Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Jennifer’s Body (2009)

    Jennifer’s Body (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, September 2009) Juno, Mamma Mia! and the Transformers have little in common except for how they set up expectations (and reactions) to this hum-drum horror/comedy movie in which a high-school sexpot is transformed in a man-eating succubus.  Would screenwriter Diablo Cody resurrect a tired genre with her lively dialogue?  Would Amanda Seyfried look less like a froggy muppet?  Would Megan Fox know what to do without giant robots around?  But while Jennifer’s Body is more interesting than most of the other teen horror movies out there, it’s practically the definition of a sophomore slump: Unsatisfying, disjointed and “off” in ways that are hard to pin down precisely. (Although if you want an idea of why the dialogue doesn’t always work, wait for the “Wikipedia” line.)  While the script shows moments of cleverness, genre-twisting and killer quips in answering the age-old question “what if the virgin sacrifice wasn’t a virgin?”, the plot as a whole seems to advance in unnatural fashion as determined by the screenwriter: Motivations are suspect, clichés abound, scenes don’t make much sense and even the self-conscious dialogue heightens the artificiality of the story.  Worst of all, Jennifer’s Body seems curiously unambitious in what it’s trying to do: the comedy falls flat, the horror is banal, the metaphors are weak and more than a few scenes seem to go through the expected beats.  At least some of the actors do well: well-cast Fox gets a bit more to do here than in Transformers, while Seyfried shows signs of being able to outgrow her current round-faced cuteness.  Overall, though, Jennifer’s Body is a letdown considering the anticipation surrounding its release, and a generally lacklustre film even taken solely on its own.  While its surface qualities are interesting (it’s a rare high-profile horror film written and directed by women, acknowledging teenage sexuality, and featuring two actresses with only secondary roles for the actors), it’s far less subversive than you may expect or hope for.

  • 9 (2009)

    9 (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, September 2009) Being visually striking counts for much, but there’s a limit to how much it can compensate for a generally unsatisfying story.  Like many bad fantasy films, 9 falls into mystery-meat plotting, in which protagonists do things that they can’t explain for reasons less explained by organic motivations than setting up the next scene.  The film doesn’t survive even cursory scrutiny: The story is thin, the characters even thinner, and the general doom and gloom of the post-apocalyptic storyline eventually leads to a victorious conclusion that doesn’t seem appreciably more hopeful.  There’s a sameness of tone through the film that takes its toll (even for a mere 80 minutes), especially since it seems to play exclusively with a palette of blacks, reds and browns.  On the other hand, 9 is likely to be remembered for an unusual combination of imagination and design, leading to a steampunkish grimness that works well as a series of disconnected moments.  The mechanic dolls that form most of the film’s characters are intriguing creations, and the care with which they’ve been given form will leave more than one viewer awed.  (This is the first film in a long time that had me admire its sound design work: Ah, the sound of metal-against-metal…)  It nothing else, it’s an original vision even if the story seems like an overly-familiar mixture of mushy incoherent mysticism and epic fantasy.  I wonder if the film will survive a second viewing more favourably than most, once the element of plot novelty has been removed from the equation.  (Or whether it would have done better as a video game)  Perhaps it’s better to see 9 as another calling card of sorts for director Shane Acker, while we wait for his next film.

  • Extract (2009)

    Extract (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, September 2009) This risqué yet generally amiable comedy by Mike Judge has little of the cubicle universality of Office Space of the striking conceptual strength of Idiocy.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does limit its appeal and give it little memetic traction.  In less pretentious terms, Extract is easily forgettable even if it’s not unpleasant to watch.  A good chunk of this appeal rests on the shoulders of the capable cast headlining the ensemble comedy.  The lead character of the piece, a harried chemist turned businessman now hitting a mid-life crisis pretty hard, wouldn’t be half as sympathetic if he wasn’t played with the good-boy charm of Jason Bateman.  Gene Simmons pops up as an intense ambulance-chasing lawyer, whereas J.K. Simmons is a bit wasted as a voice of reason in the middle of so much low-key craziness.  Extract’s plot scatters in multiple directions, with a number of small twists when characters don’t behave as they usually do in other comedies.  If the actual execution of the plot is hit-and-miss, Judge’s portrait of American working-class banality is just off-the-wall enough to keep viewers interested.  Time will tell if the film ends up producing as many catchphrases as the writer/director’s previous efforts, but a first glance suggests that this won’t be the case.  On the other hand, Extract does manage to hits its own targets consistently, and if a little more ambition (or class awareness) wouldn’t have hurt, at least there’s something to be said for decent entertainment.

  • Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009)

    Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, September 2009) In the crowded field of computer-animated 3D movies for kids, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is worth a look.  A relentlessly imaginative and fast-paced fantasy that will appeal to younger audiences as much as it will amuse their older chaperons, this is a film that fully exploits the possibilities of computer-generated animation: The art direction strikes an ideal balance between believability and whimsy, while the visuals shown on-screen wouldn’t be possible (or pleasant to see) as live-action.  How else, after all, do you make a movie about a scientist who invents a machine that makes food rain down on his town?  Much of the film is a series of delightful moments in which the premise is milked for maximum laughs, at a relentless pace that will ensure a second viewing.  The smaller surprise of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is the nerd-friendly characterization, in which a few courtship traditions are upended and pure geekiness eventually saves the day.  It’s hard not to like a movie that has a hero with a wall poster about “Nikola Tesla –ROCKSTAR SCIENTIST”, and even harder not to like a film in which the female love interest is said to be more beautiful after she starts wearing glasses again.  (Plus, hey, nice use of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”.)  So it’s unfortunate that Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs eventually damages itself with a number of ham-fisted emotional scenes that are too long and too obvious compared to the rest of the film.  But overlooking those moments isn’t difficult when contemplating the inventive imagination that powers the film’s set-pieces.  Now that there’s at least one computer-animated kid film in theatres per month, I’ll grudgingly suffer through one or two Igor if it means that I get a Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs in exchange.

  • Buyout, Alexander C. Irvine

    Buyout, Alexander C. Irvine

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Del Rey, 2009, 319 pages, C$16.50 tp, ISBN 978-0-345-49433-7

    There’s no rule saying that Science Fiction has to be predictive, but there’s no arguing that it can be –or, rather, that it’s uniquely apt to suppose a plausible change and follow its consequences.  So it is that Alexander C. Irvine’s first original SF novel, Buyout, feels like good old-fashioned Science Fiction with no tricks up its sleeves.  Not only is it a gripping read, it takes a premise and runs with it with more style and intensity than you’d expect from old-school SF.

    The premise will only feel natural to actuaries: In a medium-term future (2040) where California’s private prison system is (still) bursting at the seams, a company makes a few calculations and ends up figuring that it would be more profitable to execute young prisoners condemned to life without parole and give a huge payout to beneficiaries of their choosing than to keep them around for decades.  The ethical implications of this cold equation are… interesting, and one of Buyout‘s pleasures is to see how the argument plays out.

    The novel takes place in an all-too-believable future where water wars, omnipresent Internet connections and movie avatars have become unremarkable.  Our two viewpoint characters are Martin Kindred, an insurance worker who gets promoted to become the public face of the buyout program, and Charlie Rhodes, a cynical private investigator who recognizes in the buyout program something that can give him steady employment in checking motivations.

    Much of Buyout is about dramatizing the implication of the novel’s central premise.  How do prisoners petition for buyouts?  Who benefits?  Is it right?  Is it possible for some of that buyout money to do some good?  Won’t people deliberately commit crimes that would lead to buyouts, thereby improving their family’s life?  What about the possibility that buyouts may end up executing innocent people?  In Irvine’s hands, all of this is examined fairly, although not always finely: the inclusion of an activist character calling himself Carl Marks give an opportunity to properly critique his premise as an ultimate instrument of degenerate capitalism, albeit in an all-too-obvious fashion.  Politically, Irvine obviously leans left, but he gives some intriguing arguments in favour of his own hawkish premise.

    But while Buyout is obviously a novel of ideas (remove the premise, and everything fall apart), it also manages to do much with its characters.  Martin is in the terminal stage of his marriage as the novel begins, and the tensions of his position as the buyout spokesman inevitably lead to divorce, with consequent impact on his life and his relationship with his daughters.  Meanwhile, Charlie begins to doubt his friend Martin’s motivations as a personal tragedy starts erasing notions of cold dispassionate professionalism.  Characterization of secondary characters is sketched with professional skill, and it better be: with a conclusion that pushes both viewpoint characters as far as they can go, subtle nuances become crucial.  (On the other hand, Martin’s soon-enough-ex-wife is presented primarily from Martin and Charlie’s perspective… which is to say: not sympathetically.  But that’s characterization of a different sort.)

    Buyout is also highly enjoyable for its overheated atmosphere, a sunny noir so typical of its Los Angeles location.  The nature of its plot brings together a variety of characters from the prisoner, activist, legal and policing communities, with fascinating interactions.  Close-enough comparisons can be made with the novels of Michael Connelly, especially given the world-weariness of the characters and the detailed procedural explanation of the buyouts.  Snippets from an underground podcaster give us a lot of third-party contextualization, especially when it comes to presenting Irvine’s imagined future and the reactions of the crowd to the ideas that directly affect Martin and Charlie.

    Satiric (but not too much), reflective (but not too much) and idea-driven (but not too much), Buyout is not just a good read: it’s also the kind of novel that exemplifies what Science Fiction can accomplish in general, and what it doesn’t achieve when it retreats in the far-futures of space operas that might as well be labelled fantasy.  “Old-fashioned” and “Mundane SF” are not criticisms when applied to this novel, not when Buyout plays the classic SF game so well.  Irvine’s output since his 2000 debut has been scattered across many genres, but this solid first original SF novel should do much to leave an impression.  In the meantime, it’s one of the good surprises of the year so far.

  • The Informant! (2009)

    The Informant! (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, September 2009) If the essence of comedy is to do something new and poke fun at sacred cows, then Steven Soderbergh’s irreverent The Informant! is well on its way to hilarity.  Whistleblowers, obviously, are supposed to be tragic and noble figures.  Not, as portrayed by a surprisingly unglamorous Matt Damon, as borderline-moronic eggheads with little sense and vapid inner monologues.  The film’s initial structure is familiar, as a scientist with ethical concerns comes to work for the FBI in exposing a price-fixing conspiracy involving his corporation.  (It’s all based on real events.)  Idiotic protagonist aside, it begins as a reasonably amusing feature that seems to derive most of its comedy from decidedly mundane surroundings: Blatantly taking place in the American Midwest, The Informant! seems mostly concerned with trivia and discomfort.  But that too becomes another deception as the final act of the film gets rolling and it turns out that our protagonist has ethical problems that go far beyond being clueless.  As the snowball of his lies goes downhill, we come to realize the wisdom of the agents obsessed with figuring out his rationale for turning informant.  And, in the process, we end up with a parody of stories in which the whistleblower turns out to be clean as driven snow.  Reality, suggest Soderbergh’s film, is always more complicated.  And frequently more absurd than we can imagine.  While I can’t imagine many people thinking “Yeah, I want to watch this movie again!”, The Informant! a cheeky piece of comic subversion, especially coming from the same director as Erin Brokovich.

  • The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown

    The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday, 2009, 509 pages, C$36.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-385-50422-5

    Six years after the release of The Da Vinci Code (surely you’ve heard of it?), Dan Brown has a brand-new novel in store: The Lost Symbol.  The good and bad news are, indeed, the same: It’s an almost identical reading experience.

    There are a few differences between Brown’s latest novel and its predecessors, but not that many.  Consider this: Robert Langdon runs around a world-class city with a beautiful scientist, piecing together historical clues to avert a terrible event while trying to outwit a spiritually-motivated antagonist with a penchant for self-mutilation.  Familiar?  Yes.  Good enough for a third go-around?  Well, why not?

    This time, “Symbologist” (aka; trivia-master) Robert Langdon is called to Washington, where he gets to talk masonry with a woman studying pseudo-sciences.  They race around and under official buildings, survive attempts on their lives and spend half a day citing encyclopedia snippets at each other.  Surprisingly enough, it’s fun: While The Lost Symbol is a bit too familiar to create the same enthralling feeling as its predecessor, its accumulation of cheap stock thriller situations, short cliffhanging chapters, plausible-sounding details and compelling imagery makes it hard to stop reading.  It’s not refined but it’s got the essence of genre fiction entertainment.  The writing is even a bit better than in the previous books… or at least not quite as awful.

    The Lost Symbol even shows that Brown can have a sense of humor about himself: Early on, he takes potshots at the controversy about his previous novel (“My book group read your book about the sacred feminine and the church! What a delicious scandal that one caused!” [P.8]), his image (“He was wearing the usual charcoal turtleneck.” [P.8]) and, later on, editors complaining about the lateness of his novel (“You owe me a manuscript.” [P.176]).  While the suspense is usually too talky to be gripping, there are at least two memorable sequences in the book, one taking place in a completely dark hangar, and the other one pushing the whole “Character’s dead.  Dead-dead-dead.” shtick as far as it can go, and then a little bit further for good measure.  Cheap twists abound, although Brown does manage to do a few interesting things with parallel storytelling at times.

    Sadly, The Lost Symbol occasionally gets muddled on the shoals of yadda-yadda pseudoscience discredited back in the seventies but revived today as “noetic science” thanks to quantium jargon.  Brown may swear up and down that all the science in his book is true, but we know better.  (As a computer specialist, I’m usually disappointed whenever Brown discusses computers, and this novel has its share of IT nonsense as well.)  The pseudo-science, thankfully, doesn’t really affect the major plot lines of the book, but it’s a distracting-enough subplot that the novel could have dispensed with.

    Ironically, it almost takes mental muscles shaped by science-fiction to truly appreciate what Brown is attempting in the last tenth of the novel.  What he frequently does well (and what many imitators often forget) is to present a series of conceptual breakthroughs, big and small, that reveal the true shape of the world to protagonists and readers alike.  This is rarely as obvious as in the last fifty pages of The Lost Symbol: Once past the final action climax, the main plotline of the novel has been wrapped up with a few chapters still left to go.  It’s all over but for a few more revelations, which may be more conceptually important to Brown than the end of the thriller plot-line: The novel concludes on a pair of scenes meant to evoke a strong sense of wonder, and science-fiction readers will have been trained to respond well to such revelations.

    As for everyone else, well, the old saw hold true: “If you liked The Da Vinci Code, then…” yes, you’re going to like The Lost Symbol.  Conversely, those who hated Brown’s previous novels won’t be seduced by this one.  It is what it is, and if the same mixture of elements could have been quite a bit more interesting in better hands, it does manage to outdo many of the so-called “Da Vinci clones” in delivering the mixture of trivia, thrills, nonsense and fast pacing that we’ve come to expect from Brown.  It may be late in coming, but it does deliver.

    (Amateur puzzle-solvers will be happy to note that the US dust jacket sports at least four puzzles, and a few Easter Eggs.  I wasted an enjoyable thirty minutes solving two puzzles before rushing to read the solutions on-line.  As for the Easter Eggs, one of them will make you feel better about the recent loss of the traditional Doubleday “Anchor” logo.)

  • Whiteout (2009)

    Whiteout (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, September 2009) Thrillers are often as much about setting than about plot, and so the best thing about Whiteout is how it really tries to take advantage of its Antarctic environment.  It’s -50c outside on a white plain of ice, and the film occasionally does its best to give us all the claustrophobic, glacial, howling implications of that fact.  (The rest of the time; not so much, as any Canadian will tell you: no dripping shoes, no chapped lips, no frost-burn on the cheeks)  Unfortunately, there isn’t much more than that in store in this long-delayed B-grade thriller: The murder mystery is a bit of a bust, and the plot holes appear faster than the twists and turns.  Culprits are obvious early on (otherwise, why spend so much time featuring bit players?) and the way to the ending is littered with curious narrative choices: Why drag on the film for another 5-10 minutes after the action climax?  Why rely so heavily on coincidences, egregious oversights, dumb mistakes (such as, oh, not shooting someone coming at you with an axe?) and a generally linear plot?  Everything even remotely interesting is usually told twice (including flashbacks) and the intriguing fog of the first few minutes is so thoroughly dispersed that it has us wishing for more mystery.  (Can you believe four people wrote this?)  Even the execution feels off: it all leads up to a snowy fight in which it’s tough enough to know who’s who –let alone what’s happening.  Pretty Kate Beckinsale may have sold many/most of Whiteout’s tickets, but she’s miscast and overly made-up: an older, more world-weary heroine would have been far more believable. On the other hand, she’s not making any better impression than the film’s other actors.  As for director Dominic Sena, he’s done both better and more ludicrous in his career (Swordfish, anyone?) and either qualities would have been welcome here: he should consider going back to action movies.  As it is, Whiteout is just frozen in place, offering only a few meagre reasons to see it: people used to shoveling snow off their driveways every winter will have more thrills doing so.

  • Batman Forever (1995)

    Batman Forever (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, on DVD, September 2009) In retrospect, the post-1989 Batman movies neatly fall into a trio of pairs, with Batman Forever being the first of the Joel Schumacher duo that would reach such a nadir with Batman & Robin.  While Batman Forever is noticeably worse than Burton’s Batman Returns, it still carries itself with flashy colourful blockbuster grandeur, with ridiculous set-pieces that nonetheless show a certain breadth of conception.  As a result, it hasn’t aged all that badly… but don’t expect much: there are still plenty of ridiculous moments in the mix, and Jim Carrey as the Riddler now feels like Ace Ventura in costume: his tics are so recognizably his that they don’t mesh all that well in the bigger tapestry of the movie.  The rest often feels overlong and underthought, with a campy atmosphere that never completely meshes with the rest of the film.  The special edition DVD is both interesting and disappointing in that it does present a number of interesting deleted scenes that deepen the film (and those themes would later pop up in the Nolan-era Batman movies) but almost never acknowledges its troubled production history.  Even Schumacher’s commentary presents a rosy view of Batman Forever’s production: it’s not an uninteresting commentary, but it seems to skirt around essential material.  The rest of the features aren’t much above promotional fluff.

  • Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

    Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Little, Brown, 1996, 1078 pages, C$40.00 hc, ISBN 0-316-92004-5 sept12

    So, I finally made it through David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.1

    1. Since this is a novel that defies the notion of a novel, I can’t really review it.  But have a few notes instead:

    • For those who aren’t aware of Infinite Jest, here are a few essential pointers: It’s a 1078-pages novel with 388 endnotes (some of them with their own endnotes) spread over nearly 100 pages.  It’s dense and full of show-off moments: Pages without paragraph breaks are not uncommon, and Wallace seems determined to approach even the most ordinary scene with an oblique, ever-changing angle.  The novel takes place in a world that features “an entertainment” so compelling that it sucks viewers into compulsive re-viewing.  Still, the real point of Infinite Jest is a series of sequences about tennis players, addicts and separatists.  No plot summary will ever do it justice: there’s simply too much stuff in this novel.  It’s both elusive and verbose and fits just about every criteria that identifies experimental fiction.
    • It took me forever to get to it, and almost-forever to actually read it.  I had actually purchased the book years ago, thanks to its reputation, but kept pushing it aside for shorter reads.  It took the Infinite Summer online reading project to get me to finally get cracking on the book, and even then that wasn’t as smooth as I had hoped for: I ended up reading the first half of the book in early July (ironically, on a road trip from Ottawa to Montréal to Boston and back, which is pretty amusing given where Infinite Jest takes place) and the second half in a frantic week in September, just in time for the end of the Infinite Summer reading schedule.
    • A good chunk of Infinite Jest’s reputation is built upon an accumulation of intricate details about esoteric subjects that makes one reluctant to challenge the author’s authority.  Fortunately, the novel does deal a lot with French-Canadian themes, from French-language quotes in the text to frequent mentions of Québécois separatists as antagonists of the tale.  To anyone familiar with either separatism or the French language, however, it quickly becomes obvious that Wallace’s understanding of either subject is superficial at best: references to Quebec history are ludicrous, and about half of the French-language expressions in the text are simply wrong in ways that would be obvious to francophone grade-schoolers.  This, ironically, made the author seem more human and the novel consequently more accessible.
    • I rarely relate to novels as a writer of fiction, since my fiction output is infrequent, awful and thankfully unpublished.  But Infinite Jest made me realize how far one could go in the intricacies of writing fiction.  Much fiction writing is about finding a way to express world-building, character interaction, inner feelings or plot development.  Wallace goes so far in the direction of trivial overload (ie; putting meat around the bones of his plot, even if plot isn’t a primary force in his novel) that he ends up reassuring everyone unwilling to follow.  That revelation dawned on me during a ten-page endnote that appears to be a filmography but is really a chronology of some events in Wallace’s future history.  At some point, readers are bound to hit a wall of self-questioning and ask themselves not only why they’re reading Infinite Jest, but why they’re reading fiction at all.  What’s the point?  Why spend so much time and mental energy reading things that, to put it simply, don’t and will never exist?a
    • I didn’t like Infinite Jest as much as I admired its audacity and loved specific moments of it.  There are some terrific passages in this book (the history lesson on pages 391-410 is a tour de force, equal to the Eschaton wargame sequence and about a dozen other “good bits” as the highlights of the book), and its conceptual audacity has enough to warm the hardened heart of any jaded reader.  This being said, most of the time Infinite Jest seems to suffer from an acute case of verbiage.  My patience runs thin when I’m bored…
    • My confession: I invoked a good chunk of Daniel Pennac’s “Rights of the Reader” (PDF) while reading Infinite Jest, if only because they seemed essential to making it to the end of the novel.  I skimmed so many passages that it’s an open question as to whether I actually read most of the novel.  I re-read parts when something interesting started while I was reading diagonally.  I went on-line and memorized contextual material about the novel.  I read the novel anywhere I could carry it (which was limited by the book’s bulk).  I even read some of the good bits aloud to whoever was around.  I dipped in and out, and even began this review a hundred and fifty pages before the end.  In short, I read Infinite Jest my way, and don’t let anyone else try to tell you that there’s a right or wrong way to do it.  If you decide to spend time reading this novel (while you could read four or five others for the same amount of effort), be sure to make it yours.b

    a. An answer to that question is to be found on page 200-211, a list of things learned in a halfway house that feels like a glimpse at the universal human condition.

    b. But consider the advice of those who tell you that you’ll need more than one bookmark.

  • Songs of the Doomed, Hunter S. Thompson

    Songs of the Doomed, Hunter S. Thompson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 1990 (2002 reprint), 355 pages, C$24.00 pb, ISBN 0-7432-4099-5

    As my sequential reading of Hunter S. Thompson’s work progresses onward, I have to read about the worst years like I read about the best: After the glory years of the early seventies, Thompson’s output during the eighties became a lot more fragmented: Generation of Swine (1989) collected a hundred of his San Francisco Examiner columns, while Songs of the Doomed riffles through Thompson’s archives to present snippets of material written between 1950 and 1990.  It’s billed as a retrospective, but it feels a lot like the publication of redundant material wrapped around a few worthwhile pieces that followed The Great Shark Hunt.

    Part of this impression is formed by my extensive readings about Thompson, much of it published after Songs of the Doomed.  While the publication of excerpts from The Rum Diary must have caused a sensation back in 1990, it’s more interesting today for comparative purposes given how the entire novel manuscript was revised and published in 1998.  Some of the letters included here are also available in one of the two books of letters published so far.  On the other hand, the snippets from Prince Jellyfish in Songs of the Doomed still remain today the only publicly-available chapters from Thompson’s first novel.

    From time to time, it seems as if Thompson is either recycling notes, or reprinting familiar material.  It doesn’t help that we’re rarely told when excerpts are reprints or take-offs on familiar material.  “The Edge” passage from Hell’s Angels is reprinted as “Midnight on the Coast Highway”, whereas what looks like another draft of the high-water mark in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is presented as, indeed, “High-Water Mark”.  Thompson scarcely introduces his pieces either: in-between text, we get italicized anecdotes that don’t offer much to those who have gone through the rest of his (auto-)biographical material.

    Still, there is some more interesting material at hand.  Thompson may have officially published very little outright fiction, but he kept having ideas for novels and stories, and some of those abortive segments are included here, including notes on The Silk Road (a crime thriller inspired by the influx of Cuban refugees in early-eighties Florida) and a promising beginning called “Fear and Loathing in Sacramento”, intriguing despite elements that approach self-parody.  The snippets of Sacramento were apparently published as part of Thompson’s final columns for the SF Examiner, and they go well with other pieces that seem just as determined to dip into pure fiction.

    But the real gem of the book is one of the few gonzo articles written too late to be included in The Great Shark Hunt: “Love on the Palm Beach Express: The Pulitzer Divorce Trial” is one of the last articles that Thompson would write as a journalist, and it’s a savage look at the lifestyle of the rich and scandalous in Palm Beach, Florida.  Thomspon scholars already know that this was the article that made Thompson realize that he was too famous to keep doing journalism work: his presence disrupted the trial he was supposed to cover, although it’s ironic that we get no trace of this very gonzoesque incident in the article itself.

    Even for those who start reading Songs of the Doomed with an open mind and the best of intentions, the sheer familiarity of the material makes it tough to disagree with the assessment that Thompson was a shadow of his former creative self by the eighties.  The last chunk of the book focuses on the writer’s early 1990 legal problems, but the impact of that section seems to operate on an entirely different level than Thompson intended: while he portrays himself as a downtrodden citizen persecuted by a police state for political reasons, many readers will see this section as the culmination of the rest of the book: after a life spent “in the passing lane” advocating drugs, insanity and violence, Thompson got caught.  Numerous Thompson biographers have noticed that the writer was never more comfortable than when he was the source of whatever craziness went around; his loud protests when he got arrested show how different things looked when he was at the receiving end of some good old-fashioned fear and loathing.  It’s enough to make one become a bit more sceptical of Thompson’s oft-quoted slogan “it never got weird enough for me.”

  • Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S. Thompson, Ed. Anita Thompson

    Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S. Thompson, Ed. Anita Thompson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Da Capo Press, 2009, 411 pages, C$22.95 tp, ISBN 978-0-306-81651-2 sept4

    Depending on your level of cynicism, there are at least two ways of looking at Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, a lengthy compendium of interviews with Hunter S. Thompson.  You can see it as an homage to an American writer whose career spanned decades, an over-sized personality whose personal excesses were as legendary as his best-known works and an infamous wit who almost unfailingly provided interviewers with great material.  But you can also see it as yet another brick in the growing cottage industry that revolves around Thompson, an industry that began in earnest a decade before Thompson’s suicide in 2005.

    Since the mid-nineties, we’ve seen the publication of two volumes of his letters, re-editions of his rarer out-of-print books (in matching sets, even), a number of personal memoirs and a few more dispassionate biographies.  Given Thompson’s lifelong obsession with money, it would certainly please him to understand that he now accounts for a small sliver of the publishing industry’s revenue stream.  For fans and readers, though, it raises the question as to when we’ll reach saturation point.  As the wait drags on for The Mutineer, a third-and-last volume of his personal letters, the arrival of Ancient Gonzo Wisdom sidesteps the issue by offering fans exactly what it promises: a highly enjoyable collection of interviews.

    Spanning decades between 1967 and 2005, this book follows Thompson’s career as he goes from an obscure writer solely known for a book about the Hell’s Angels, to his growing fame as the first gonzo journalist, to the elder curmudgeon whose words passed into legend.  A media biography of sorts, Ancient Gonzo Wisdom is perhaps most interesting in the look it offers at those who talk to Thompson: their questions change as Thompson’s celebrity grows, and different venues focus on different aspects of the writer’s life.  By their inclusion here, a few landmark pieces are now easily available to Thompson scholars as well: The infamous 1974 Playboy interview by Craig Vetter is reprinted (albeit edited) and those who are curious about Thompson’s lectures to college students will be glad to see a few of them transcribed here.

    Some of the most interesting pieces go beyond the usual interview format to tackle specific venues or subjects.  Early on, a lengthy and detailed interview for a Boston radio station focuses almost exclusively on politics.  Twice, High Times discusses drugs with “elderly dope fiend” Thompson, first in 1977 and then again in 2003.  In-between, the Washington Journalism Review and the Paris Review discuss journalism.  Perhaps the strangest piece is self-avowed fan Phoebe Legere’s interview for Puritan adult magazine: the two seem to know each other intimately, and the interview soon takes on airs of a comedy skit in-between discussions of sexual techniques: “Phoebe screams, he brandishes the gun” [P.245]

    Not all interviews are coherent, though, and (even leaving aside the further editing specific to the book) there can be a dramatic difference from venue to venue in how well they edit Thompson’s words.  Some interviews are barely understandable, while others distill Thompson’s words into quasi-epigrams: One of the best editing decisions is to close the book with a posthumous May 2005 Playboy piece which boils down a week’s worth of discussions into solid “postcard wisdom”.

    More than half of the pieces presented in Ancient Gonzo Wisdom date from the last ten years of Thompson’s life, which can be explained by the wider availability of recent material but also end up presenting a view of Thompson biased toward the latter-day legend.  It’s both amusing and dispiriting to see that Thompson saw the Bush administration in a clear light well before most Americans did; on the other hand, some of the last interviews show Thompson sliding toward conspiracy theories from the JFK assassination to the “9/11 was an inside job” truthers.

    If nothing else, Ancient Gonzo Wisdom presents, in a nutshell, the evolution of Thompson as seen by popular media.  The introductions to the pieces (as writers frequently have trouble reaching Thompson) are often as interesting as the interviews themselves, and the sheer force of Thompson’s personality has no trouble shining through the page.  This may not be an essential Thompson book, but it’s a good read and a decent addition to the Thompson bibliography.  But seriously, when is The Mutineer coming out?

    [November 2009: There is another compilation of interviews out there: Conversations with Hunter S. Thompson, edited by Beef Torrey and Kevin Simonson for the very-serious University Press of Mississippi.  Much of the material will feel familiar to veteran Thompson readers, and even more so for readers of Ancient Gonzo Wisdom.  The emphasis here is usually placed on Thompson-the-writer or Thompson-the-Journalist, although latter pieces tend to focus on Thompson-the-Difficult-Interview-Subject: Typical post-1990 pieces tend to include a lengthy description of the interview process as prologue, sidebar and epilogue to Thompson’s words.  Unlike Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, the interviews here have not been edited and are printed as they first appeared –including the Vetter interview for Playboy, which appears in both collections.]

  • Gamer (2009)

    Gamer (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, September 2009) It goes without saying that I’m about twice the age of Gamer’s intended audience of XBox-addicted teens who would think that a real-life FPS with remote-controlled convicts is a cool idea.  Nonetheless, even the most enthusiastic gamers will have no trouble recognizing a lousy film when they see one.  Light on SF ideas and just as disappointing in strict action-movie terms, Gamer pushes the lightning-quick editing craze as far as it goes until it shreds to tatters.  The irony, of course, is that gaming usually takes place within a long continuous shot that allows players to build a strong mental landscape of their surroundings: Chopping up an action scene in a flurry of split-second shots is the exact opposite of that kind of aesthetics.  But this is starting to sound like old-guy complaining, so let’s focus on Gamer’s more substantial failings: the cookie-cutter plot that feels like a re-thread of so many other “real game” movies (I don’t usually bring up Death Race in conversation, but there’s an exception to everything), the wasted thematic foundations of a film using gaming as a metaphor about control, the sheer weirdness of -say- a dance number confrontation between hero and villain… Gamer is a bit of a mess, really, but it doesn’t even have what it takes to become an enjoyable mess.  Aside from Gerard Butler’s credible presence as an action hero and the pedigree of writer/directors Neveldine/Taylor, there’s little, in fact, to distinguish Gamer from so many dull straight-to-video SF thrillers.  Why don’t you fire up the console instead?

  • Dance of Death, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    Dance of Death, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner Books, 2005 (2006 mass-market reprint), 560 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-61709-1

    This one is for the fans.

    Readers completely new to the Preston/Child novels should enjoy this latest magisterial demonstration of why they reign as the most popular team in contemporary thrillers, but it’s really the fans who have read all nine of their previous collaborations that will enjoy Dance of Death to its fullest extent.  It bring together elements of nearly everything in their shared bibliography, exploits existing relationships, puts recurring characters through tough situations, upsets a few familiar truths and delivers extra payoffs for readers with long memories.

    It is, after all, the second volume in the “Diogenes Trilogy”.  But unlike its predecessor Brimstone, the duel between FBI Agent Aloysius Pendergast and his brother Diogenes is not a subplot: it takes center-stage, and Diogenes is a featured character as plan for a “perfect crime” unfolds in and around New York.  Aloysius, predictably, has survived the sombre conclusion of Brimstone, but people around him may not fare as well as Dance of Death begins and a number of his acquaintances are killed.  Could Diogenes’ plan have as an ultimate victim his own brother?  How could it not?

    Those acquaintances include practically everyone in the Preston/Child universe, and so Dance of Death feels like an extended reunion with walk-in roles for nearly everyone ever featured in their previous nine novels.  Some of those appearances aren’t much more than one-scene mentions; others have a far greater role to play in the story.  Fans of The Ice Limit, in particular, will get not only a cute meta-fictional wink (as characters see a copy of Ice Limit III: Return To Cape Horn), but a pair of spellbinding chapters in which thought-to-be-dead Eli Glinn goes head-to-head with agent Pendergast.  Readers will even decode a sequel of sorts to The Ice Limit from the various clues left in plain view by Preston/Child.

    Other links cleverly exploit various characters’ particular talents and skills: NYPD Laura Hayward is a dogged investigator looking into Pendergast’s role in the murders, while her boyfriend Vincent D’Agosta makes a perfect brawny companion to the cerebral FBI agent.  Even elements of the plotting seem to echo previous Preston/Child collaborations, as yet another big exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History goes spectacularly awry; it goes without saying that both curators Nora Kelly and Margo Green are involved in some way –one of them more dramatically than the other.

    In sheer thrills, it’s always amazing to see Preston/Child manage to re-use old classic elements and wrap them into something new.  Jaded thriller readers won’t help but smile at the accumulation of well-worn plot devices crammed in the novel: Sane people wrongfully committed; diamond thievery (twice!); characters framed for murder; love interest held hostage… there’s even a pair of thrilling car chases to keep things rolling along.

    But the real thrill of Dance of Death is in seeing a duel of masterminds.  Agent Pendergast has always been a ridiculously overpowered protagonist, and novels such as Still Life with Crows only proved how tricky it was to match him with a challenging opponent.  Now it looks as if The Diogenes Trilogy is designed to provide a fair adversary for Pendergast.

    The novel ends on a note that will send fans rushing to get the third volume: Dance of Death keeps going about thirty pages longer than it could, building up a sense of anticipation that another phase of the story is starting… and that it’s interrupting itself just when it’s getting good.

    As usual, it’s this combination of familiar characters, solid thrills, catchy prose and overall forward rhythm that continues to mesmerize Preston/Child readers.  Dance of Death does not transcend the contemporary thriller genre, but it fully exploits that storytelling mode and provides the entertainment that genre fiction should reliably provide.  The Diogenes trilogy concludes in The Book of the Dead, and only the strongest-willed readers won’t drop everything in order to see what happens next.

  • The Final Destination [Final Destination 4] (2009)

    The Final Destination [Final Destination 4] (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2009) By the fourth entry in this horror franchise, we already know what we’re going to get: a nihilistic string of Rube-Golbergian mechanisms of death, with a side order of dark humour.  The Final Destination may struggle to present anything distinctive, but it certainly delivers the bare minimum of what the audience is expecting.  As a piece of carnography, it’s assembled with skill and a willingness to keep things moving at a fast clip –within the confines of slick B-grade teenage horror, that’s already not too bad.  Of course, it never comes close to escaping the confines of its own expectations: The plot is the same as the first three instalments (albeit with even less justification), the nihilism is even stronger, the gore just as excessive and even when the film seems to display an attempt at wit, it never bothers going the extra step forward.  The filmmakers will want you to believe that the 3D conception of The Final Destination somehow put it apart, but aside from the requisite impalements and things-through-your-eye (non-horror 3D movies love to throw things at your face; horror 3D movies love to throw things through your face) the film is going to be just as bland on 2D-DVD.  Film geeks will spot a number of references to the other entries in the franchise (including a 3D CGI gallery of the previous three film’s “best-of” deaths, along with a nasty little coda in the same style), but little approaching real effort: even the meta-finale, taking place in a movie theatre where they’re showing a 3D movie, seldom bothers to go beyond the superficial.  The characters are bland, some deaths feel perfunctory (readers of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Guts” will chuckle at one) and the lack of evolution in the series’ mythology reinforces the creative cash-in nature of this sequel.  But don’t worry: The Final Destination may be pretentiously titled, but there will be another one in a year or two… and chances are that you can already figure how it’s going to go and how it’s going to end.