoughts aren’t, and The Eyes of the Dragon may work better as a fable for grown-ups, creating a sentiment of nostalgia for bedside storytelling while managing to address adult concerns.  There’s more depth to the book than expected, and a lot of sympathy for the fully-sketched characters.

    Where The Eyes of the Dragon doesn’t work so well is in its pacing: Ironically, the novel gets a great deal less absorbing once the plot moves forward.  Rather than focus on the protagonists and the palace intrigue, it dissipates by changing focus and following minor characters.  Those characters aren’t so minor in that they are reportedly meant to portray King’s children in the story, but they do send the novel in another, less interesting direction just as it should move toward its conclusion.

    Still, the overall impact of the book is strong, and it cements the notion that Stephen King is not just a gifted writer, but one who has continued to try new things along the way.  King scholars will better understand the relationship between The Eyes of the Dragon and the rest of the King universe (most particularly his fantasy work) but you don’t need to be a King aficionado to appreciate this book and what it attempts to do.

  • The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

    The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2010) At first, this umpteenth adaption of Philip K. Dick’s work seems to be following the usual template: Grab an idea from the Dick short story cupboard and expand it in a middle-of-the-road science-fiction film.  The premise seems shaky at first, with too many unanswered questions and plot holes to be wholly convincing: There’s a stretch between the way the film convincingly presents modern politics and the hazy nature of its deviation from reality.  Matt Damon is fine, but the film itself seems wobbly.  Things then get quite a bit better during the second half, as the film’s overall fable-like atmosphere becomes more comfortable, as some of the haziness disappears, and as the film starts playing off the elements of its setup.  Damon makes for a sympathetic hero and the film keeps its wilder reality-bending sequences for a third-act climactic chase sequence all around New York landmarks.  At the same time, the temporal jumps in the plotting allow for some heavier meditations on the nature of fate, choices, happenstance and predestination.  While the result still isn’t as seamless as one could wish for, The Adjustment Bureau ends up being a reasonably effective Science Fiction film, one that surprisingly cares more about romance and drama than death and violence (in terms of violence, the film only features two car accidents, none of them fatal and the second of them handled with a great deal of compassion for the wounded victim).  Writer/director George Nolfi manages to bring a lot to Dick’s sketchy short story, and while the result doesn’t achieve its full potential, it’s good enough not to embarrass anyone, especially not its audience.  It’s not a disservice to anyone to lump it with the slew of other good low-key science-fiction films (also; Never Let Me Go) that recently appeared on-screen.

  • The Forever Machine, Mark Clifton & Frank Riley

    The Forever Machine, Mark Clifton & Frank Riley

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Carroll & Graf, 1992 reprint of 1954/1981 original, 351 pages, C$5.95 mmpb, ISBN 0-88184-842-5

    In a better world, I would be able to discuss The Forever Machine more substantially than simply describing it as “the most forgettable novel to ever win the Hugo Award”.  Compared to other great Science Fiction novels honoured by a Hugo, Mark Clifton and Frank Riley’s They’d Rather be Right (which formed the basis for the slightly-reworked Forever Machine) simply doesn’t sustain comparison.  Even looking at its 1954 contemporaries, you get classics like Mission of Gravity, The Caves of Steel, Double Star, Childhood’s End, The Space Merchants, Fahrenheit 451… a good chunk of essential reading for the dedicated SF fan.

    Meanwhile, The Forever Machine is… a story of its time.  It stinks of 1950s attitudes and prejudices, while failing to deliver much in terms of contemporary SF wonders.  Explaining why it won the Hugo isn’t difficult for people who voted for it at the time: while Riley never had much of a writing career, Clifton (who recently won the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award, given out annually to unjustly-forgotten writers) was a reasonably prolific writer in the SF magazines at the time: The Internet Science-Fiction Database lists nearly a dozen stories published in a handful of publications during 1952-1953, including two stories set in the world of The Forever Machine.  Keeping in mind that the total number of people to attend the Clevention Worldcon in 1955 (when the Hugo was awarded to this novel) was 380: it doesn’t take much to see how a then-hot writer would, thanks to a novel serialized in the top SF magazine of the time would earn enough votes to get the prize.  Furthermore, it’s not as if more recent Hugos show a better track records at picking the best-of-the-best either. (Hominids, anyone?)

    But let the past remain the past and consider The Forever Machine as a novel sealed in a time capsule and sent in the future by fifties fandom as a novel they thought would be worth a read by their descendants.  56 years later, what do we have?  As seen from today’s perspective, the efforts to build a really big computer and then feed it all known facts to create an emergent AI (dubbed “Bossy”) are kind of amusing.  (But then again, we did the same, called it “Google” and mostly use it for entertainment.)  Where the story gets a little bit crazier is when Bossy figures out how to rejuvenate a test subject. (“My instructions, regarding therapy, were to find all tensions of any nature, and remove them” [P.176] says the computer.)  From Artificial Intelligence, the novel turns into a consideration of immortality… but only if you can make it past the unselfconscious sexism that permeates the novel alongside mentions of cable cars, and plastic tape for data storage.  The universe of the novel is one where fathers “thrash” their misbehaving kids, women are either housewives or secretaries, and “public opinion” is basically what a mass of white middle-aged male house-owners think.  The rejuvenated character of Mabel is treated in a patronizing way that shows the infantilization of women at the time.  Against that background, a story of emergent singularity (have a telepath invent an AI, and immortality for all soon follows!) definitely seems strange, maybe sufficiently so to still warrant a trip to Fifties middle-class America.

    But I’ll stop short of leveraging this back-handed compliment into a recommendation.  While there are interesting little bits here and there in the narrative, the entire novel is almost perfectly forgettable.  It dissipates quickly after completion, to the point where you’d be challenged to come up with specifics only days after reading it.  This is my second encounter with the novel (which I first read in 1999), and I remembered little of the previous attempt; I don’t expect to remember much of it when/if I read it again, and the lack of substance in this review will, I hope, serve as a warning to my future-self contemplating a re-read.

    When I started systematically reading all Hugo-winning novels in the mid-nineties, it took me years to find a copy of They’d Rather be Right, and even then it was loaned to me for a few hours during a science-fiction convention.  Now, thanks to the internet, the book isn’t as hard to find as it once was.  Furthermore, every few years, a publisher figures out that this is one of the few Hugo-winning novels to be out of print and reprints it.  So, even ignoring that illegal copies are available only a Google search away, there isn’t much of an excuse for being unable to find the novel.  Whether you’d want to read it as more than an exercise in list-checking is something I will leave to others to decide… despite my hearty endorsement of list-checking.

  • Clubland, Frank Owen

    Clubland, Frank Owen

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s Press, 2003, 323 pages, C$36.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-28766-6

    One of the reasons why I can’t stop reading non-fiction books these days is the renewed realization that the world is vast and contains an infinity of interesting things.  No matter how tightly the subject is defined, there are more than enough interesting narratives out there to keep anyone reading forever.

    For instance, you wouldn’t necessarily expect the mid-nineties New York club scene to be be interesting enough to sustain a hardcover book… and you’d be tragically wrong.

    Frank Owen was there at the time, and Clubland is a fascinating report on what he witnessed.  He’s not a big part of the story that plays out, but he’s not entirely detached from it either.  It starts as he buys a new popular drug, Special K, from a distinctive dealer.  This scene is important, but it takes about a hundred pages to understand why.

    For Clubland is, in many ways, structured like a drug trip.

    The first third is the high.  Here, Owen takes his time to clearly identify his subject.  Within mid-nineties New York club culture, he focuses on four different individuals: One-eyed Canadian-born club owner Peter Gatien, imaginative promoter Lord Michael Caruso, unhinged party animal Michael Alig, and shady small-time thug Chris Paciello.  All four men intersect in oft-surprising ways during that time.  But for the first hundred pages of Clubland, everything feels like a great night out: Gatien’s clubs are the toast of the town, and the rave culture of the mid-nineties seems to herald a happy kind of lifestyle the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Disco’s heyday.  Esctasy is the drug of choice, and uninhibited self-expression on the dance floor seems to be without consequences.

    Unfortunately, this temporary reprieve soon turns dark.  The second third of Clubland is where the high peaks and transforms itself in an acute case of paranoia and madness.  Gatien’s successful clubs attract enough drug dealers to interest federal authorities.  Caruso helps Alig become his own exuberant self after a repressed childhood, but Alig ends up accidentally killing the very same dealer who sold Special K to Owen during the prologue.  For a chapter or two, Clubland changes gears: After a lengthy stretch of objective reporting, Owen comes back to the forefront as he describes his own efforts as a journalist for the Village Voice to find and expose a murderer.  Nightmares abound as the club culture turns sour, sometimes with hilariously awful results:

    …the most notorious of Alig’s outlaw events took place in the back of a moving eighteen-wheel big rig outfitted with a sound system, a bar, and a disco ball. “Rudolph and Michael Alig dare you to ride the Disco Truck,” read the invitation for what would become a nightmarish journey around lower Manhattan.  Two hundred partygoers climbed into the back, and, as they soon discovered, the truck had little in the way of suspension.  As a consequence, the disco ball fell and smashed.  Then the sound system toppled over.  There was precious little air, so people started to faint, while others began to cry.  Partygoers pounded on the wall of the truck, begging to be let out, but the coked-up driver in the front failed to hear their cries for help.” [P.132-133]

    As horrible as this excerpt sounds, I can’t help but giggle uncontrollably at the idea of an out-of-control Disco Truck.

    While this is going on, Chris Paciello begins his unlikely rise from New York mob relations to the top of the Miami club scene, befriending a number of celebrities (including seemingly-wholesome Sofia Vergara, who even tried to help him pay bail when he was arrested) and changing the nature of East Coast music along the way.  The last third of Clubland feels like the letdown phase of a drug trip as the crazy stories and violent excesses all turn to numbing series of accounts and consequences: Gatien, Alig and Paciello all do time in the courts, some of them landing in jail for what they have done.  Meanwhile, the New York club scene dissolves and the temporary scene that Owen chronicles in his book seems to disperse.  (Whether this is truly the case I’ll leave to the partygoers who were there, and are better able to talk about what else was going on at the time.)

    Clubland may not be a deep and meaningful examination of world-changing events, but it’s certainly an entertaining look at a unique culture that briefly blossomed and fell apart.  It’s a terrific read, and a powerful reminder that all sorts of horrible and beautiful events are taking place around us, even when they escape our notice at the time

  • Drive Angry (2011)

    Drive Angry (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, February 2011) I wish I liked this film a bit more.  After all, what unholy union of escaped-from-Hell supernatural characters, muscle cars, evil cultists, William Fichtner and Nicolas Cage could fail to ignite the interest of any self-respecting geek?  Yet Drive Angry feels a lot less interesting than it should: flat dialogue, familiar action scenes (Another mid-coitus shootout?  Shoot’em Up did it better!), wasted actors, bland script, dull direction and unappealing cinematography all compete to undermine the potential of the film.  While it’s always good to see William Fichtner on the big screen and Nicolas CageCage is always at least kind of cool to see, Fichtner isn’t given any kind of exceptional material and Cage tones down his performance a bit too much.  The scripts and its associate mythology are both filled with holes and hazy rules: there’s little concision to the story, which hurts a lot given its self-professed intent to ape old-school exploitation pictures.  The action scenes feel a lot more ordinary than they should (even the exploding tanker just doesn’t get the blood racing) and Drive Angry never completely clicks.  The mixture of demonic characters, cult sacrifices and American muscle-cars never amounts to much more than a collection of buzzwords: A perfect example of how good B-movie are usually identified by pleased audiences, not deliberately put together by technicians.

  • The Five Greatest Warriors, Matthew Reilly

    The Five Greatest Warriors, Matthew Reilly

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket Books, 2011 reprint of 2010 original, 574 pages, C$9.99 pb, ISBN 978-1-4165-7758-4

    Consistency is usually a good thing for authors and their readers.  Writers accumulate fans thanks to their particular set of strengths, after all, and the path to popular success is capitalizing on the reason why buyers will pick up books by authors they like.  Matthew Reilly has developed a reputation as the novelistic equivalent to a big-budget action-adventure movie director: He writes novels as if they were action movies with an unlimited budget, and dangerous spectacle is his stock in trade.

    Still, there’s something to be said against too much consistency.  The Five Greatest Warriors is the third novel in the “Jack West Jr.” series, but while I reviewed first volume Seven Ancient Wonders a few months ago, I found nothing interesting to say about sequel The Six Sacred Stones given how similar it was to its predecessor.  This third entry isn’t all that different from the second one and what had been a lack of variety now becomes a bit of a problem.

    Tough audiences that readers are, there’s a fine line between consistency and self-repetition, and The Five Greatest Warrior tiptoes a bit too close to the edge.  The blend of high-tech action theatrics with mysterious ancient fantastic settings and low-grade mysticism that seemed so interesting in The Seven Deadly Wonders now seems like more of the same, repeated again.

    The biggest problem of the Jack West Jr. series so far is the inherent problems in having a sequel to world-saving heroics.  Once characters have saved the world once, what’s to do for an encore?  Save it again?  Reilly’s oft-stated wish to go faster and bigger with each successive novel runs into self-defeating diminishing returns.  Little can surprise these characters now, and rehashing yet another set of ancient mysteries coupled with mystical cosmic alignments can get less and less forgivable.

    The formula that seemed so crazy (in a good way) at first glance can now seem crazy (in a bad way) when it’s repeated again with minor variations.  Lessening the blow somewhat is that The Five Freatest Warriors is a wrap-up of the plotline introduced in The Six Sacred Stones: Nobody really relieved that Jack West Jr. was dead when, at the end of the previous volume, he leaped into a pit.  Not only is he alive and healthy in this sequel, but he wraps up the adventure even though, at nearly 1200 combined pages, it feels far too long for its own good.

    At least the action set-pieces are, as usual, ingeniously constructed.  As West and his group keeps unearthing fantastic ancient sites, we get to go inside a tower set in a Mongolian crater, run around a massive Japanese complex, and give a spectacular send-off to the 747 that starred in the series so far.  Massive inverted pyramids are found everywhere, and helpful diagrams will make it easier for readers to keep up with Reilly’s videogame-influenced imagination.

    Sceptics should be warned that The Five Greatest Warriors is definitely not the book that will change their minds about Reilly’s work: His narration is still just as full of exclamation points, one-word paragraphs and cliffhanger chapter endings (If you want to speed-read Reilly’s work, simply glance at the last sentence of each chapter.  All action, no filler.)  Maybe there’s an argument to be made for readers to let a generous amount of time elapse between every book of the Jack West Jr. series: Its thrills operate on a too-similar level to sustain close comparison, so a bit of distraction can work wonders for those coming back to Reilly’s universe.

    Still, it works.  Reilly can stuff more imaginative concepts in a disappointing novel than most other reality-bound writers can manage in a handful of theirs.  (In this volume, his idea for “living human tombs” manages to strike a nerve.)  The series may look like a bunch of dumb action thrillers, but Reilly repurposes a lot of historical research, trivia and coincidences for his own purposes.  For all his faults, he knows what he’s trying to do and reading his self-interviews at the end of each book is worth the trouble if only because he manages to pre-empt most of the basic criticism about his own novels.  Referring to the Jack West Jr. as contemporary epic fantasy pretty much says it all, really.

    The interview also outlines the rest of the series, down to “The One Something Something”.  I’m not in any hurry to see the rest of the sequence, but keep in mind that this may be about satiation more than disappointment.  Let Reilly write something else for a moment, and in a few years, who knows, I may be in the mood again for that kind of spectacular blow-em up action thriller.

  • Revenge of the Nerds IV: Nerds in Love (1994)

    Revenge of the Nerds IV: Nerds in Love (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, February 2011) By the time a fourth installment in a comedy series rolls around as a TV movie, much of the magic is gone and so there isn’t a whole lot to say about Revenge of the Nerds IV: Nerds in Love other than it makes for a pale epilogue to an already low-flying series.  Even the plot feels like “a very special episode”, as a long-running character gets married and hijinks ensue.  Lazily opposing nonconformist heroes (who become less and less nerdy as time goes by) to straight-laced villains, Nerds in Love takes the cheap and easy way forward every time.  The villains are bigger caricatures than before, the plotting is dumb to the point of insult and the film is so desperate for laughs that it ends up featuring a food fight and a birth scene in the middle of the usual antics surrounding movie weddings.  Robert Carradine does his best to keep up the spirit of the previous film and, to his credit, actually anchors a cast (including a guest appearance by James Cromwell) that doesn’t completely ruin it: Nerds in Love may not be much of a film, but it’s endearing to those who have stuck with the series so far, and it keeps up the charming nerdiness that made the first film such a fond memory.  The DVD contains a deleted scene but no special features of note.

  • Unknown (2011)

    Unknown (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, February 2011)  I suspect that any overall appreciation of the film will hinge on the reaction to the shift from the Hitchcockian beginning of this B-grade thriller to its far stranger ending.  The premise is solid suspense gold (an American traveler in Berlin has an accident, suffers from some amnesia, but isn’t recognized by his wife once he finds her again) but as the film progresses it shifts while adding assassins, car chases and characters curiously versed in espionage lore.  It’s all nicely tied up, but more importantly it’s delivered with a solid regard for thriller conventions.  While Unknown may not qualify as a top-quality suspense film, it’s quick and dirty enough to serve as a respectable typical genre exercise.  In a solid performance, Liam Neeson reminds us of his turn in the seemingly-related Taken and carries much of the film on his shoulders.  The cinematography is Berlin Winter-harsh and if Jaume Collet-Serra’s directing is a bit too jumpy to be more effective, the entire film feels like a straight-ahead delivery of expected thrills.  Never mind the plot holes or the mid-film lulls: You want a thriller?  Here’s a thriller.  Curiously enough, this exploitative genre piece is adapted from a far more introspective 2003 French novel by Didier van Cauwelaert, Hors de moi, which delves into metaphysical possibilities before delivering pretty much the same twist as the film, without car chases.  The movie, for once, is far more satisfying.