Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

    Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2011) I have an unaccountable soft spot for the Resident Evil films, and part of the fascination is seeing how the series continues to surprise even in its fourth installment: Not only has it squeezed two adventures after the logical end-point of most zombie movies (that is: the infection going global, everybody dying, etc.), the series has actually recovered from the awful second film and Afterlife continues to show how clever it can be in delivering polished visuals, action thrills and further developments to its own playful mythology.  Impressively enough, this installment depowers a seemingly omnipotent Alice after a deliriously overpowered first sequence.  Then it’s off to Los Angeles (via Alaska) for a little more of that claustrophobic Resident Evil setting.  A new crew is introduced, many of them discarded on the way to the conclusion, and there’s a nice little upswing to the conclusion. (Hint: don’t stop watching right after the credits start to roll and pay attention to the credited names that haven’t yet appeared in the film.)  I haven’t always been kind to director Paul W.S. Anderson, but his eye for impressive visual sequences is undeniable, and his return to the series helps make this fourth entry the strongest since the first one.  (This made-for-3D film looks really good even in 2D.)  Milla Jovovich doesn’t have to make any special effort to make another good impression as Alice.  Never mind the formula dialogue, characters or plot: the kick here is the same kind of over-the-top, hyper-glossy action visuals that the series has provided so far.  Even ten years after the first film, Afterlife proves that there’s a little bit of juice left in the series.

  • Brüno (2009)

    Brüno (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2011) I had very mixed feelings about Sacha Baron Cohen’s previous Borat: I’m not a fan of humiliation humour, and I was impressed more by the concept of the film than its execution.  But maybe that’s why I liked Brüno quite a bit better: The formula seems sharper, the targets more deserving (Ron Paul?  Heck yeah!) and the execution more confident.  Going from the European fashion circuit to Hollywood provides Cohen with numerous sources of inspired teasing, and confronting unsuspecting victims with a cliché of flamboyant homosexuality leads to more interesting reactions than Borat’s anti-Semitic foreigner.  (An alternate title for the film could be “Brüno and the repressed.”)  Cohen’s willingness to perform as Brüno is awe-inspiring: he throws himself in the role with daredevil abandon and doesn’t let anything scare him from getting his laughs.  The mixture of improvisation/documentary set-pieces within a larger scripted ensemble works well, and the climax of the film seems just a bit more satisfying than the previous one.  Certainly, Brüno is never dull, often daring and generally successful at what it tries to do.  The DVD is deservedly unrated, with enough full frontal male nudity to surprise even jaded viewers: viewers who want to be offended will be fulfilled.

  • Robsessed (2009)

    Robsessed (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2011) The adulation of teenage girls for young male heartthrobs is a gender-specific phenomenon I can’t quite understand, but I knew what I was getting into when I picked up this cheap biography of Twilight star Robert Pattinson:  Even at $0.99, I knew that I was getting ripped off, and the end result does not disappoint.  A mediocre collage of talking heads, terrible paparazzi pictures and breathless hagiography that sounds read from a tabloid profile, Robsessed is cheap celebexploitation filmmaking and it shows.  How cheap?  Well; no interviews with Patterson, scarcely any footage of him (and none whatsoever from Twilight), little original material… basically, nothing requiring real money.  Nothing else really compensates for the lack of resources: There’s no wit to the cinematography, barely any depth to the interviews (all with distant third-party sources, pundits or “superfans”) and little insight to the pop-magazine-grade writing.  The producers are as innumerate as they are exploitative: The case says the film lasts “110 minutes”, whereas it really lasts 70 (or “1:10 hours”)… not that anyone was really asking for 30 more minutes of this stuff.  The happiest surprise to the film is in seeing respected fantasy author/critic Kim Newman talk cogently about vampires and point out that Patterson-the-actor is far less important to his fans as Patterson-as-Edward-Cullen, perhaps the closest the film comes to self-awareness.  Otherwise, it goes without saying that Robsessed is practically worthless: anyone with a high-speed internet connection could come up with a better multimedia profile of Patterson by simply clicking away on search results.  Still, as audio-visual wallpaper while doing something more worthwhile (like washing dishes, or rearranging a stamp collection), Robsessed is perfect low-attention chattering.  Plus imagine the ironic hipster credentials once you start showing off the box at parties, either now or in twenty years!

  • American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center, William Langewiesche

    American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center, William Langewiesche

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    North Point, 2003 revised edition of 2002 original, 218 pages, C$21.50 pb, ISBN 0-86547-675-6

    The surprise about American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center isn’t that it presents a factual, generally unsentimental and highly informative description of the way the ruins of the World Trade Center were removed from downtown New York in the months following 9/11.

    The surprise is that it was published in 2002.  Even the revised paperback edition is dated 2003, a time during which, to non-American observers, much of the United States went violently insane and invaded a small country on a spurious “weapons of mass destruction” rationale.  It took years for America to collectively calm down and generally acknowledge that delusion.  Given the time lag between fantasy and acknowledgement, one would expect a sober account of traumatic events to take years to put together.  Yet William Langewiesche was able to do so in mere months.

    To do this, he gained access to the site even as authorities were still busy putting together a response plan.  For weeks, Langewiesche was able to walk though the Ground Zero site, interview those who were involved in the effort and get answers from people in charge.  His narrative describes how a response was assembled in the hours following the tragedy, in-between a destroyed section of downtown, people wanting to go forward with rescue efforts, investigators looking for clues in the debris, an environment filled with unstable rubble, multiple levels of overlapping authority and all of that set in one of the densest urban areas on Earth –basically, the worst imaginable combination of complications.

    American Ground also describes the often-amazing story of what happened at the site long after the news channel stopped the round-the-clock coverage.  How the containment basin nearly crumbled and flooded the area; how four construction companies were hurriedly contacted to provide services; how the debris were finally taken out of the area by barge, processed off-site, inspected multiple times for human remains, and ultimately sold to foreign buyers.  Those who have always loved triumphant engineering stories will be amazed at the complexity of the effort and how people can rally behind a common cause in times of crises.

    Little is said about 9/11 itself in American Ground, the subject matter carefully restrained to the engineering challenge of clearing out the debris from the area.  It doesn’t really need to do anything more: readers will provide their emotional soundtrack.  And yet, by being as clear as possible, but refusing to engage in drama, Langewiesche is able to faithfully represent the emotional charge of working at what was, after all, both a grave and a crime scene.  It also allows him to present factual but unpleasant information on conflicts between various groups on people working on-site, some of which does not reflect very well on groups that had been, at the time, placed on a pedestal.  NYFD firefighters are described as acting far more reverently when a body from their service is found in the wreckage; 9/11 widows are portrayed as emotional and unhelpful in meetings.

    It’s not surprising for a circa-2011 reader to find out that the book raised a considerable amount of controversy in the two years after its release.  The paperback edition of the book is recommended over the original hardcover for an after-word that describes some of the controversies.  Extra fun can be found by looking at the book’s one-star reviews on amazon –the most ironic being a one-star review from “C. Pellegrino “timewalker””, aka Charles Pellegrino, whose professional reputation would be destroyed in 2010 in the fracas surrounding the recall of his book Last Train from Hiroshima.  Much of the criticism is based on emotional disbelief: How can you say bad things about people involved in such an event? Years later, we’re readier to acknowledge that even good people can act badly in some circumstances, that some people’s anecdotal behaviour does not change the magnitude of a collective achievement and that the way New York regained its footing after 9/11 was just as extraordinary as the event itself.  Langewiesche simply arrived to those conclusions long before his detractors.

    So it is that ten years after 9/11, we can see more clearly how much of an achievement American Ground was at the time.  It’s unusually honest, devoid of cheap jingoism, and mesmerizingly readable from beginning to end.  As much of the then-chatter about 9/11 now reads as ridiculously overdone, American Ground remains just as compelling today.  That it got published in 2002 is just as impressive as the content of the book itself.

  • The Green Hornet (2011)

    The Green Hornet (2011)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In Theaters, January 2010) I had no preconceived notions of how the Green Hornet character should be portrayed on-screen.  Unfortunately, I can’t say that I have a similar blank state of expectations regarding Seth Rogen: I find his man-child shtick annoying (Gaaah, Pineapple Express, gaaah), and this film pretty much revolves around it.  If the final result can be watched without too much pain, Rogen is irritating throughout, and not just because he plays a spoiled boorish incompetent: The Green Hornet flirts so effectively with the idea that his sidekick is a far more deserving superhero that Rogen becomes an intrusion more than anything else.  (Big Trouble in Little China did this trick far more effectively, albeit with a hero that was far more likable than Rogen’s usual loudmouth stoner-dude.)  As far as action-comedies go, The Green Hornet isn’t anything particularly special: A few laughs, a few action sequences, some interesting visuals.  That’s already better than we usually get for January dumping-ground films, even those adapted from sources that few people care about.  Parts of the film actually do play better than average: Thanks to director Michel Gondry’s visual sense, the action sequences benefit from judicious editing, well-placed slow-motion and a classic sense of pacing that avoids the new shaky-cam spastic-editing norms.  Gondry sneaks in a psychedelic sequence late in the film, and the green color scheme is used judiciously.  When Rogen shuts up and behaves like an action hero, the film works quite a bit better than when it tries to showcase his comedy.  The script is particularly poor in amusing sequences, delivering scene after scene that only work if you assume that every character is mentally retarded.  (Poor Jay Chou, undeservingly playing second fiddle; poor Cameron Diaz, relegated to MILF-prize for two boys.)  In other hands, The Green Hornet might have been good, or at least entertaining without moments of irritation.  Here, though, it just plays to Rogen’s crowd and leaves everyone else waiting until the next good moment.

  • Devil (2010)

    Devil (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2011) I missed this film in theatres due to a combination of unfortunate timing and so-so reviews, but the film is significantly better than I expected.  A blend between high-concept thriller and supernatural horror (ie; Five people are trapped in an elevator… but one of them is Satan), Devil is a snappy 81-minutes B-movie that’s effective and up-front about its own intentions.  Devil keeps up its energy by hopping back and forth between the trapped elevator, frantic investigators and a grim catholic legend.  It moves fast enough not to let things go stale, and takes care to establish its supernatural elements early so that we don’t get misled into thinking that this is a pure thriller. While the catholic mythology is significant and at times slightly overbearing, it doesn’t take a theology degree to appreciate the film, especially given how much of the framework is made-up for the film. The ending isn’t as strong as it could be and the moral lesson of the film smacks of other pat M. Night Shyamalan resolutions, but John Erick Dowdle’s efficient direction confirms that his work on Quarantine wasn’t a fluke and the cinematography keeps things interesting even as five characters are stuck in a box.  For a film with a significant body-count and a pick-off-the-characters structure, Devil remains intriguingly restrained in the presentation of its deaths: We will often see the events leading to the death and their aftermath, but not the actual gruesome moment; I wish more horror movies were as coy.  While this may not be anything more than a chills-and-thrills thriller, it’s a well-made, reasonably entertaining low-budget film.  That’s already more than we have been able to say about most Shyamalan projects in a long while.

  • Hot Stuff: A Brief History of Disco, John Manuel Andriote

    Hot Stuff: A Brief History of Disco, John Manuel Andriote

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Collins, 2001, 195 pages,C$19.95 tp, ISBN 0-380-80907-9

    Given that I spent most of the month reading non-fiction about Very Important Subjects such as declassified national secrets, the tension between contemporary science and business, the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and the exploitation of third-world workers, it seemed perfectly acceptable to kick back for a while and relax with a book entirely dedicated to a frivolous subject.  Something like disco, for instance.

    Disco never gets any respect.  Rising and crashing over a period of a few short years at the end of the 1970s, disco music is today best remembered as a temporary embarrassment (by those who embraced it at the time) or harmless retro kitsch fit for self-consciously ironic role-playing (by those who didn’t).  Disco precisely sets any party back to 1978, seems inherently campy and still (thirty years later) has produced some of the best dance music on planet Earth.  If disco doesn’t get any respect, it’s partly because it has never wanted any: It’s out-and-out fun, hedonism, play and release wrapped in one hot package.

    John Manuel Andriote’s Hot Stuff: A Brief History of Disco isn’t meant to be a scholarly or encyclopaedic discussion of the subject: Experienced non-fiction readers will recognize the kind of workmanlike craft through which the book was assembled from interviews, personal recollections and a huge number of newspaper clippings.  But even if the book sometimes feels like a contractual obligation by a writer looking to pay the bills in-between weightier projects, it reaches its essential objective: Provide a brief, entertaining, cogent and even insightful history of disco through its origins, beginnings, full-blown craze, rapid decline and periodic revivals.

    Much of this is due to the book’s breezy and accessible style: Andriote’s no-nonsense approach covers disco’s rise and fall chronologically, broadly dividing the book’s six chapters and illustrating his examples with a variety of historical sources.  The frequent mentions of important songs makes the book’s reading experience curiously synesthesiac, as readers won’t help but replay excerpts in their head as they are mentioned in the text.  (The more technically adept will know to read the book with their disco-drenched iPod at their fingertips.)

    For those of us who were far too young during disco’s original run to remember anything but TV re-runs of Xanadu and a few suspicious vinyl records in our parents’ collection, Hot Stuff does well in telling us about disco-as-a-lifestyle.  For many Americans at the tail end of the baby-boom, disco was their coming-of-age ritual: The self-conscious dressing-up, the mindless dancing, the creation of the discotheque concept… disco’s distinct visual aesthetic ensured its abrupt popularity as much as its rapid downfall: it was something new, something unique and something that people wouldn’t fail to remember fondly despite the backlash.  It was, after all, a music made to have fun –and people did.

    But there’s a bit more to disco than booty-shaking beats, and Andriote (best known for Victory Deferred, a book about AIDS and the gay community) never neglects the link between disco and the gay community: How disco started out marginally and had to be made safe for mainstream consumption, how even clear links between disco and the gay community were denied by many “average fans” (with hilarious anecdotes of denial about the Village People) and how homophobia fed into the disco backlash.  The Seventies, we are reminded, were not a good decade in America, and disco happened in part due to a complex interaction between a downbeat decade and people looking for something else.  Left unspoken is whether the wild nights of disco eventually led to Reagan’s “morning in America”.

    Are there better books out there about Disco?  Probably.  Even a cursory look at the book’s Amazon reviews brings up Saturday Night Forever as a recommended alternative.  But as a book found in the bargain bin, Hot Stuff remains a great stepping-stone introduction to the subject, and a literary break equivalent to a fun disco tune in-between heavier pieces.  It’s not as if I can deny my own fascination for the music: Disco all happened during my first half-dozen years, but when I picked up the music bug during the early nineties, Time Magazine assured me that my dance music was “The Revenge of the Disco Babies”.  There are only a few more degrees of separation between that, the Big Beat of the late-nineties and the Drum-and-bass of now: Disco’s echo continues even today.

  • Dark Waters, Lee Vyborny & Don Davis

    Dark Waters, Lee Vyborny & Don Davis

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    New American Library, 2004 paperback reprint of 2003 original, 243 pages, C$21.00 pb, ISBN 0-451-21161-8

    Like submarines, some military projects can stay submerged a long time, occasionally appearing on the radar come procurement time, but otherwise remaining away from public view, conducting operations that may not be revealed publicly for years or decades.

    So it is that Dark Waters takes us behind the scenes for a look at the NR-1, one of the most unique craft in the US Navy’s fleet.  Designed to operate at depths far below other submarines, only one NR-1 was ever built: the cost overruns, technical complexity and limited uses for the craft basically made the construction of a second one unthinkable.  (Interestingly enough, the craft was never formally commissioned by the Navy: By keeping it on a special status, it freed up a spot in the Navy’s counted inventory and allowed the craft to avoid official scrutiny).  What a unique submarine it is, through: Resistant to pressures that would crush other submarines, the NR-1 could go explore the seabed by sinking to the bottom and then driving on the ocean floor using the special tracks it had been built with, grabbing things with a claw for retrieval.  Even at times where weather would drive away ships and submarines relying on surface assistance, the NR-1 could continue to operate.

    Designing such a craft takes a special kind of madness, especially during the sixties, a time where computer-assisted design was still notional and material science wasn’t nearly as powerful as it is now.  The NR-1 came equipped with a mind-bogglingly primitive Sperry computer, had to be tested in dangerous conditions (nearly being hit by other US Navy crafts during testing in shallow domestic waters), often suffered from its own design compromises and demanded much of its sailors.

    It’s one of those sailors, Lee Vyborny, who tells us of his time aboard the NR-1’s inaugural missions in Dark Waters.  Working with journalist Don Davis, Vyborny tells the biography of a unique machine, halfway between national security asset and scientific instrument.  Given Vyborny’s career path in and out of the NR-1, most of the details in the book are about the submarine’s first few years when he was a crewmember: the rest is covered less precisely, via official reports, recently-declassified documents, personal recollections and interviews with other crewmembers.  But even chunks of the book excerpted from the official record are fascinating, in no small part due to the role that the extraordinary admiral Hyman Rickover played in the NR-1’s conception and construction.

    Some of the book’s best moments come when Vyborny describes some of the close calls encountered by the NR-1 crew during the early years of the project.  Whether it’s nearly being rammed by a friendly aircraft carrier, or encountering such a catastrophic equipment failure that the sub looked destined for a one-way trip to the bottom, Dark Waters gives us a sense of the dangers faced by men aboard semi-experimental crafts.  The other big thrill comes when Vyborny tells of actual military operations undertaken by the NR-1: There’s a gripping chapter about the recovery of a downed F-14 fighter jet and its precious munitions, while another chapters describes how the US Navy was able to sneak the NR-1 in the Mediterranean, past active Soviet listening posts, by smuggling it within another US warship.  Later in the book, we get to see how the NR-1 was used to re-write oceanography textbooks, scientists being amazed at the amount of new data they could see with their own eyes while aboard the submarine.

    It’s not entirely true to say that the NR-1 was a national secret (it featured in a number of press reports), but it’s correct to say that until recently, much of its true covert nature was left unspecified to observers.  Starting in 1995, the Navy started letting go of a few secrets about the NR-1, helped along by the growing popularity and scientific worth of its non-military missions.  This increased publicity continued well after Dark Waters‘ publication: We barely get a mention of the NR-1’s involvement in the recovery of the Challenger debris, whereas the topic is now well-covered on-line.  Still, Dark Waters is likely to remain the definitive book about the NR-1 (which was deactivated in 2007 and is currently awaiting scrapping): Don Davis’ prose ties up Vyborny’s recollections, making the book just as interesting to read as countless fictional submarine thrillers.  A number of novelists could use it as reference and inspiration, not only in historical terms, but also for details of daring experimental projects and the ways they can (almost) go wrong.  It’s also a fascinating look at a footnote in the complex history in the Cold War, and how fascinating stories are still lurking in the archives… just under the surface.

  • The King’s Speech (2010)

    The King’s Speech (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, January 2011) Combining physical-handicap drama with palace intrigue may not be the most obvious kind of mash-up, but there’s a first time for anything, and it’s the kind of stuff that upscale audiences and Academy voters just enjoy without reservations.  The King’s Speech really starts with the abdication of Edward VIII and wraps up the royal succession drama in a standard story of a man overcoming his handicap… the man in question being the next king, George VI, who suffers from a stutter that’s practically debilitating at a time where radio technology allows leaders to speak directly to the masses.  Wrapped up in a heavy dose of British interwar period values, The King’s Speech feels like a slightly-updated Merchant Ivory feature stuck in a physical-handicap narrative template: Slight, with a certain dose of ponderous self-importance.  Predictable, sure, but fascinating to watch in large part due to the talent of the actors: Geoffrey Rush is fine as the therapist with all the answers, but it’s Colin Firth who really makes an impression with his portrait of a capable man stuck within a stammering shell that limits what he can do.  The deviations from the historical record are a matter of dramatic structure: the film wraps up so neatly that it defies common sense.  The direction underscores a number of themes (for instance, in framing characters against empty walls), but it feels odd and sometimes incoherent in the way it goes from locked camera to a flying one.  But no matter: for fans of period drama, this is about as good as it gets.  One man overcoming his personal issues, plus a bit of royal drama?  Seems like a perfect match.  Expect Oscar nominations.

  • The Info Mesa, Ed Regis

    The Info Mesa, Ed Regis

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    W.W.Norton, 2003, 268 pages, C$39.00 hc, ISBN 0-393-02123-8

    I have no perceptible interest in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but contemporary science interests me and I’ll read anything by Ed Regis… so that’s how I ended up with The Info Mesa, an exploration of “Science, Business, and New Age Alchemy on the Santa Fe Plateau”.  It’s a non-fiction account of how science is increasingly being funneled through computers, as shown through the biography of four men who founded high-tech companies in Santa Fe.  As with other Regis book, it couples engaging portraits of scientists at work with broader consideration of science as it is being practiced today.  Much like other Regis books, The Info Mesa is sometimes superficial and often more triumphant than latter events (or an impartial observer) would suggest.  But as far as science nonfiction goes, it’s another pleasant read and it even has a few things to teach its readers.

    The story of how Santa Fe became a hotbed of scientific research begins with the Manhattan project, which grew in the nearby city of Los Alamos.  With such a formidable gathering of scientists, it was only natural that some of them would remember the area fondly and propose it years later as a location for a research institute specializing in unusual problems.  Whenever there’s a research institute, there’s also high probability of start-ups, and that’s how Santa Fe (population: less than 200,000 in the entire metro area) ended up with a small specialized number of companies specializing in high-end computer research as applied to science.

    The broad scientific development that Regis tackles in The Info Mesa, beyond some wonderful descriptions of Santa Fe that would make the local Chamber of Commerce give him an honorary membership, is how science has gradually shifted its research in the digital realm.  This happened early in physics, as computer simulations of physical events were relatively easy to model in software: Nuclear explosions are non-trivial to simulate well in silico, but they’re considerably easier to clean up than the real thing.  Meanwhile, the computerization of fields such as biology and chemistry would have to wait for a few crucial developments: The wide availability of powerful computers, and the codification of a common descriptive language.  One of The Info Mesa’s most fascinating tangents is about how David Weininger refined a way to codify the presentation of chemical compounds.  SMILES (Simplified Molecular Input Line Entry Specification) neatly cuts through centuries of chemical confusion to present an unambiguous, human-readable and machine-usable way to present complex chemical compounds.  It’s nothing less than a small study in human ingenuity.

    It’s also a neat entry in the biographies of the four men that Regis follows in an attempt to illustrate the development of the Info Mesa.  Weininger is described as a rock-star scientist: He flies his own jet planes (one of them, a decommissioned Russian fighter jet, bought cash-in-hand on an airport tarmac from a weapons dealer), lives in a house that once belonged to SF/Fantasy writer Roger Zelazny and helped build a molecule statue in front of his company’s building.  Meanwhile, The Info Mesa also tracks the lives of Anthony Rippo, Stuart Kauffman and Anthony Nicholls, writing warm portraits of them as scientists and entrepreneurs as they transform knowledge into money.  (Regis is notably glib about the latter, and scrupulously avoids discussing the darker side of, say, bulk-patenting molecules.  But that’s another book in itself.)

    The net effect of efforts like those from the Santa Fe companies is that biology and chemistry research is now, in many ways, susceptible to primarily take place within computer simulation.  Drug research stems from new molecules, and digital simulations allow to generate reams of “dry” theoretical data (seeking which molecular structure would bond with a certain neuro-receptor, for instance) in far less time than it would to perform actual “wet” chemical experiments.  Properly applied, computers can speed up vital research by orders of magnitude, and the field is still young.  Apply those same computers to data mining large amount of existing data, and you may even find something new and invisible to earlier methods of analysis.  (In between the gosh-wows, I couldn’t help but notice how many of those innovations post-dated my own formal science education.)

    An expansion of Regis’ own Wired June 2000 article “Greeting from Info Mesa”, The Info Mesa is another readable account of how science, technology and humanity interact in new ways.  It’s occasionally scattered, obviously present the best side of everyone involved and probably overestimate their importance in the grand scheme of things, but there’s plenty of fascinating stuff here to make up for the rest.

  • Bitter Chocolate, Carol Off

    Bitter Chocolate, Carol Off

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Random House Canada, 2006, 326 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-679-31319-2

    If you think my online bibliomania is obnoxious, imagine how I must be in everyday life.  Friends, family and colleagues have come to dread my frequent visits to the bookstore, as I cannot stop myself from showing off my latest discoveries: “Look at this book!  Isn’t that cool?”  Most of them humour me (what else can they do?), but showing off Carol Off’s Bitter Chocolate and explaining what it’s about (“The exploitation of third-world cocoa farmers!”) got me some unusual push-back: “No! I don’t want to hear about chocolate exploitation!  I like chocolate!  I want to keep enjoying chocolate!”

    The good news, I suppose is that it’s hard to be a semi-cognizant first-worlder these days without having internalized the notion of inadvertent exploitation.  Practically every single product or service that relatively affluent member of the North-American middle class can enjoy depends on some degree of layered suffering.  The products we buy are shelved by minimum-wage employees without hope of a rewarding career; they’re brought to the store by overworked and underpaid transport workers; they’re made by child workers in oppressive factories; and don’t ask about the raw materials, because it gets even worse the deeper you dig in the production chain.

    As it turns out, this is also the case for chocolate, and it has been so for a very long time.  As Off’s introductory history of chocolate makes clear, cacao has almost always been a luxury product, from its Mayan origins to its European introduction to its most recent transformation into the stuff that creates country-breaking market cartels.  The history of chocolate production has always involved overworked farmers who can’t afford the end product of their labour, colonial exploiters overexploiting growing regions before moving somewhere else, and of complicit hordes of consumers.  Like many tropical crops favoured by first-worlders, exploitation seems written deep into chocolate’s history.

    Much of Bitter Chocolate revolves around Off’s first-hand reporting from Côte d’Ivoire, a cocoa-producing country that has suffered from its share of problems since its 1970s heyday.  She is able to link the country’s tumultuous history with the changing fortunes of its cocoa production, particularly how government attempts to guarantee a minimum income for farmers have led to reprisals by a coordinated group of buyers.  Since then, the one-sided market has led to predictable abuse: child labour bordering on indentured slavery, rampant corruption and warring political factions.  (Coincidentally, Côte d’Ivoire was heavily in the news as I was reading the book, reeling from the aftermath of a contested late-2010 elections.)  Off goes on the ground with pisteurs to interview local actors and report from the cacao frontlines.  She comes back with stories of disappeared journalists and government officials destroyed for their opposition to exploited labour.

    None of this is pleasant, but none of this is unexpected either: It’s the same logic of exploitation that occurs whenever rich countries want something from poor countries.  Bitter Chocolate has the merit of making the links in the chain just a bit more explicit.

    Nit-pickers will note a few errors, at least in the chocolate-jacketed hardcover edition: Off claims a etymological origin for cacahuatl that seems dubious to experts, and at one point makes the absurd claim that cacao “beans could grow anywhere within a twenty-kilometre belt north or south of the equator” [P.58], which is quite a bit different from the true figure of twenty degrees from the equator (or roughly 2210 kilometres).  I’m nit-picking, but that’s part of the obnoxious reviewing services I provide: If those were mistakes that I could catch after just a casual reading of Wikipedia’s cocoa bean page, what other errors are in the historical section of the book?

    Still, there’s no denying the quality of the first-hand accounts, or the accumulation of historical evidence pointing to chocolate’s very bitter history.  It’s enough to make anyone feel slightly better about New Year’s resolutions to avoid chocolate, or be considerably less glib about the chocolate that they consume without a thought.  I personally ended up feeling less furious about the ways mass producers of chocolate are finding ways to reduce the actual chocolate content in the candies they present as chocolate; it also led me to buy a bar of “Maya Gold” fair-trade certified chocolate.  It’s not because we accept our role as unwitting exploiters that we can’t feel guilty about it.

  • The Fighter (2010)

    The Fighter (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, December 2010) I have no specific interest in boxing movies or family dramas, but even I can recognize that The Fighter is about as good as those kinds of films can ever be.  Based on the true story of boxer “Irish” Micky Ward, the film focuses on a period during which family problems and lack of focus are threatening to derail his career.  Part of the appeal is the film’s unusual message of reasonably distancing oneself from one’s family in order to succeed –a far cry from the usual family-at-all-costs message in American films.  While the film does end up with a happy reunion… it’s suitably nuanced by sacrifices and bad personality traits from everyone involved.  Although Mark Wahlberg is credible as a boxer, he doesn’t have much to do dramatically here but portray a solid hero; Christian Bale gets a far more interesting role as a washed-up addict waking up to his faults, whereas Amy Adams throws herself in a role that could have easily gone straight to cliché.  David O. Russell’s direction is often documentary-style; more-so at first, and then later on during the boxing sequences.  Those boxing scenes are solid enough to actually catch the nuances of who’s winning and why (which turns out to be essential once the protagonist starts winning fight unexpectedly).  Given the film’s close ties with the real people it portrays, don’t expect to see Ward’s true story (read the news clippings instead).  Still, even if The Fighter doesn’t have any surprises and plays with clichés, its portrayal of lower-class characters is honest, its payoffs are earned and its blend of sports and family drama is satisfying.

  • Rigged, Ben Mezrich

    Rigged, Ben Mezrich

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2007, 294 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-06-125272-3

    What?  Another heavily-fictionalized account of an East-Coast young man making a lot of money?  It must be time for the latest Ben Mezrich book!

    Oh I kid, but I kid with the Stockholm-syndrome grin of someone who now owns all of Mezrich’s non-fiction bibliography.  I may have issues with his repetitive use of fictional narrative devices to dope otherwise perfectly interesting non-fiction accounts, but when truth-seeking confront entertainment, I usually break in favour of having a good time: Mezrich’s books are a lot of fun to read.

    Faithful readers will be happy to note that Mezrich expands his horizons a bit with this latest entry Rigged, which tells the sort-of-true story of a Brooklyn-born finance analyst who gets hired by the New-York based Mercantile Exchange, where he gets to put together a proposal to create the Dubai Mercantile Exchange.  The protagonist is named David Russo, but he’s loosely based on John D’Agostino, who gets to minimally fact-check the narrative in a signed afterword.

    This being Mezrich’s fourth non-fiction book, it’s interesting to note how carefully he now acknowledges the novel as having heavily fictionalized components.  Unlike previous works, which tried to elide the fictive manipulations, Rigged recognizes up-front that some things have been changed or added, from an amalgam of antagonists to a tightening of events to, most likely, a number of ominous threats made against the protagonist.  There’s also quite a bit of lowest-denominator exposition-setting: It’s a bit insulting to read about two finance professionals discussing the basic point of mercantile trade; while readers don’t necessarily know those details, it’s ridiculous to pass the exposition as on-the-job training between two guys who really should know better.  (On the other hand, oh, that’s how oil is traded.)

    But if it’s so fictionalized, is it better, then, to consider Rigged primarily as fiction?

    Not really, because if Rigged is dramatized as a novel, it doesn’t necessarily make good fiction.  The plot threads are coarse, the characters are dull, the threats are strictly low-grade (the blackmail scheme is particularly obvious) and the book doesn’t quite know what to do with its second viewpoint protagonist, a young Dubai trader from who proposes a project to our lead character.  As financial fiction, it would be weak beer, and not even Mezrich’s rapid pacing, anecdote-heavy plotting and pleasant prose could patch up the lack of substance and simplistic structure.  No, the book has to somehow convince us that it’s about something real if it has any chance of surviving in our minds.

    Too bad that there isn’t more to Rigged (a dull title, barely alluding to oil rigs and not at all to market manipulation) than a description of the trader life and a look at Dubai that feels repetitive to those who have already read other similar non-fiction accounts.  There’s plenty of yuppie macho posturing in the book and an allusion to the increasingly computerized nature of exchanges, but it seems like a throwback to a time where the trading floor reigned supreme.  (1983’s Trading Places is referenced more than once).  Modern finance is a game of automated high-frequency trading where even the physical location of computer servers can be crucial –it would be interesting to see Mezrich write about that, but in order to do so, I suppose that he’d have to find a way to feature a Boston-educated whiz kid making tons of money.

    It may be that Mezrich’s formula is wearing thin.  Rigged uses so many of the same narrative devices (the threat; the mentor; the money-fuelled excesses) that it feels familiar even when it tackles a different kind of money-rich environment.  The foundation of the Dubai Mercantile Exchange is an important moment in financial history, but it seems like an afterthought to the kind of material already covered in movies like Boiler Room or plenty of other non-fiction titles of the past few years.  Mezrich’s money-is-interesting formula dissolves in meaninglessness if you don’t subscribe to its core value.  Add to that the uneasy balance between fact and fiction (Do I want information, entertainment or a disappointing mixture of both in which the presence of one nullifies the other?) and Rigged, albeit readable, still ends up feeling like the slightest of Mezrich’s non-fiction.

    One notes, with some amusement, that his next book, The Accidental Billionaires, would leave the financial world behind to tackle the newest social media zeitgeist.  The one after that, Sex on the Moon, goes on to describe a moon-rock heist.  As you may expect, I have already bought them both.

  • Fanboys (2009)

    Fanboys (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, December 2010) I’ll be one of the first to bemoan the increasing cooptation of geeks from social outcasts to lucrative market segment, but even I have to admit that Fanboys is a fun comedy aimed squarely at that audience.  The story of four Star-Wars-loving friends racing to steal an early copy of The Phantom Meance from Skywalker ranch, Fanboys gleefully indulges in geek references, inside jokes and enough re-quoted dialogue to qualify as a derivative work.  I’m not sure why I was expecting something cheap, because the end result is polished B-movie, low-budget but not necessarily unpleasant to look at.  The actors do their best (Jay Baruchel shows up in a decent early role, even showing his maple leaf chest tattoo), but it’s really the geekery of the film that takes center-stage in reflecting in the state of fandom circa winter 1999, still hoping that George Lucas would pull off a new trilogy of classic Star Wars films.  (Part of the film’s humour is in the knowing references to the post-1999 reputation of The Phantom Menace, Jar Jar Binks or Harrison Ford)  The geek stereotypes are extreme, but good-natured and even endearing when it comes to the five heroes of the story.  If nothing else, fans should see Fanboys for the succession of cameos and bit parts for notables such as William Shatner, Danny Trejo, Seth Rogen (in three different roles), Carrie Fisher, Billy Dee Williams and many more.  (Only Kevin Smith’s cameo feels rushed and incoherent.)  There’s also a snappy pop soundtrack.  Fanboys isn’t much of a comedy without the geek references (people without knowledge of the Star Wars universe, in particular, will miss out on much), but it’s good enough to exceed low expectations.  [Classification note for metadata nerds: The film was shot in 2007, pushed back numerous times during the film’s troubled production history and eventually released in theaters and DVD in 2009.  IMDB thinks it’s a 2008 film, but I’m listing it here as a 2009 release.]

  • The Fall (2006)

    The Fall (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, December 2010) Writer/Director Tarsem Singh’s first full-length directorial effort was the somewhat simplistic The Cell: great visuals, underwhelming story.  Much of the same can also be said about The Fall, which presents fantastic images from the very first moments but doesn’t quite wrap up its story as efficiently as it could have.  Balancing on the screen performance of a very young actress, The Fall tries to go back and forth between a base reality set in a 1920ish Los Angeles hospital and a globe-spanning tall tale spun by one of the characters.  Allusions go back and forth between the two realms, and The Fall’s fantasy-world climax may be unique in that it depends on the mental state of a suicidal narrator for a happy ending.  What rankles a bit about the film is the way it will teeter back and forth between finely elliptical dialogue and a dull-as-dirt repetitive exchange between protagonist and child (eg; “Are you trying to save my soul?”).  The back-and-forth between the two levels of storytelling suggest far many more opportunities than are shown on-screen.  Fortunately, there’s a lot more to The Fall than story: the film really stretches to its fullest potential in presenting the fantastic vision of an imaginary quest taking place in a landscape coming from two dozen countries.  “Visually spectacular” doesn’t quite come close to describing the splendour of the film’s visuals, not when the Taj Mahal is one of the least impressive sets…

    (Second viewing, On DVD, February 2011) After looking at The Fall twice more while listening to the audio commentary, I must say that film has grown a lot on me along the way.  Many of the things that bothered me about the film’s script turn out to be the by-product of a long and complicated production history that dared balance a quasi-improvisational shooting style to accommodate a six-year-old actress for the “base reality” of the film, and an extended production schedule that spanned four years and two dozen countries for the “fantasy reality” of the rest.  Considering the film’s amazing production, the otherwise disappointing making-of documentary on the DVD is mesmerizing for what it shows to be real.  Elephants can swim, amazing buildings and landscapes truly exist and Charles Darwin can be re-imagined as a fantasy adventure protagonist.  Even though the film’s story may not fulfill its full potential, the visuals certainly do: If nothing else, it’s reason enough to have a look at the film and call The Fall one of the decade’s forgotten gems: It’s a heck of a personal vision.  The DVD audio commentaries will make you like the film even more, as director Tarsem Singh tells us about the film’s amazing production, the personal crisis that led to his ambitiously self-financed effort and the perils of working with a very young actress.