Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Repo Men (2010)

    Repo Men (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, March 2010) In a generous mood, I would probably praise Repo Men for its satiric vision of a future where synthetic organ transplants are common and expensive enough to warrant repo men going around repossessing deadbeats, leaving them, well, dead on the floor.  I would congratulate Jude Law, Liev Schreiber and Forrest Whittaker for thankless roles playing unsympathetic characters and Alice Braga for something like a breakthrough role.  I would say something clever about the film’s forthright carnographic nature.  I may even have something affable to say about Eric Garcia, who sort-of-adapted his own novel for the screen (the story, as described in the book’s afterword, is far more complicated) and wrote one of the most bitterly depressing movie ending in recent memory.  Heck, I would point out the numerous undisguised references to Toronto (where the movie was shot): the inverted TTC sign, the Eaton center complete with Indigo bookstore, the streetcars, even the traffic lights and suburban streets.  But I am not in a generous mood, because Repo Men is an unpleasant and defective attempt at a satirical action SF film that fails at most of what it attempts.  The characters are unlikable, their actions are despicable, the chuckles are faint and the Saw-inspired gory violence isn’t warranted by anything looking like thematic depth.  It is a literally viscerally repulsive film, and even trying to play along the grim sardonic humour gets increasingly difficult to swallow during self-congratulatory action sequences.  Once the film’s none-too-serious credentials are established, it’s hard to care –and that includes a wannabe-romantic sequence in which internal organs are exposed and fondled.  The ending wants to be witty, but it just feels absurd before it is revealed to be cheaply cynical.  The Science Fictional elements don’t even fit together and the result is a big bloody bore.  Instead, just give me another shot of Repo: The Genetic Opera!: at least that film knew how to balance arch seriousness with a sense of camp.  The irony is that Garcia’s novel is actually quite a bit better than the film –don’t let the adaptation scare you from a novel that does what the film wanted to do in a far more palatable fashion.

  • Repo Men aka The Repossession Mambo, Eric Garcia

    Repo Men aka The Repossession Mambo, Eric Garcia

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper, 2010 movie tie-in reprint of 2009 original, 328 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-06-171304-0

    Repo Men can be said to be a dark satire about the flesh and the inner rot of hyper-capitalism, but looking at its movie adaptation and then at the source novel, I can’t help but see both versions of the story as being about tone, the slippery literalization of metaphors and how easy it is to ruin a story by telling it badly.  Because even though the novel and the movie share the same creator, (many of) the same characters and (many of) the same plot beats, I hated the film and thought the novel was an enjoyable piece of work.  How did that happen?

    First, the commonalities: In a not-too-distant future, artificial organs have become reliable and sophisticated enough that people don’t make much of a fuss in getting rid of their natural internals and getting better ones.  There’s a catch, of course: said organs are so expensive that they require financing, and if ever you don’t pay, well, the financing company feels completely justified in ripping them out of you.

    (Yes, this is a very similar premise to Repo! The Genetic Opera, which has clear antecedents over Repo Men in having been an off-Broadway play about a decade ago.  But then again, there are examples of that idea in a number of older SF stories, so let’s stop claiming idea paternity.  High concepts aren’t unique diamonds that can be discovered once and thereafter only stolen: Writers can come to the same conclusion from different sources of inspiration, and as this review will keep hammering home, it’s all in the execution rather than the premise.)

    It’s not difficult to come up with a few objections to the organ-ripping nonsense: There’s the slight issue of murdering people by removing their innards that defies a bit of common sense even in a satirical future.  But here’s one crucial difference between novel and movie: Whereas the novel can gloss over the messy business of organ extraction with a few wry sentences and allusions, the director of the film felt it necessary to show the removal in all of its glistening gory glory, along with a smirking narration that felt more psychopathological than amusing.  That’s one way to turn off an audience in less than five minutes and never get them back.

    Prose, for all of its deficient audio-visual qualities, is actually quite a bit better at presenting satire, context, justification and depth.  So it is that even after disliking Repo Men quite a bit, I found myself enjoying Garcia’s novel even as it covered the same ground as the film, except with quite a bit more detail and a number of significant changes to the third act.

    (It would be handy to criticize the film for being a ham-fisted hack-and-slash job on the novel, but the real story, as revealed in the movie tie-in edition’s afterword of the novel, is more a case of parallel development.  This being said, I suspect that films become worse when they’re developed over years of studio interference, whereas novels can only benefit from their writer’s sustained vision.  Still, it is surprising to find out that the film is quite a bit darker in its ending than the book.  This may be a first.)

    Readers coming at Garcia’s novel without preconceptions will find an energetic, tangentially-told dark satire.  The narrator’s story keeps looping back to his marriages, his war experiences, his anecdotes as a Repo Man, the events that have landed him in such a desperate situation, and what happens after that.  Happily, this isn’t a confusing novel even as it hops all over the entire life of its main character: the narration is crisp, the voice of the narrator is enjoyable and the reading experience is top-notch.  As Science Fiction, the details don’t quite make sense (which is to be expected from a satirical novel by a writer seen as working from outside the genre), but this isn’t quite enough to harm Repo Men’s odd charm.

    The lesson may be that I’m a far more lenient reader than a viewer: Perhaps I’m more patient with dense novels than simple movies.  But perhaps it’s also a lesson in how too much is too much, how a dark smile works better in written fiction than on a screen where there’s little wiggle room left to imagination.  But the result is the same: Eric Garcia may have scripted the adaptation of his own novel, but the book is clearly the winner here.  At the very least, it’s got all of its original guts.

  • The Ghost Writer aka The Ghost (2010)

    The Ghost Writer aka The Ghost (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, March 2010) Roman Polanski may be a runaway convicted pedophile, but he sure knows how to direct a movie.  Faithfully adapted by Robert Harris from his own unusually accessible novel, The Ghost Writer starts with an intriguing premise and then accelerates into a full-blown political thriller.  As a ghostwriter asked to help a former British Prime Minister finish his memoirs after the untimely death of his predecessor, Ewan McGregor is sympathetic enough to hold our interest.  Meanwhile, Pierce Brosnan is convincing as the conniving politician.  The fascinating aspects of ghost-writing are strong enough to allow us to settle in the film’s increasingly frantic pacing.  Once our protagonist starts finding clues about his subject’s past, palace intrigue develops and modern accusations come to besiege their quiet beachfront house.  Added interest can be found in The Ghost Writer’s not-so-subtle political allusions to Tony Blair’s administration.  The film’s plot is nearly identical to the book, but it’s really Polanski’s deft touch with suspense that ties up the film in a neat bow.  A number of showy sequences present familiar developments in refreshing fashion, and the deliberate pacing keeps things neither too slow nor too fast.  Some plot kinks are best explained in the book (which is also a bit more aggressive in political themes), but overall The Ghost Writer is a well-made thriller for adults, bringing back memories of classic seventies movie paranoia.  You can say what you want about Polanski, but the result up on the screen is unarguable.

  • Alice in Wonderland (2010)

    Alice in Wonderland (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, March 2010) The good news with Tim Burton is that he is guaranteed to put a vision on screen.  Alas, it may not be the vision you would prefer.  So it is that this loose sequel to the classic Alice in Wonderland is an affront to my aesthetic preferences: At the exception of the oh-so-cute Cheshire Cat, I found the film’s artistic choices ugly.  This is partly intentional; after all, the point of this follow-up is that Wonderland has grown tainted; the magic has fled the land and been replaced by corruption.  {Insert heavy-duty genre fantasy narrative schematics inspired by John Clute here.}  No wonder everything is so repulsive.  The showy use of 3D makes moments of the film look even more incomprehensible and overdone to 2D audiences.  But as hard as it is to ignore Alice in Wonderland’s visuals, the real snore comes from the plot, which feels as Alice filtered through the Lord of the Rings plot template that has informed almost a full decade of genre cinema fantasy by now.  It’s dull, and the overdone shot of the two armies running to clash together has become almost parody.  Alice in Wonderland becomes duller as it goes on, and not even Johnny Depp’s increasingly active Mad Hatter (or Anne Hathaway’s regal presence, for that matter) can do much to redeem the rest of the picture.  It’s a middling fantasy film at best: when “dull” and “ugly” crop up in the same review, there’s little room for favourable quotes.

  • Proust was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer

    Proust was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Mariner, 2008, 242 pages, $14.95 tp, ISBN 978-0-547-08590-6

    Decades after C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures, the so-called divide between art and science continues to fascinate.  Are the two “cultures” still so completely incomprehensible to each other?  Why does this gap persist despite a wide acknowledgement of Snow’s thesis?  Is a true “third culture” even possible?

    With Proust was a Neuroscientist, science journalist/editor Jonah Lehrer proposes that the work of artists through the ages has long hinted at natural truths that science has only recently acknowledged.  Marcel Proust’s exploration of the power of memory within In Search of Lost Time largely reflects what we have since learned about memory: how it interconnects with everything else, how it’s directly affected by smell and taste, how it mutates as it’s recalled, overwriting original memories with memories of the memory.  In eight successive chapters, Lehrer uses the work of a different artist as a springboard to discuss new developments in neuroscience, and then back again to an appreciation of the artist’s work.  It all makes for a serious, informative and compelling work of popular science/culture.

    That’s why and how Proust was a Neuroscientist goes from Stravinsky to dopamine, from Walt Whitman to phantom limbs and from Gerdrude Stein to the structure of language by way of Chomsky.  The references in the book are as artistic as they are scientific, with literary quotations and historical overviews of the artist’s career alongside research paper summaries.  Getting the most out of Lehrer’s book involves knowing a lot about many things, but even those who may not know their Emerson from their Escoffier won’t have any trouble understanding most of it, Lehrer’s easy-to-read style betraying his experience working at mass-market periodicals.

    Not every chapter is created equal, however, and so Lehrer really hits his stride in discussing George Eliott, leading to a luminously clear description of brain plasticity and how science has recently come to accept the once-heretical notion that neurons could reproduce in adults.  The Marcel Proust chapter is good enough to provide the book’s title, while discussing Paul Cézanne tells us a lot about vision, or more precisely how the images caught by our optics are then heavily post-processed by the brain.  But the best chapter of the book discusses turn-of-the-nineteenth-century chef Auguste Escoffier, which gently takes us from the codification of French cuisine to a discussion of umami and the mechanics of taste, recently up-ended after centuries of simple belief in sweet, sour, salty and bitter.  It’s good enough to read twice, especially if you have an interest in food.  (It also provides one of the book’s best lines in “Umami even explains (although it doesn’t excuse) Marmite, the British spread…” [P.60])  It’s enough to make us realize that Escoffier was a scientist in his own way, refusing accepted wisdom and only trusting the results of his experiments: there isn’t much of a humanities/science divide in a chef who relies on repeatability of experimental results.

    But the same can’t always be said about the other seven artists discussed by Lehrer, from writers who instinctively knew things about the human condition to artists whose processes mirror latter discoveries.  Overly sensationalistic descriptions of the book (see how artists scooped science by hundreds of years!) do it a disservice: It’s far more satisfying to approach Proust was a Neuroscientist as another piece of evidence supporting perhaps the most obvious conclusion of all: Both artists and scientists are aiming at a common description of natural truth, and both toolsets, when best deployed, will end up describing the same thing from complementary perspectives.

    The book closes on a meditation on C.P. Snow’s two cultures, and how even after more than fifty years, the gap between both remains significant.  More controversially, Lehrer writes that the current best-known examples of a “third culture” is essentially scientific vulgarization, which is essential in its own right, but often prone to the same pitfalls as scientific culture itself.  (Interestingly, while Lehrer does discuss Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday in favourable terms, he never mention Science Fiction at all.)  Perhaps there is a need for a truer third culture to stand aside and explore links between science and art without the preconceptions of either.  Readers, of course, are invited to find out for themselves how such a discipline would be helpful, starting with Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist.

  • Fast Food Nation (2006)

    Fast Food Nation (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2010) Adapting a book to a movie is a gamble even in the best circumstances, but adapting a well-regarded non-fiction classic into an ensemble drama is really asking for trouble.  To its credit, Richard Linklater manages to touch upon much of Eric Schlosser’s critique of the fast-food industry: We get a taste of its reliance on students and migrant workers, the bloody mass butchery required to keep those burgers flowing, the external costs inherent in cheap food and even details such as made-in-laboratory flavours.  What the film doesn’t do as well is in dramatizing those issues: Often, Fast Food Nation feels like a talky issues show in which every scene mentions a problem or two.  (Even a quick walk through school corridors can’t help but feature metal detectors and drug-sniffing dogs.)  Some characters are more interesting than others (there are plenty of cameos and small roles for familiar faces, the best of which being a single-scene semi-villainous turn for Bruce Willis), but the film shuts down before it can tie up most situations adequately: it’s all setup and little payoff, although it leads, Heart of Darkness-style, to a revelatory climax showing the gruesome nature of the “Killing Floor” discussed so often during the rest of the film..  This unflinching moment, filmed in a real Mexico butchery said to be cleaner than US ones, is meant to disgust –but it may not be the film’s intended climax for viewers who already understand that animals become meat become burgers.  Still, Fast Food Nation generally sticks close to reality, and its failings as a piece of narrative fiction are profoundly linked to its strength as a semi-documentary exposé.  It could have been much stronger by including a third act, presenting its messages more carefully (although, thanks goodness, it avoids the most obvious “fast food will make you fat”) and sticking closer to its characters.  But even with its flaws, it’s a worthwhile film: the issues are there to ponder, and there are a handful of scenes good enough to make the film compelling.  Don’t plan on eating much fast-food right after, though.  Appropriately, viewers may come to appreciate the film more after listening to co-writers Linklater and Schlosser on the audio commentary track: they discuss what material was kept from the book, the nature of low-budget moviemaking and some of the themes they were tackling.  A handful of other extras round up the DVD, the most memorable of them being the now-classic Meatrix Flash animation short films.

  • Green Zone (2010)

    Green Zone (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, March 2010) Politically-motivated action films are rare and precious, so I am unapologetic in liking Green Zone a lot more than I should given my distaste for Paul Greengrass’s shaky-cam style.  His politics are in the right place, but his habit of giving jobs to spastic cameramen can be tough to tolerate, especially in early dialogue scenes.  Yet despite the firefights, this story is largely about the way a loyal soldier comes to realize the ways the US government has lied about WMDs in Iraq.  It’s also a damning portrait of the way the US acted during its first year as an invader: Using Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s non-fiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City as inspiration for its setting leads to one of the best digitally-enhanced portrait of occupied Baghdad so far.  Matt Damon is surprisingly credible as the soldier whose questions lead to unpleasant realizations, and one action sequence featuring helicopter surveillance feels as uniquely contemporary as Greengrass’s own Bourne Ultimatum London chase sequence.  Still, this may be a film not only for those who can spot the Judith-Miller-inspired patsy journalist or the not-Ahmed-Chalabi puppet figurehead, but those who can both explain De-Baathification and why it was so badly implemented.  For savvy political observers, Green Zone feels like a swift Cliff’s Notes version of recent history, or a version of No End in Sight with far many more gunfights.  While the dramatic arc of the script feels ordinary (although the American-on-American conflicts are a nice touch), it’s its dramatization of recent bleeding history that’s most rewarding.  It so confidently states what many Americans are still reluctant to affirm despite piles of evidence to the contrary that it becomes a minor revelation of what filmmaking can still do –especially in non-American hands.  In this context, trolling the politically-driven negative reviews for the film becomes entertainment in its own right.  In the meantime, Green Zone goes to join The Kingdom and Lord of War as examples of how enjoyable action filmmaking can back up a socially-conscious theme, and not be much more than half a decade behind current events.

  • The Ghost aka The Ghost Writer, Robert Harris

    The Ghost aka The Ghost Writer, Robert Harris

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Arrow, 2010 film tie-in reprint of 2007 original, 400 pages, C11.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-099-53852-3

    I completely missed this novel when it first came out.  Like many thriller readers, I had pigeonholed Robert Harris in the limited-interest “historical thriller” subgenre and opted out after Pompeii when he announced an entire trilogy of classical Roman thrillers.  It didn’t help that I found his novels a bit too slow and generic to catch my attention.

    Fortunately, The Ghost is a welcome change of pace.  It’s decidedly modern, decently paced, easily accessible and a joy to read.  While it also mines history for inspiration, it only goes back a few decades, and could only have been written in the past few years.  It deals with contemporary politics, the craft of writing, cutting-edge conspiracies, sordid spying between friends and combines it all in a classic thriller framework.

    It starts amiably enough: A London-based professional ghostwriter, a not-to-be-named scribe for the stars, is suddenly offered an important job: He is to drop everything, fly to an estate on Martha’s Vineyard island and help an ex-British Prime Minister write his memoirs.  So far, so good:  He’s a professional, and if the job is high-profile, it’s nothing he’s not prepared to handle.  The politician is so polished that no humanity can escape from him?  No problem.  He sees evidence of marital problems accompanied by hints of an affair between the ex-PM and his assistant?  Whatever: Our hero has a job to do, and after working with rock stars, vapid actresses and illiterate football players, it’s not a high-profile politician that is going to be a challenge.  Even formal charges of war crimes by the International Court against the ex-PM are more interesting than troublesome when our writer gets drafted in writing a statement that is immediately repeated around the planet.

    But the situation gets more problematic when our narrator begins accumulating details about his predecessor, who died in an increasingly mysterious fashion after finishing a poorly-written first draft of the biography in question.  Left almost alone in an isolated house, our protagonist is seduced by the ex-politician’s wife, and discovers documents that suggest even deeper secrets.  Left to his own devices while his subject is off confronting international public opinion, the ghost writer soon finds himself trapped in a series of long-repressed secrets that go all the way up…

    No doubt about it: Thriller readers are in for a treat with The Ghost.  The perfectly paced rhythm of the novel is initially kept slow: We’re charmed into the story via the titular ghostwriter as he goes about his job and gives us a look at an inglorious profession, with plenty of tricks, tips and revealing anecdotes along the way.  The narration is clean, engaging and effortlessly takes us from one chapter to another.  When the mystery starts, we’re ready for it; when it flips over to thrills, it’s also at the right moment.  By the last act, which takes places between high-stakes power-brokers and tackles weighty geopolitical issues, The Ghost is already a success.

    For followers of British politics, there are plenty of extra thrills in contemplating a barely-disguised portrait of Tony Blair leading to a conspiracy theory at once implausible and revelatory.  Among other things, The Ghost is an eloquent demonstration of the possibilities of vengeful writing, as Harris seems to be channeling a fair amount of rage at recent history and uses that emotional power to shape a novel that criticizes key British policy decisions.  In that fashion, The Ghost is not too far away from John LeCarré’s equally-compelling The Constant Gardener.

    Readers who have seen Roman Polanski’s well-made movie adaptation will be pleased to find few noteworthy differences between the novel and its big-screen counterpart.  The most notable change come late in the book, which features scenes set in New York that were relocated somewhere else in the movie to accommodate the director’s travel restrictions.  Otherwise, a good chunk of the novel’s events, tone and rhythm are faithfully adapted, in large part due to a script co-written by Polanski and Harris himself.

    For disenchanted Harris fans such as myself, The Ghost is a reminder that he can do a whole lot more than write about Roman history.  For thriller readers, it’s a perfectly mastered genre exercise, and for readers in general, it’s a really enjoyable novel –not to be missed now that it’s widely available in a movie tie-in edition.

  • The Crazies (2010)

    The Crazies (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, March 2010) On paper, this film doesn’t look like much: A remake of a 1973 Romero film about people being transformed into zombies, er, crazy psychotics?  Another take on the good old “Government will kill you the first chance it gets” paranoia?  Yet another familiar zombie zombier ZOMBIEST film like 28 Days/Weeks Later?  Not interested.  And yet, even though most of The Crazies plays like a dirt-simple genre horror film, it is –for all of its conceptual lack of originality- well-made enough to hold attention even when it indulges in well-worn clichés and nonsensical set-pieces.  Despite a second act lull and a predictable late-film eruption of zombies, the direction is snappy, the writing is adequate and the actors do what they can with what they’re given.  Unlike the original, the film is sparse with explanations, and (at the notable exception of a few ominous satellite shots) limits its perspective what the protagonists can learn: the minuscule amount of exposition happens at a frantic pace.  The subtext about government intervention is far, far less important that the genre chills and thrills, and takes a back-seat to a convincing portrait of small-town Midwestern America. Timothy Olyphant turns in a fine performance as the sheriff-protagonist, while director Breck Eisner may end up proving that there is life after the underwhelming Sahara.  Until his next film, though, The Crazies is a rare competent horror film remake that rises above a hum-drum premise to deliver a decent entertainment experience.

  • Brooklyn’s Finest (2009)

    Brooklyn’s Finest (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, March 2010) Brooklyn’s Finest is a profoundly ironic title, but there’s little sly humour in the rest of this deliberately gritty and down-beat police drama that follows three variously-corrupted Brooklyn policemen.  This isn’t director Antoine Fuqua’s first corrupt cop drama (remember Training Day?), nor the first corrupt cop drama in recent memory (Dark Blue?  Street Kings?  Pride and Glory?  Righteous Kill?), so viewers may be spared a sentiment of déjà-vu.  Where this film distinguishes itself is in structure: The three stories rarely intersect, except for a bit of tragic cross-fire at the very end.  In the meantime, we get Richard Gere (far too proud and well-coiffed for his own role) as a disillusioned veteran marking down his last days, the always-fantastic Don Cheadle as an undercover informant with stronger ties to criminals than his own superiors, and Ethan Hawke as an overwhelmed father-of-many who resorts to stealing drug money in order to supplement his pay check.  Brooklyn’s Finest has a patina of unpleasantness that is supposed to transmute into authentic grittiness, but this illusion doesn’t sustain the steadily-increasing body-count as criminals are gunned down in police raids by the dozen.  Few of the film’s characters can be expected to live until the credits.  This sombre tone, alas, creates expectations that the unfocused, moralistic ending can’t match: Since this isn’t a popcorn picture, we look in vain for a deeper message and a stronger conclusion than a final hail of bullets.  The script, while interesting throughout, fails to cohere in its third act and the result is a mild disappointment.  Like many of its corrupted-blue brethren, Brooklyn’s Finest will be another forgettable DVD in the crime section; adequate to satisfy those looking for that kind of film, and insignificant for everyone else.

  • Cop Out (2010)

    Cop Out (2010)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, March 2010) The most profound irony about Cop Out, as directed by Kevin Smith from someone else’s script, is that the film’s direction is quite a bit better than its screenplay.  This should surprise Smith fans: after all, hasn’t it been a trademark of his movies that their writing frequently rises above their often-pedestrian direction?  Here, through, Smith has a budget and presumably the time to present a more visually ambitious vision.  Alas, the script just isn’t there: As a pair of policemen bumble their way through a dull storyline involving Latin gangsters in Brooklyn, Bruce Willis does well as the veteran leader of the pair but I remain unconvinced by Tracy Morgan’s comedic style.  Worse, though, is the script’s fondness for police intimidation as a plot driver: in Cop Out’s reality, it’s hilarious for heroes to jam pistols and tattoo needles in civilians’ face to extract information.  As for the rest of the film, it’s more miss than hit.  Seann William Scott has an intriguing character that’s played for senseless giggles.  Other characters come and go, with a dramatic plot heavy-handedly jammed in the middle of the comedy.  There’s a noticeable lack of flow to the proceedings, and the spot-the-references-to-eighties-action-movies game quickly grows tiresome.  For a comedy, Cop Out has a noticeable lack of laughs: even what is supposed to be amusing just feels dumb.  On the other hand, the direction feels undistinguishable from most cookie-cutter cop comedies, which marks a step up for Smith.  He’s still not doing it well, but at least it’s not as blatantly bad as in his first few films.  Hopefully it’s a lucrative enough project that he’ll be able to work on something else soon.  Still, even in mercenary work-for-hire projects, he may want to pick material that’s stronger than Jersey Girl.

  • Beyond Heaving Bosom: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels, Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan

    Beyond Heaving Bosom: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels, Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Fireside, 2009, 291 pages, C$19.99 pb, ISBN 978-1-4165-7122-3

    I don’t read a lot of romance fiction, but I don’t look at the genre unsympathetically: What little I have read in the genre was entertaining, and given my affection for a number of other literary genres from science-fiction to thrillers, I tend to see dedicated romance readers as kindred spirits: they read what they like, I read what I like, and the combined sales figures of popular fiction genres are good enough to puncture the pretentions of those who think that fiction ends at the literary aisle.  So you could say that I was receptive to the idea of an irreverent guide to romance novels, and I couldn’t have dared hope for a better one than Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan’s Beyond Heaving Bosom: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels.

    Wendell and Tan are minor internet celebrities for writing the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books blog, which covers romantic fiction in a way that makes some cheer and others blush.  Their hip, intelligent and foul-mouthed commentary on romance fiction is one of the many reasons why the web is fostering one of the golden eras of reviewing: This is contemporary commentary on fiction being written now, and it’s as entertaining as it is brutally honest.

    With Beyond Heaving Bosoms, they get to go beyond quick blog posts and make a sweeping judgement about the entire field.  Part introduction to the field, part affectionate satire, part advocacy in favour of the genre, this guide packs the romance genre between two covers and tells you why you should pay attention.  I read it as a complete outsider and got in three hundred pages the accumulated wisdom of years of genre reading.  New-skool/old-skool divide; typical characteristics of the protagonists; cover illustration analysis; familiar plot devices; bad sex clichés: Wendell and Tan have it all figured out, so pay attention.

    Not that you’ll have any trouble staying interested: Fighting for eyeballs in an oversaturated web of review blogs, our authors have staked themselves a place as the genre’s irreverent hipsters.  Their foul-mouthed style is as frank as it’s hilarious, and it definitely makes romance look far more contemporary than its sometimes-stodgy reputation would suggest.  It helps that the authors are passionate about their subject: they love romance while recognizing its faults, and their passion for the material shines though.  So much so, in fact, that the chapter dedicated to explaining why smart people would love romance ends up feeling oddly defensive when the rest of the book is such an eloquent illustration of why the genre is worth so much to its readers.

    The best part of Beyond Heaving Bosoms is how quickly its blend of insights and snark leads to a compulsively readable experience.  In attempting to explain the core of romance, the authors provide a helpful flowchart to help readers decide whether they’re reading old or new-skool romance (“Does the hero ever rape the heroine?” [P.14]), a list of thirteen ways for a heroine to be virginal before meeting the hero, a “Big Misunderstanding” board game, a revealing interview with a real male cover model (along with a prototypical “Ultimate Cover”) and a pick-your-own-romance adventure that keeps its funniest payoff for its last entry.

    Smart and funny, Beyond Heaving Bosoms has something to offer to fans, foes and bystanders of romance.  It’s a successful and entertaining overview of a genre that doesn’t get nearly enough respect, and it does a fine job at discussing romance’s clichés without losing touch with what makes it so compelling… and does so in a way that should convince even newcomers.  I’d like to see a similar approach to other genres.  How about a Smart Bastards’ Guide to Thriller Novels?  Can I interest any publisher in the Smart Nerd’s Guide to Science-Fiction Novels?

  • Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser

    Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Perennial, 2002 updated re-edition of a 2001 original, 383 pages, C$22.95 tp, ISBN 0-06-093845-5

    Almost ten years after its publication, it’s not a stretch to call Eric Schlosser’s non-fiction exposé Fast Food Nation a budding classic.  It’s been influential enough to spawn one direct film adaptation (as an ensemble drama, no less) and inspire a documentary picture (Food, Inc), while becoming a primary inspiration for a basket of food-related non-fiction such as Morgan Spurlock’s Super-Size Me and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  The 1,462 reviews on Amazon.com so far hint at the influence it had on readers during its decade-long history.  Best of all; it’s still a terrific read in 2010.

    It’s not as if his basic thesis is controversial: Fast-food (ie; food you order at a counter and get almost immediately) is a uniquely American creation, and its continued existence hints at a number of profound second-order effects.  Born in the socio-economic context of 1950s Southern California, its growth as an industry has changed the way America feeds itself.  That much is unarguable, but as Schlosser set out to examine American through the prism of fast-food, the less savoury aspects of the fast food industry quickly emerge.

    It starts with the food, obviously: Chemically manipulated to a point where basic taste and smell can be manipulated at will, fast food is laden with salt, sugar and fat designed to fill you up and make you ask for more.  The resemblance with traditional food is more a matter of habit than substance.  Thankfully, Schlosser doesn’t spend a lot of time dealing with the health impact of the industry: the point having been made elsewhere, he feels free to talk about the second-order effects of the rapid-restaurant agri-cultural complex: The regression of the meat-packing industry to appalling standards that would make even Upton Sinclair blanch; the transformation of agriculture into a corporate cartel (a subject that has since been explored in greater detail by a variety of sources), the transformation of food in neatly marketable categories… if you thought fast food was bad for your health, just wait until you realize the impact of the industries that had to be built in order to make that cheap burger possible.

    Once we’re sliding down the greased rabbit hole of the fast food underbelly, through, it’s hard to stop.  What about the voluntary servitude asked of the largely teenage employees employed at fast food restaurants?  What about the far less optional servitude of illegal immigrants employed in the meat-packing factories?  What about the lower food safety standards that result from a system concerned with profits and speed?  Fast food is not just a way for people to buy food, it’s a system that, domino-like, affects everything it touches.  The idea that one can explore a culture through what it eats has seldom been as troubling.

    In delivering this work of investigative journalism, Schlosser depends on a wide variety of historical sources, personal interviews, documented statistics and verifiable press clippings.  One of the book’s smartest decisions is to ground its subject in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, and examine the facets of the fast food community through a community small enough to be understood.  This microcosm becomes a way to grasp an issue that would otherwise be too overwhelming to contemplate.

    Circa 2010, Fast Food Nation continues to show the way.  There is now a lot more material available to those who would like to learn more about the modern food industry, and others have picked up the threads identified by Schlosser.  There’s a reason why it’s still selling briskly: But even today, the book is still a fun, engaging, noxiously informative read… even as most of its points are now common sense.

    [March 2010: As an experiment in investigative criticism, I actually went out of my way to go get lunch at McDonald’s shortly after finishing the book.  I was reminded within moments of stepping into the lunchtime rush of the restaurant why it had been years since my last Big Mac.  I’d like to say that the food was horrible, but it was… fine.  I did have some trouble at the office due to the smell of the meal, however: plans to stealthily eat at my workstation as usual were foiled by the unmistakable aroma of the combo I had ordered, and I had to retreat to the lunch room where I got a few surprised comments about what I was eating.  All in all, not an experience I’m bound to repeat soon.]

  • The Strain, Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan

    The Strain, Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2009, 401 pages, C$34.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-06-155823-8

    Any review of Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s The Strain can start from an embarrassing number of attention-grabbing hooks: The celebrity stunt-writing aspect; the resurgence of the evil-vampire breed; the post-9/11 New York setting; the first-book-in-a-trilogy angle.  They all compete for attention, obscuring the fact that the book reads like an average middle-of-the-road horror novel with techno-thriller overtones.

    It would be easy to focus exclusively on Guillermo del Toro, who’s one of the finest genre horror director currently working.  Few others combine his rich affection for the fantastic, his storytelling skills and his strong visual imagination.  But his obvious influence on The Strain seems limited to two things.  First: how the vampires have a striking similarity to the ones in del Toro’s own Blade 2.  Second, how his name alone seems to have added 5$ to the book’s cover price for a shoddily-made hardcover.  Otherwise, one would assume that the book has been written in more or less the same way as other celebrity collaborations: Ideas and concepts from the celebrity, actual writing from the below-the-line writer. In this case Chuck Hogan, taking a detour in horror after his rather good crime novels Prince of Thieves and others.

    The resurgence of the evil vampire as an antagonist is only noteworthy thanks to a blip in popular culture that, from Lestat de Lioncourt to Edward Cullen while passing through a good chunk of the paranormal romance genre, had momentarily de-fanged the vampire in quasi-genre literature.  One notes, however, that most of this vampiric denaturation has occurred at the borders of the genre, and not too often within horror itself: The “return of the evil vampire” was never needed for core horror fans.  Still, del Toro and Hogan make no secret of what they’re trying to do in this novel: As vampires land in Manhattan, it’s time for a zombie epidemic scenario featuring blood-suckers.

    The post-9/11 setting offers a few more interesting opportunities for critical commentary, especially considered within the book’s techno-thriller affections.  From the Dracula-inspired opening sequence in which a Boeing 777 lies immobile on the JFK tarmac with only four survivors left inside, The Strain co-opts some of the techno-thriller tricks to heighten its depiction of an initial vampire outbreak.  We get short chapters alternating between many narrative viewpoints.  We get tons of historical and technical details weaved into the fabric of the story.  We even get historical flashbacks explaining back-story, familiar characters, one-off vignettes in which the viewpoint character ends up dying horribly and use of landmark locations in action set-pieces.  (Or, as it happens, the use of former landmark locations in action set-pieces.)

    It may be familiar, but it works well: The opening sequence is creepy in part because it explains so patiently how official authorities would react to a supernatural mystery.  The picture that del Toro and Hogan end up creating of modern New York feels convincing, and does much to distinguish this novel from others in the same pack.  The use of thriller plot mechanics also allows the story to tackle a bigger canvas than other horror novels, which is practically a necessity in this avowed first volume of a trilogy that seems headed for global apocalypse.

    This potential for scope and breath, however, remains the most distinctive element of a novel that remains overly familiar in its other aspects.  If the vampire/zombie hybrids feel as if they stepped out of Blade 2, the human characters also seem to come out of Central Casting: Give me an overworked divorced scientist, a wizened holocaust survivor and a level-headed blue-collar worker! The entire narrative thrust of the novel is just as ordinary, down to the convenient “kill the head of the vampires and the rest will die” plot device.  The satisfaction-denied ending is also predictable from the moment we understand that this is the first volume of a trilogy.

    The good news are that this first volume does set up a promising follow-up, and that it’s solid enough to please horror fans looking for an uncompromisingly gory take on the vampire genre.  The Strain is forthright enough to announce that the two other volumes in the trilogy, The Fall and The Night Eternal, will be forthcoming in June 2010 and 2011.  Hopes are that they will take the story in more original territory.

    [October 2010: The Fall is a decent follow-up in that it continues the story is pretty much the same way, using pretty much the same characters and monsters.  While the apocalyptic atmosphere is stronger, the techno-thriller detailing isn’t as strong.  Traditional narrativus interruptus is typical for a second-volume-in-a-trilogy.  Recommended for fans of the first book, although it won’t make new converts to the series.]

    [January 2024: Oof — it took nearly fourteen years, but I finally made my way to The Night Eternal, third and concluding volume of The Strain trilogy. Never mind why, or how there was time in-between my buying the book and reading it for packing/unpacking my personal library three times and for a complete four-season TV show adaptation (which I haven’t seen) to be announced, produced, released and forgotten. This third volume is actually quite a bit more interesting than I expected — to the point that I seriously thought about reviewing it at length rather than hide it as an appendix to the review of the first volume.  But here goes, summarized: The post-apocalyptic setting of this third volume is unbelievable and overdone, but it does take the series to a logical and intriguing conclusion: “What if the vampires got everything they wanted?” It’s a third book that absolutely nails the tone of what a concluding installment should deliver: big payoffs, high drama and a nearly operatic conclusion.  Less happily, it transitions from a techno-thriller rationalist perspective to one in which biblical mumbo-jumbo ends up “explaining” everything.  At least the book does, once again, make good use of its New York City locations.  Amazingly enough, the third act leaves Manhattan and makes its way north, north, north… until it lands in the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence River — less than two hundred kilometers from where I live. The story itself may be interesting in many ways, but I’m not sure I’d classify it as completely successful:  There’s a romantic triangle to resolve, a family unit to disintegrate, old rivalries still burning bright after a two-year time-skip after the end of western civilization, and more contrivances than I care to highlight.  The nominal protagonist of the series has become a laughingstock of a junkie in order to set up his redemption arc, while his son is being turned into a vampire in many different ways.  As a reviewer getting back into the book-criticism game, I found it all interesting, but I could see how it would divide other readers — especially those who don’t pass by the Thousand Islands one a year.  Still, I’d rather have a flawed wild ride than the too-safe approach taken by the first volume.  In many ways, I wonder if a fourteen-year break between the second and third book may have worked to the third’s advantage: my expectations were nil except to get the book out of my to-read pile.  Now let’s have a look at that TV show…]

    [February 2024: Ooh, how interesting. I just watched (sometimes casually) The Strain TV show, and it’s a fascinating case study in adaptation.  Adapting a trilogy in a four-season show is not the same process as making a film out of a novel: While the latter means abridgement and concision, del Toro and Hogan had to go the other way in transforming their work into thirty-plus hours of running time: New characters are introduced, subplots expanded, second thoughts executed and entire dramatic arcs changed.  Sure, it starts with that immobile 777 on the JFK tarmac — but as the series develops, the differences get wilder and wilder.  The overall story scope is often smaller (the infection remains limited to New York City; the climax never leaves the island), there’s a lot of flashback-filler, some plot threads take forever to develop, and the series can never decide whether it’s committing to the vampire-plague apocalypse or not.  More significantly, the fates and arcs of some characters are significantly altered in the adaptation.  I ended up liking Fet a lot more due to actor Kevin Durand; I ended up liking Eph somewhat less even if he was played by the normally reliable Cliff Stoll. The increasing differences in plot as the series progressed actually kept my interest up — the moment some characters died early on, I couldn’t necessarily predict the specifics of the episode-to-episode plotting.  Past the end of the first season, The Strain TV Show is absolutely not a faithful adaptation of the trilogy — which may be for the best… and illustrate just how off-base the third volume is compared to the two first ones.]

  • Cemetary Dance, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    Cemetary Dance, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Grand Central, 2009, 435 pages, C$29.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-446-58029-8

    It’s books like this one that make me fear that one day, “they” will take away my critical license and forbid me from ever posting reviews on the web again.  When I will ask why, they will point to this review and stay silent, because it will stand on its own as the ravings of a terminally jaded reviewer.

    So here it is: Cemetary Dance is a dull disappointment that is barely worth the Preston/Child name.  It’s not particularly distinctive, recycles some of Preston/Child’s worst narrative tics and squanders one of its series’ recurring characters.  Once the last page is turned, we’re left without lasting memories, except for the impression of having wasted our time.

    It begins, like so many of Preston/Child’s previous collaborations do, with a gruesome murder.  This time, though, the victim is someone near and dear to readers of the series: Journalist Bill Smithback, who has been part of the Preston/Child universe since The Relic, is killed in his own apartment.  (This isn’t a spoiler, as it happens in chapter two and is an integral part of the cover blurb.)  Investigating the case, NYPD detective Vincent D’Agosta and FBI super-agent Aloysius Pendergast are troubled to find out that the murderer was conclusively identified as dead two weeks before.  Their investigation soon reveals mysterious connections with a cult hidden in an estate north of Manhattan.  Zombiis are inevitably involved.

    You would think that sacrificing a sympathetic recurring character would serve a greater purpose, but Smithback’s death has narrative meaning only in that the novel raises the possibility of reanimated zombie killers.  In this context, propping up the corpse of a dear old character is more effective than in grabbing a random stranger.  But in terms of narrative payoff, Smithback’s exit isn’t particularly worthwhile: the villains in this book aren’t noteworthy opponents, and when one thinks that Smithback made it through the Diogenes trilogy more or less intact, it seems like a waste of a good opportunity.  At the very least, Preston/Child are good enough to give us two dramatic farewell scenes from Smithback’s friends.

    But enough about Smithback, especially when there are bigger issues with the novel.  The most obvious one is the constant suggestion of supernatural mysteries, something that has always been part of the fabric of the Preston/Child universe ever since The Relic, but seldom more so than in the post-Brimstone sequence.  Again, though, the supernatural is unmasked to reveal a particularly tortured set of thriller conventions: By now, we’re so used to that Scooby-doo tricks that it’s hard to be worked up about it: Readers making it through Cemetary Dance will be more exasperated than thrilled in waiting for the inevitable rational explanation.  Those are getting increasingly implausible as novels go by, risking suspension of disbelief at every turn.  There comes a point in convoluted thrillers where supernatural explanations are simpler and more believable than the ludicrous chain of events that Preston/Child now favour.

    It also dovetails into a feeling that rather than trying to be original (say, by breaking out something as different as The Ice Limit), Preston/Child are seeking refuge in the familiar playground of New York settings and hackneyed thriller tricks.  By now, Pendergast and friends have been used in so many successive books and plunged in a succession of so many outlandish adventures that we know better than to take the adventures at their initial word: There is always another trick, another hidden Kevlar vest, purloined gun or fake death to rescue the characters.  (Well, except for Smithback who, until further notice, is stone-cold-dead.)  The titles of the latest Preston/Child novels have been largely interchangeable (something-death-something, from The Book of the Dead to The Wheel of Death to Dance of Death), but that only reflects something about their books

    All of this to say that it may be time for Preston/Child to either leave Pendergast behind or come up with a major novel in the sequence.  Cemetary Dance is, except for one major death, a minor work in their bibliography, forgettable to an extent that even Constance Green (who ought to be a mom by this time in the sequence) isn’t even to be found in the novel.  It’s a waste of money in hardcover, and barely worth a beach read in paperback.  Preston/Child have and will do better… but just not this time.

    Unless I’m so spectacularly jaded that I can’t even appreciate a run-of-the-mill thriller anymore.