Author: Christian Sauvé

  • True Grit (2010)

    True Grit (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, December 2010) The Coen Brothers never do anything in a straightforward fashion, and so it is that if their homage to the classic True Grit may be as dirty and unforgiving as we imagine the West to have been, it’s also surprisingly entertaining and even, yes, amusing.  The repartee between rivals Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon is one of the film’s finest points, and the film often acknowledges the absurdity of its own premise.  But for all of its tension-defusing laughs, the film isn’t a comedy: the drama plays without ironic distancing, the characters aren’t completely softened for Hollywood effect, and the finale doesn’t pull any stops in punishing characters for going so deep in the wild.  While Bridges is magnificent as the one-eyed marshal “Rooster” that becomes the film’s true hero, it’s Hailee Steinfeld who makes the strongest impression as the 14-year-old heroine of the film capable of mouthing the Coens’ typically dense dialogue.  This leads us to the film’s main weakness in theaters: The often thick accents duelling on-screen.  Home-video viewers will have the advantage of captions: movie theatre viewers will have to tough it out on their own.  At a time where filmed Westerns are most often anachronistic genre recreations, it’s a bit surprising to find True Grit to be such a true-pedigree Western, spiced but not overwhelmed by comedy.  It’s an old-fashioned film worth watching and savouring.

  • Cryoburn, Lois McMaster Bujold

    Cryoburn, Lois McMaster Bujold

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 2010, 345 pages, C$28.99 hc, ISBN 978-1-4391-3394-1

    Was Lois McMaster Bujold’s Cryoburn one of the most eagerly expected Science Fiction novels of 2010?  As far as its publisher is concerned, the only clue you need is the triumphant cover that heralds “A New Miles Vorkosigan Novel!”  The enormously popular series had, after all, lain dormant for much of the past decade, ever since Bujold followed up 2002’s Diplomatic Immunity with six fantasy novels set in an entirely different universe.

    After such a lengthy real-world pause, Cryoburn fittingly picks up seven years after the events of Diplomatic Immunity: Miles has grown into a respected imperial auditor, a devoted husband and a father to several kids.  Not that the domestic aspects of his personality get much play here, as he spends most of the book on Kibou-daini, a planet noteworthy for the extent to which it has invested in cryogenic preservation techniques.  The catacombs under the city are filled with frozen people, and that’s where the novel confidently begins in media res, with Miles blindly stumbling about after a failed kidnapping attempt.

    Once the dust settles down after an initial volley of typically Vorkosiganian adventures, the shape of the plot becomes clearer: Miles is investigating various corporate shenanigans on behalf of the Emperor, and solving the one he’s been sent to settle doesn’t preclude taking on another more interesting conspiracy when it comes to his attention.  Miles is nothing but a hyperactive problem-solver, and dangling further corporate malfeasance in front of him is an excellent way to get an adventure.  He is fortunate to be accompanied by his faithful armsman Roic, who gets his share of the narrative viewpoint while suffering through Miles’ elaborate schemes; and Jin, a Kibou-daini kid with a missing mother and a refreshing perspective on familiar characters.

    Cryoburn is a minor Vorkosigan novel more or less in the mould of Diplomatic Immunity, with enough hard science to justify a background for Miles’ adventures but without series-changing developments until its sucker-punch conclusion.  Kibou-daini’s fascination for cryogenic preservation is a solid excuse to explore the stranger social consequences of that scientific innovation—the best one being the logical consequence of proxy voting rights transfer from the frozen many to their holding corporations.  We also get to see the thawing process in two tense sequences, with enough plausible technical details to make it feel satisfying to the harder-minded SF fans.

    This being said, most readers coming back to the Vorkosigan series with Cryoburn will read it for the characters, not the fictional science.  Miles is thankfully back in full form, plunged in the kind of complex power-play that allows him to be as devious as he likes.  Roic’s viewpoint is most useful in feeling the impact that Miles can have on people who know him best, whereas Jin’s viewpoint is played for the emotional impact of characters who aren’t necessarily indestructible by virtue of being series protagonists.

    Yet notions of invulnerability inevitably lead us to the abrupt epilogue of the book, in which an amiable but minor Vorkosigan adventure suddenly becomes something else.  It’s not an entirely unexpected development: Thematically, Cryoburn is about death… and Vorkosigan fans will be able to piece together the upcoming revelation solely on the basis of what a series protagonist of Miles’s age should experience.  But while the development is intriguing, it still makes Cryoburn feel unbalanced, far more so that previous adventures in the series.  This isn’t a major entry in the Vorkosigan series, but the ending suggests that the next novel will be.  Until the next Bujold novel shows up in bookstores, there’s no avoiding the wait and assorted speculations.

    Fannish expectations will vary enormously: Those who care deeply about the Vorkosigan series may find that Cryoburn feels like light throat-clearing before another major entry.  People without that much attachment to Miles and company will find it to be an entertaining adventure with intriguing elements and an accomplished writer’s deft touch with plotting and characterization.  It may have been one of the SF’s most eagerly-awaited novels of 2010, but it’s not likely to remain one of the year’s major works (although, knowing Bujold fans, a few award nominations are definitely possible.)  One thing’s for sure: I can’t imagine any fan of the series not wanting to read the next novel as soon as they’re done with Cryoburn.

  • Black Swan (2010)

    Black Swan (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, December 2010) The difference between genre horror and “psychological drama” is often that in the latter case, much of the monsters can be explained away by the narrator being completely crazy.  That’s certainly one plausible interpretation for Black Swan: In this high-class horror film, a ballerina driven mad by the pressures of performing the lead role in Swan Lake gradually lets themes of repression, doppelgangers and mirror images get the better of her.  It doesn’t end well… or does it?  This murky conclusion is only one of the ways in which Black Swan acts as a companion to director Darren Aronofsky’s previous The Wrestler: Same grainy flat cinematography, same fascination for the psychological impact of intense passion, same look at a performance-driven sub-culture.  Visually, Black Swan looks ugly (with exceptions whenever the performers are on-stage), but it constantly reinforces the visual themes of opposite doubles: the grainy super-16mm cinematography has enough depth to sustain a film-school paper.  It also strips all glossy moviemaking glamour away from Nathalie Portman’s mesmerizing lead performance, instantly credible as a ballerina with enough issues to sustain a film’s worth of delusions.  Mila Kunis also acquits herself honourably in her third significant role of 2010, whereas Vincent Cassel is as deliciously slimy as ever.  But the star here remains Portman, and if Black Swan works, it’s largely because of her dedication to her craft.  As for the ending, well, it grows with time: If, initially, it seems as if the film stops about thirty seconds and a coroner’s report too soon, it also fully commits itself to its unreliable narrator, and eventually lends itself to about three interpretations spanning the entire length of the genre horror / psychological drama spectrum.  Aronofsky may never direct a comedy, but his dramas are growing ever-more finely tuned to their subject, and viewers may as well endure the ride.

  • Megamind (2010)

    Megamind (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, December 2010) Comic-book culture is so pervasive by now that films such as Megamind can just file the numbers off the subgenre’s most familiar archetypes and run with the concept.  The derivative nature of such premises is obvious –but given that derivation is Dreamworks Animation’s specialty, it’s perhaps better to be happy at the end result than to expect fresh premises and concepts from them.  Surprisingly enough, Megamind actually has one or two things to say about super-villainy and its need for super-heroism: Our protagonist isn’t evil as much as he’s misunderstood and bored: by the time he’s had a few weeks to rule over Metro City, his lack of challenges is such that he sets out to reinvent a superhero… with hilarious results.  The action set-pieces have a welcome kinship with Monsters Versus Aliens; unfortunately, the angular character designs owe more to the Madagascar films in that they are distinctive but not particularly appealing.  Fortunately, most of the film feels bright, bold, clean and contemporary: The action sequences have a fondness for large-scale destruction, and the film moves at a pleasantly rapid pace.  There are a few twists and turns: nothing shocking, but a pleasant reconfiguration of dramatic situations every twenty minutes or so.  In doing so, Megamind manages to be the best think-piece about superheroes since The Incredibles and The Dark Knight, and it’s partly that vivaciousness of ideas that makes it so much fun to watch.  In this context, the derivative nature of its premise isn’t as much a problem as it is scene-setting for second-order questions… and that’s not bad, especially for a film supposedly aimed at kids.

  • Unit Omega, Jeff Rovin as Jim Grand

    Unit Omega, Jeff Rovin as Jim Grand

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Berkley, 2003, 277 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-425-19321-7

    As the year grinds down to a halt during the December holidays and as I reflect on the number of books I have read and reviewed this year, I find myself fascinated not by a big thick meaty masterpiece, but by a trifle of a thriller.  Part of the attraction is due to surprise: Packaged as wide-scale military fiction, Unit Omega turns out to be a small science-heavy adventure that almost works better when its two protagonists are just talking to each other.  It’s charming and refreshing, and it’s completely unlike what I was expecting when I purchased the book.

    Unsurprisingly, I got it from a used book store: Long out of print and now unavailable except through specialized sellers, Unit Omega was apparently published in late 2003 and quickly sank without a trace shortly thereafter, leaving in its wake a scant six customer reviews on amazon.com.  None of them were particularly positive, much of the hostility having to do with a misleading cover promising military action from a United Nation unit specializing in “investigating unusual scientific phenomena”. (“The military is facing an enemy like none ever seen before.”)

    The true nature of the novel, after a perfunctory mysterious prologue, quickly becomes something of a laugh.  Because the “unusual scientific phenomena” unit of the United Nation ends up being one lone young scientist holed up in the basement of the United Nations headquarters in New York, idly contemplating writing science-fiction novels on the job while his putative boss tries to get him a real budget.  Harold Collins is bright and enthusiastic about pushing back the frontiers of science, but he’s stuck in a miserable situation.  Opportunity strikes when a phone call is patched to his office: A once-respectable scientist has reason to believe that the Loch Ness legend has a grain of truth to it and wants a third-party to investigate what she has found.  Bored out of his mind, Collins spends his yearly travel budget on a trip to Scotland, and manages to convince a young and attractive magazine editor to come along.

    Number of transatlantic flights spent stuck in coach: One.  Number of military helicopters in the novel: Zero.

    Their investigation unfolds as a deliciously low-tech affair, with consumer-grade camera equipment and wet suits rented from the local dive shop.  The plot is just as threadbare: Collins does discover something, figures out what it is and comes back.  A comfy epilogue quickly follows, complete with the promise of another novel in the series.  If you were expecting explosions, fighter jets or even a military uniform, you may spare yourself some trouble and reset your expectations accordingly: Unit Omega is one of those rare techno-thrillers with no military involvement whatsoever.

    It’s best to call it low-grade science-fiction: The “Loch Ness anomaly” is a natural scientific phenomenon, implausible but generally well-developed.  The protagonist seems to have absorbed the ideas and attitude of classic genre Science Fiction, and a shortened version of his simple adventure wouldn’t have felt out-of-place in as a novelette in Analog magazine.  As far as I’m concerned, that’s part of the appeal: Collins is a likable nerd, and his budding romance with his travel companion (obviously designed to reach fruition much later in the proposed series) is conventional but entertaining.

    In fact, most of Unit Omega is just plain fun to read.  The undermining of the “elite United Nation unit” trope is fit for giggles and the novel plays up those subverted expectations throughout the rest of the narrative.  As a story, it has a substantially more likable personality than the usual generic military thrillers it’s meant to evoke, and it reminded me of the kind of boyish adventures that SF used to do so well.  It’s not, in other words, a particularly deep or meaningful novel… but it’s rewarding and memorable in its own fashion.

    It’s worth noting that “Jim Grand” is really (as per the Copyright page) Jeff Rovin, a professional writer with one of the most diverse bibliographies you’re likely to see.  It’s a shame that he doesn’t seem to have a permanent web presence: I’d love to read him talk about his work, and how he manages to write a few books per year.  Unit Omega has exactly one follow-up to date, the similarly mis-marketed Operation Medusa published a month later.  I think I’ll start lurking in used book store to find a copy.

  • The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010)

    The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, December 2010) I’ve had a particular lack of affection for the Narnia series so far, and while this third entry is a bit better than the first two, it’s not enough to make me think any more fondly about the trilogy: it’s still a colossal waste of resources in the service of fantasy adaptations that have been hammered in a generic Hollywood fantasy-film plot template.  This time, it’s less Lord of the Rings and more Pirates of the Caribbean as the adventure shifts locales to a boat going from island to island.  Taking the two most annoying Pensieve children and adding a quasi-insupportable twerp of a cousin to the mix, Dawn Treader, like its predecessors, patiently waits for Aslan to show up so that the series’ usual deus ex leo and religious allegory quota can be neatly fulfilled.  What saves the film from a complete lack of interest are the more diverse nature of the adventures at sea and on land, culminating in a familiar battle between heroes and sea monster.  Numerous nods to the two previous volumes help wrap up the Pensieve trilogy of the Narnia series, leading one to hope that this may act as a natural stopping point for any effort to adapt more of C.S. Lewis’ novels to the big screen.  Dawn Treader already creaks under a complete re-structuring of the novel’s plot in order to fit a standard Hollywood plot formula.  There’s no need for more.

  • Tron aka Tron: Legacy (2010)

    Tron aka Tron: Legacy (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, December 2010) Given the impact of the original Tron over the generation that went on to build the Internet, it’s a wonder that it took so long for a sequel to arrive.  It’s not much of a surprise, however, to find out that the follow-up is best appreciated as a visual-arts piece than a narrative film: special effects have advanced enormously since 1982’s original, and the impact of all-computerized imagery isn’t what it used to be.  On the other hand, Tron: Legacy puts most of its budget on-screen, and it’s the visuals of the action pieces that hold them together more than the narrative tension.  Never mind the tedious many-against-one videogame battles: just enjoy the swooping lines and cubic destruction.  The plot, merely serviceable, is just an excuse to keep together an exercise in nerd nostalgia.  While that occasionally works (there’s something retro-cyberpunkish in contemplating late-1980s technology creating fully-virtual worlds), it’s not quite enough to offset the tedium of the film’s neon-on-black visuals in which the character’s faces literally fade to dark.  Ironically, perhaps Tron: Legacy’s most achieved visual effects is the way Jeff Bridges manages to play two roles, including one with the face he had almost thirty years ago.  Also worth noticing: Daft Punk’s distinctive electro-synth soundtrack.  Otherwise, this sequel suffers from an overstuffed plot (only explained if you get the graphic novel and the video game), hazily-motivated character actions (let’s hope they understand why they’re doing things, because we don’t), dull dialogue and a merely-satisfactory effort in sketching out the virtual world and why we should care about its liberation.  Tron: Legacy certainly adds up to something interesting, but not in the conventional sense: it’s a film to be stared at rather than enjoyed, and while that’s good enough for a casual viewing, it may not be what’s required to ignite nerd audiences as much as the original did.

  • Old City Hall, Robert Rotenberg

    Old City Hall, Robert Rotenberg

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Touchstone, 2009, 372 pages, C$29.99 hc, ISBN 978-1-4165-9285-3

    Like many Canadians who don’t live in Toronto, my feelings about the city are a mixture of envy and distrust.  Toronto is, in some ways, Canada’s most important city –which is fine: after all, it’s tough to be anything else when about a sixth of the country’s population lives nearby.  (What’s less endearing is Toronto’s tendency to assume that anything not within commuting distance of the CN Tower might as well be on another primitive planet.  But I digress.)  Toronto is an order of magnitude bigger than my Ottawa hometown and I can never completely get used to its scale and density.  On the other hand, recent years have taught me that Toronto can be a lot of fun when approached the right way, and that while I could never live there, it’s an awesome place to visit a few times a year.

    These considerations aren’t completely foreign to Robert Rotenberg’s Old City Hall, a crime-fiction debut that lavishes attention on its characters –the most important of them being Toronto itself.  For everyone who wished the Torontonian equivalent to Robert B. Parker’s Boston or Michael Connelly’s Los Angeles, don’t look any further than Old City Hall.

    It begins with a celebrity radio host accused of murdering his wife.  The evidence against him is overwhelming, not the least being the seemingly-incriminating statement “I killed her”.  But don’t jump to early conclusions: Old City Hall soon reveals itself to be an old-fashioned mystery/procedural that describes almost everything about the subsequent trial.  Witnesses, policemen, lawyers, and journalists all become involved in trying to discover the truth behind the crime.

    The best part of the novel for anyone reasonably familiar with Toronto is the care and detail through which Rotenberg describes his hometown.  From the Don Jail to the titular Old City Hall, though details about traffic to the city’s fascination for the hapless Maple Leafs, Toronto comes alive and those who have wandered around its downtown district will be able to picture the backdrop to many of the novel’s sequences.

    But even for readers without much knowledge of Toronto, Old City Hall shines for its lavish attention to characterization.  Nearly every character of significance is sketched with skill and depth, providing full backgrounds to even the most inconsequential witnesses.  I was particularly struck by “Albert Fernandez”, a young Crown attorney who’s insanely ambitious, yet strangely likable and, ultimately, honourable in his own fashion.  It helps that Rotenberg writes clearly, with constant narrative momentum and mysteries.  Why isn’t the radio host talking?  What are the policemen missing?  Who’s lying?  Will the Leafs win the Stanley Cup?

    Unfortunately, the last fifty pages of the book feel like a messy let-down once the various parts of the plot are resolved.  Rotenberg’s problem is in attempting to do too much at a time where readers could have been satisfied with far less.  Not content with revealing the crucial circumstances of the events, he piles up overly complicated family drama far past the point where readers will care.  From a careful and enjoyable procedural crime thriller, Old City Hall becomes a jack-in the-box of unneeded and useless revelations; the novel would have ended on a stronger note without most of them.

    But that’s a late and minor sour note to a debut novel that promises much from Rotenberg’s next efforts.  The ensemble of characters introduced in Old City Hall seem rich enough to warrant a continuing series, and Toronto can always use one more high-profile crime series.  In the meantime, Old City Hall is a joy to read, and it’s a decent paean to Canada’s largest city.  Even for those of us who don’t live there, and never intend to.

  • Burlesque (2010)

    Burlesque (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, December 2010) Burlesque does quite a few things blandly or badly, but the real test of musical comedies is whether they deliver the expected music, laughs, dance choreographies and smiles whenever the final credits start to roll.  So it is that we can’t really fault the film for an intensely familiar structure, predictable plot developments, weaker tunes or a very PG interpretation of “burlesque”; not as long as it has enough song-and-dance.  There are plenty of good news: Christina Aguilera proves to be a credible actress, Cher looks amazingly good for her age (and you can see this as an invitation to cue all of the usual cosmetic surgery jokes), Stanley Tucci is as good as he usually is, the somewhat better-than-usual banter probably comes from Diablo Cody’s screenwriting and in terms of choreography, Burlesque has more or less what we can expect from a contemporary musical.  Unfortunately, there is little here to set the film apart from more notable musicals: The songs are instantly forgettable (the one exception, a maudlin solo number by Cher, stays in mind because it uses the flimsiest of pretexts to stop the entire film dead in its tracks), the plot offers few surprises, the choreography of each number blurs into an indistinct mush, and the choice to play much of the story earnestly rather than as ironic camp seems like a modestly wasted opportunity.  There’s no risk-taking here, and the film’s family-friendly take on neo-burlesque is a telling clue as to what kind of middle-American target the filmmakers were aiming for.  Fortunately, there are still enough fancy fishnet stockings on display to resort to sheer sex-appeal when the film’s other qualities prove defective.  No matter what, there is at least some redemption in the mud: Burlesque may be ordinary, but it’s not often boring.

  • Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)

    Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, December 2010) For years, I’ve been watching Harry Potter films and commenting that the films are essentially critic-proof.  Fans of J.K. Rowling’s series will see the films no matter what the reviewers say, and the films have been produced with such a consistent level of quality that one review says everything about most of the series.  This, however, doesn’t turn out to be true in this self-indulgent first half of a seventh instalment.  It’s probably the worst Potter yet, in part because it has been split in half with a final instalment still eight months in the future.  The problem isn’t as much the cliff-hanger as the lackadaisical nature of the film’s middle third, which cries out for aggressive editing as the lead trio goes gallivanting across England in search of… something or another. (I didn’t care.)  There are, to be sure, a few things worth noticing about this seventh-and-a-half instalment: The tone is as dark and adult as the series can become, the action never makes it to Hogwart’s, the totality of the budding Voldemort regime is nightmarish and the film dares to present a brief stylish animated segment.  Alas, much of the film is spent waiting for the next thing to happen, with brief squabbles to break up interminable moments in the wilderness as the lead trio figures out the clues handed to them.  There is, as you would expect from the first half of a broken-up film, not much of a climax: most of the action has been deferred to the second film… which everyone will see anyway.  So, in a sense, the film is critic-proof: final judgement on Deathly Hallows Part 1 will have to wait until we see Part 2.

  • How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu

    How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, Charles Yu

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pantheon, 2010, 239 pages, C$27.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-307-37920-7

    It used to be that Science Fiction was something best enjoyed by a small self-selected bunch of geeks.  Nothing wrong with that; in fact, I’m often tempted to argue that SF in its purest essence is best when it’s meant to be literature for nerds who otherwise wouldn’t crack open any fiction.  Every genre serves a purpose, and SF’s reason for existing may have been to provide entertainment to the techno-scientific subculture.

    That, however, stopped being true a long time ago.  As SF movies got more popular, as SF television series multiplied, as SF took over video games, Science Fiction has diffused itself into the world, earning some permanent space in the mind of every reasonably-socialized citizen of the western world.  SF won; hurrah!  Call it a snowball effect: as SF becomes more popular, it becomes more accessible to more people; as it becomes more accessible, it grows even more popular.

    But there are consequences to such pervasiveness, and the biggest is that people will use Science Fiction for their own purposes.  While a common snotty stereotype among the SF fans is that popularity will invariably dumb-down the material, there is also a possibility that it will spur some truly oddball creation using SF tropes in ways that would never be imagined by old-school SF fans.

    I know nothing about Charles Yu except that he’s under 35, and that’s enough to make a few safe predictions: He has lived in the American cultural matrix all of his life.  No surprise if his brand of literature is influenced by a boiling cauldron of SF-flavoured references.

    How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is one of those increasingly common novels that use Science Fictional elements with a good understanding of how they work, but don’t quite fit the straightjacket description of genre SF.  Unlike previous generations of SF novels written by mainstream writers with a distant, incomplete or dismissive view of Science-Fiction, Yu’s cohort simply picks what they want to use from SF’s bag of tricks in the service of what they’re trying to do.  Yu’s first novel is playfully meta-fictional, intensely self-reflective (to the point of having a narrator sharing his name with the author), doesn’t attempt to deliver a fully-imagined reality and doesn’t really want to play by the stylistic or narrative guidelines of the genre.

    It’s nominally about a time-travel machine repairman who gets in trouble when he kills a future version of himself, but that’s really just a narrative framework on which to hang reflections on personal destinies, a process of self-growth, funny snippets about the nature of science-fiction universes and an interesting look at a protagonist who knows that something very unpleasant is about to happen to him.  There are plenty of nods to classic SF writers in-between “Holy Heinlein” [P.160], a “Niven Ring” [P.162] and “Holy Mother of Ursula K. LeGuin” [P.213], plus some cleverness in skewering the narrative conventions of SF world-building with the titular passages.

    The meta-fictional games (referring to the novel by its own page numbers, or as a book to be written by the narrator who’s aware that he’s writing one) are the extra proof that Yu’s novel is meant to be taken as literary diversion rather than hard-edged speculation.  As such, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe works more often than it should: If the novel feels shorter and les substantial than narrative-heavy classical-mode SF novels, that’s a prejudiced reading from a genre-SF perspective.  It may be more fulfilling to consider the book as a playful mainstream novel that fully engages with a science-fictional trope.  It’s certainly a joy to read –not for the story, but for the moments, digressions, references and new ways to look at familiar issues.  Despite the novel’s emo-mopey attitude, I smiled quite a bit more than I expected, and I’m going to carry the amusing bits longer than the maudlin ones.

    For those taking a wider-spectrum view of the novel and what it means, I note that it fits well between Michael Ruben’s  The Sheriff of Yrnameer, Nick Harkaway’s The Gone-Away World, Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time-Traveler’s Wife and Larry Doyle’s Go Mutants! (not to mention Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) as hip quasi-mainstream novels that take a somewhat light-hearted approach to blending genre or genre-friendly elements into a literary framework.  The generation that grew up on VHS horror movies, Nintendo gaming, Star Trek: The Next Generation and the Gulf War is finally finding its voice… and it has a vision of the present that’s influenced by Science Fiction.  Gernsback and Campbell wouldn’t necessarily approve of the result, but they’re not around to complain.

  • The Tourist (2010)

    The Tourist (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, December 2010) In retrospect, The Tourist doesn’t look like the kind of film that’s difficult to mess up: Take two hugely popular stars, a picturesque location, and a premise that allows for both a bit of comedy and some action.  Easy!  Yet much of The Tourist plays as an introduction for a movie that never ends up on-screen… and the conclusion seems deliberately engineered to vex anyone still looking for some coherence.  Part of the issue is that the film occasionally presents itself as a thriller when it’s not much more than a romantic comedy and its attempts to play up the thrills are misplaced through a depiction of incompetent police operations, tepid action sequences and half-hearted justifications for the cops and criminals acting as plot drivers.  As a romantic comedy, The Tourist can at least depend on the presence of Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, even though only Jolie seems perfectly adapted to her role as an elegant woman with secrets: Depp, on the other hand, seems uncomfortable playing a supposedly normal man thrust in the middle of so many shenanigans.  His specialty as an actor is the oddball character, not the kind of bland romantic lead that The Tourist wants him to play.  What doesn’t help is the unremarkable dialogue: despite the star power of the two leads with Venice in the background, the entire film is barely worth a shrug.  Perhaps worse than the result is the almost-there quality of the film it should have been.  Fans of Depp and/or Jolie may find enough of their favourite to be happy with the results, but anyone wanting something more than celebrity tourism may want to look elsewhere first.

  • Faster (2010)

    Faster (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, December 2010) Sophistication is overrated in most movies, as so it is that this exploitation revenge film homage is exactly what it purports to be: a straight-ahead action thriller in which a lot of people shoot at each other.  Dwayne Johnson headlines the film as an ex-convict whose first and last task out of prison is to kill those who betrayed him and murdered his brother: His perpetually-angry expression and shoulders hunched forward in unstoppable motion are exactly what the film needs in order to earn its title.  Faster seldom stops, and yet it manages to juggle a few fascinating characters along the way, including one of the oddest, most sympathetic elite assassin in recent memory.  It’s all no-CGI, muscle-cars, big guns, 70s music until the end.  The action isn’t especially well-directed, but the film itself races forward relentlessly, and it scores a few great sequences along the way: While Faster can’t aspire to depth, it does something interesting with its theme of revenge, a few seemingly disconnected radio sermons eventually leading to a satisfying climactic sequence that wraps up one of the film’s subplots.  Alas, it’s perhaps one of the only threads effectively wrapped up in a messy climax that doesn’t quite know how to deal with its tangled-up ball of intrigue: While Faster doesn’t leave us hanging, it doesn’t conclude as well as it could, and the result isn’t as satisfying as it could have been.  This is a shame, because otherwise Faster is a highly satisfying revenge film that doesn’t try to pass itself as anything higher or lower.  It’s a perfect antidote for the Oscar-baiting films currently tripping over each other in a bid for dramatic meaning.

  • Fade, Kyle Mills

    Fade, Kyle Mills

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 2006 paperback reprint of 2005 original, 344 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-312-93418-1

    Kyle Mills may not be a best-selling thriller author, but he’s certainly an interesting one.  His bibliography shows a preference for tackling unusual subjects with an off-beat sensibility:  His best work to date may be Smoke Screen, a low-intensity comic thriller taking place within the smoking industry.  In other novels, he has featured characters poisoning the US drug supply, taking on Scientology-like cults, discovering Edgar J. Hoover’s secret files or publicly helping terrorists.  While not everything he writes is of equal interest, even his most forgettable novels have one or two elements worth mentioning.

    Fade won’t rank as one of his best, but it certainly shows the way Mills can take familiar thriller elements and rearrange them in an unusual fashion.  The main character of the novel is, at first glance, the kind of guy you find at the middle of just about every modern American thriller: A super-competent Special Forces operative, a one-man army capable of winning the War on Terror by himself.  Except that Salam al Fayed (“Fade”) has been wounded in action years ago and sent to retirement by a government too cheap to pay for surgery that would avert his eventual paralysis.  When former best friend Matt Egan comes knocking to ask him to perform one last mission, he’s unaware that Fade has nurtured his resentment to a dangerous level.

    Most thrillers would then go on to that last mission, to the promise of healing, to friendship between brothers-in-arms.  But this is where Fade goes off the rails: Our protagonist vehemently refuses to accept that last mission.  When the government tries to take him in through a local SWAT force, Fade kills most of them, leaving their team leader (an attractive policewoman) alive.  Contacted again by Egan, he vows deadly revenge against his ex-friend and whoever authorized the botched SWAT raid.

    But there’s a further flip in store, because while most thrillers would take painstaking efforts to paint Fade as an outright villain, Mills turns him into a strangely likable anti-hero; witty, desperate for a date with the policewoman he spared, not above acute gadget fever and definitely not deadly when he can be vengefully funny.  Fade, can often be read as a comic novel, especially when a plan for poisoning his enemies turns into a somewhat more lax experience, or when Fade hires colourful mechanics to transform his car into something more spectacular.  There are strong echoes of Smoke Signal’s smirking tone in the way much of the novel unfolds, with amusing dialogue between characters that should hate each other but seem to get along quite well, and unusual sequences that sometimes threaten to veer into absurdity.

    As far as simple reading pleasure is concerned, Fade fares well despite the often-tangled web of loyalties the reader is asked to consider.  The novel has a few standout sequences and nice character moments, such as the tense negotiations between Fade and Egan as to whether the latter’s family should be kept out of the revenge equation.  Contrarily to much of Mills’ bibliography, Fade’s intimate focus has little interest for world-shaking theatrics when there’s a character with real problems to solve within the American heartland.

    But the tension between the novel’s sometimes-serious plotting and sometimes-silly sequences eventually lands Fade in a narrative dead-end from which there’s only one unpleasant exit.  Its conflicted hero is equally deadly as he is charming, and that helps make the novel’s final moments feel bittersweet.  On the other hand, they’re a further mark of distinction for an author who doesn’t seem to want to play by the same rules of so many other interchangeable modern thrillers pitting reliably white American operatives against just-as-reliably Arab antagonists.

    Fade is less predictable than most other novels in its category, and that makes it quite a bit intriguing.  On the other hand, it remains to be seen if that kind of unorthodox approach is what has kept Mills from hitting greater sales numbers.  The danger is always that his Bookscan numbers would dip under what publishers consider to be viable threshold.  Without access to the sales numbers, it’s still easy to note (with some worry) that Mills doesn’t have an upcoming novel listing despite a last publication of two years ago.  Hopefully this is just a blip…

    [Trivial bibliographic note, but: The first edition of the mass-market paperback has an error on the copyright page stating that the “St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition” was published in “May 2005”… that is, one month before the release of the first hardcover edition.  Amazon.com has the proper May 2006 release date.]

  • Tangled (2010)

    Tangled (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, December 2010) There’s nothing revolutionary in this latest offering from the “Disney Princesses” factory.  In fact, much of Tangled (marketed as “Disney’s fiftieth animated feature”) seems to be a conscious homage to the best-known films from the House of the Mouse, down to the use of fairy tales, musical numbers, animal sidekicks and evil stepmoms.  But there’s no need to reinvent everything when it’s possible to do the familiar really well, and so Tangled offers a pretty good times at the movie even without necessarily offering anything dramatically new.  The Rapunzel fairy tale isn’t given a reinterpretation as much as homage and the long-haired blonde heroine is easily one of Disney’s most appealing young heroines in a while.  The story is crisply told, the jokes are funny, the animation is top-notch, the action sequences are terrific, the animal sidekicks are used deftly (they have personalities, but they don’t talk) and the hair-related gags are inventive.  For such a fast-paced film, the irony is that one of the best sequences in Tangled comes when the narrative stops and the film indulges in a lovely “paper lanterns” sequence that does much to reaffirm computer animation as an art form.  The weaknesses of the film are easily overlooked: The musical numbers are bland, forgettable and have none of the snappiness of The Princess and the Frog.  But by embracing a fairy tale without ironic distance and forgoing pop-culture references, Disney may have delivered its first film in a long while with built-in longevity as a family classic.  Even Disney-sceptics may be willing to let go of their accumulated resentment and embrace Tangled.