Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Saw V (2008)

    Saw V (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, April 2009) I can’t say that I’ve followed this series closely (I’ve seen the third and fourth installment in bits and pieces, just enough to keep up with the storyline), but this fifth entry is easily the least satisfying yet. While the series has always been a contrived exercise in self-referential carnography, the third and fourth volumes at least had the decency of some intricate plotting, along with occasional flourishes of cinematography (such as the clever scene transitions in Saw IV) and rough morality. This fifth entry, on the other hand, is more nihilistic than sadistic, and does little to enhance the series: Everyone even remotely sympathetic dies horribly (I predict that no one in this series will survive it), and there’s no point to it all. The traps have finally become a substitute for plotting, and the appeal of Jigsaw as a lead character feels more overdone than ever. Yet Saw VI is nearing post-production…

  • Obsessed (2009)

    Obsessed (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2009) Every generation needs its Fatal Attraction remake, so it’s not a stretch to suppose that the current twenty-something audience deserves nothing more than a limp reiteration of the same dramatic situation, except with bad storytelling instincts. The lead male character is dull by design: Despite an intriguing back-story of womanizing, he spends the picture being holier-than-thou, and escapes jeopardy mostly by the intervention of others. But that bad storytelling aspect takes a back-seat to the complete shift in protagonist that occurs during the last ten minutes, as the putative “hero” is sidelined to an SUV commute while another character resolves the main conflict of the picture. It’s dumb, deeply unsatisfying, and telling of the relative star-power of Idris Elba versus Beyoncé Knowles. It’s a very pretty movie with attractive characters, but the script is all wrong, and barely interested in its most interesting aspects. Even Ali Larter, as the designated psycho, gets little to play with as none of her character’s motivations are explored. Obsessed shows how unsatisfying a bad script can be even when most other aspects are handled professionally: there’s nothing left of the “psycho stalker” suspense except the memory of other, better films.

  • Fighting (2009)

    Fighting (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2009) There’s far more drama and far less fighting in this picture than you might expect. While most bare-knuckles-fighting movies beef up their action with an insubstantial plot, this film seems like it was first conceived as a hustling drama with fighting scenes penciled in. The tension could have revolved around chess-playing that it wouldn’t have changed much to the overall impact of the film. Alas, this approach leads to perfunctory fighting scenes that barely affect the characters and leave no lasting memories. As it is, Fighting is bit dull, and hardly deserving of any “action” designation. As a drama, it’s definitely centered around New York hustlers, which limits its appeal somewhat: Channing Tatum’s lead character knows how to fight and flirt, while Terrence Howard as his new best friend (and agent) remains steadfastly stuck in his cloying wimp mode. Zulay Henao isn’t too bad as the perfunctory love interest, but the rest of the picture is simply too dull and convenient to warrant much attention. With better filmmakers willing to cut away at the endless “dramatic” scenes, this could have been turned into a far more interesting picture, even it would have erred on the side of exploitation.

  • Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, Hunter S. Thompson

    Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72, Hunter S. Thompson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Grand Central, 1973 (2006 reprint), 481 pages, C$20.99 tpb, ISBN 978-0-446-69822-1

    Few things age faster that political reporting, especially when covering actual elections. Today’s hot scoop is tomorrow’s accepted wisdom and next week’s irrelevant history. It’s no surprise that political commentary has been embraced so fiercely by the instant-publishing world of blogging, when every moment counts and no opinion goes unpublished.

    But it wasn’t always so, and a lifetime ago (my lifetime, at least) some periodicals had to be content with running election coverage once every two weeks. Few people would be crazy enough to accept such an assignment, but gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson wasn’t an entirely sane man even when he was completely sober. When Thompson managed to convince the biweekly Rolling Stone magazine to cover the 1972 presidential elections, a unique match was struck between reporter and venue: Thompson would set up shop in the nation’s capital and cover the election from an avowed left-leaning perspective, without any regard to keeping bridges standing longer than it would take to make it to November 1972.

    From the very first installment, in which Thompson describes a hellish wintertime drive from Colorado to Washington (speaking to some suspiciously convenient interlocutors along the way), it’s obvious that this isn’t routine objective political reporting. Thompson barged on that world with an outsider’s perspective, and no amount of official accreditation would alter this mindset. By the time he allows his press credentials to be used by a heckler to climb aboard disliked candidate Ed Muskie’s whistlestop tour, and later plants rumors of Muskie’s Ibogaine drug addiction, it’s obvious that Thompson is neither neutral nor interested in playing it safe. That largely explains why the result of this year-long electoral chronicle still remain compelling, more than 35 years after publication.

    Much of the book has aged ungracefully: Despite Thompson’s intent to explain the mechanics of the presidential campaigning process to readers discovering politics for the first time, many of his off-hand references to contemporary figures and events are now mystifying: Readers may want to invest a few minutes into reading a more objective summary of the 1972 campaign before leaping into the more impressionistic, commentary-enhanced prose of Thompson’s chronicles. Some of the photos, most notably, could now use updated captions as the event surrounding them have completely faded away and the surrounding text doesn’t help.

    Thompson isn’t nearly as interesting a reporter as he is a commentator, or a walking stereotype of his own burgeoning legend. Some of the most dramatic hard-news moments of the campaign (such as the attempted assassination of candidate George Wallace) are distantly described at a remove, whereas some of the book’s strongest passages occur as Thompson takes flights of fancy into the mystique of a hard-boozing reporter stuck between hellish working conditions and inflexible deadlines, or editorializes the results of the election —famously saying

    “This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves, finally just lay back and say it —that we are really just a nation of 220 million used-car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.” [P.389]

    and proving that some things remain true even decades and a few more million Americans later.

    But the insane pacing of a presidential campaign eventually takes its toll on the reporter. It’s not insignificant if more than half of the book focuses on the Democratic party primaries and if nearly two-thirds of the narrative occurs before the end of the two party conventions in Miami –the rest of the campaign is covered limply, and a good chunk of the book’s last third takes the form of post-election analysis. In the grand arc of Thompson’s career, Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail ’72 marks an intellectual crescendo of sorts; an enduring proof of what he could do when running in peak condition. But many biographers also describe how the campaign broke Thompson’s spirit, dogged him through tense personal moments, led him to harder drugs and made him a celebrity, all of which would make it impossible for him to go back to the type of work he was capable of doing between the release of Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (which was finally published in book form during the campaign). More significantly, it’s also the book that cemented Thompson’s credentials as a celebrity political commentator —a role he would adopt until the end of his life.

    But On the Campaign Trail ’72 hasn’t aged as well as Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in part because its ground-breaking quality gets increasingly less distinct as the years go by. For modern readers tempered in the fire of the 2004 and 2008 elections, Thompson’s prose reads a lot like pungent blog entries fueled by an unusual level of access. Thompson’s then-revolutionary subjective viewpoint is now a common quality of partisan blogging, and his “getting the story” gonzo-journalism shtick has now been co-opted by an increasing number of blogs set up by established mainstream reporters. In their own ways, bloggers are the true children of gonzo, reporting quickly and without any editorial filters to their readers and trusting them to see where reporting ends and subjective commentary begins. (No wonder if some of Thompson’s last writing was published on ESPN’s web site, in a style faithful both to his earlier gonzo work and to modern blog-writing.)

    For those who have read a lot about Thompson and his writing process, it’s hard to read this collection of essays without sparing a thought for the Rolling Stone editors who had to wrestle Thompson’s undisciplined output into readable shape. The effort isn’t completely transparent: The columns still have a herky-jerky stream-of-madness quality that reads more like a stack of related items than a sustained narrative. The last third of the book is particularly scattered, as the “notes from the editor” multiply and narrative fiction is suspended in favor of interview-like questions-and answers. After lengthy missives earlier during the year, the entirety of the month of October fits in four airy pages of anguished prose about the inevitability of Nixon’s victory.

    It’s hard to make out the true shape of the campaign at is occurs, but the final pages are made of savvy analysis about the campaign. For modern readers, the 1972 presidential campaign remains one of the most baffling one in American history: Even as the Watergate scandal was picking up steam, a war-torn America still awarded Richard Nixon one of the largest majority on record, only a few months before he resigned the presidency —and that’s not even mentioning Spiro Agnew’s straight journey from the vice-presidency to prison. Thompson’s instant analysis provides a few clues as to what happened, but it’s noteworthy that his undisguised loathing of failed vice-presidential democratic candidate Thomas Eagleton would dovetail with the 2007 revelations that Eagleton
    was the undisclosed originator of the “Amnesty, Abortion, and Acid” catch-phrase that so damaged George McGovern during the campaign.

    But the most remarkable thing about the book is that even nine presidential elections later, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 remains an intriguing read for American politics junkies. The good moments are still a joy to read, and the time-capsule aspect of the narrative has a certain interest. Needless to say, the book amply proves why it remains near the top of Thompson’s bibliography. It’s a just a shame that he was never able to reach that level of sustained political analysis ever again.

  • Fast & Furious aka The Fast and the Furious 4 (2009)

    Fast & Furious aka The Fast and the Furious 4 (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2009) It’s useless to try to judge this film by most conventional standards. Its sole goal, after all, is to stroke the pleasure centers of automobile enthusiasts (a group that mostly overlaps with Y chromosomes) and its success it directly tied to how much automobile goodness it crams on-screen. The return of the first film’s cast isn’t a bad idea, but the boys have all the fun while the girls are kept off-screen or hastily taken out of the picture. At least Vin Diesel and Paul Walker have some fun rekindling their on-screen rivalry. Action-wise, the standout remains the opening chase sequence: The rest of the picture is a bit too over-edited and CGI-enhanced to make much of an impact. As for the cars, well, they’re a satisfying mixture of modern rice-burners and classic American muscle. It’s a shame that the cheerful multicultural shock of Tokyo Drift isn’t as strong here, but make no mistake: Between the colorful Southern California locale and the reggaeton soundtrack, this is still a twenty-first century motion picture for the young and licensed. It’s fun, it’s not often boring and, most of all, it shows fast cars and girls kissing girls –there’s no denying that it’s another entry in the ongoing franchise.

    (Second viewing, Streaming, December 2025) In the Fast and Furious pantheon, the fourth instalment is the boring but necessary one — noticeably limper in matters of action, but still essential in charting the series and reuniting the leads into a more coherent whole that would be developed later on. It’s not a surprise if I hadn’t bothered re-watching it, nor thought about it too much since seeing it: with its sequel redefining the series, it’s hardly an essential watch if you’re into what the franchise became with Fast Five. But taken as a whole, it does have a few high points in-between the drudgery. The opening sequence, in which the series’s fascination for stealing things off moving vehicles is indulged with a five-trailer gas tanker, is the kind o f strong over-the-top action sequence that would become the mainstay of later films in the series. There’s some good-and-necessary character work from Paul Walker (back as a cop, for one film) and Vin Diesel in having the characters reunite not-so-easily, as well as a few more crumbs to Jordana Brewster and Michelle Rodriguez. It’s the real sequel to the first film, and it finishes hammering the foundation that the series would use as of the next installment. Still, Fast & Furious remains remarkably duller than it should: Despire acceptable work from director Justin Lin, early good moments gradually give way to an underwhelming third act, hampered (as the film’s production history says) by an undercooked script due to the then-writer’s strike. The villain is dull (with a whole identity-switcheroo plot wrinkle that’s completely useless), the last action scene was a bad idea from the get-go, and the “death” of a main characters is badly handled. While its first act is more easily watchable than I remembered, Fast & Furious gradually reminded me of why I found it so unremarkable — starts off strong, ends with a whimper. Fortunately, much better was to come later.

  • Crank: High Voltage (2009)

    Crank: High Voltage (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2009) I remain severely conflicted about this film: While I admire its go-for-broke audacity, it carries along the unpleasant smell of moral decay. I’m a sucker for any kind of cinematic experimentation, especially in the action genre –but there was a clear moment in the film, as a stripper’s fake breasts start pouring silicone from a well-placed gunshot, that I realized that my moral integrity was being forever tainted by the excesses of this picture and everything it represents about the state of contemporary cinema. This film is about movement and thrills: its human characters are mere flesh puppets to abuse in the pursuit of ever-more nihilistic visual flashes. Sure, Ling Bai is a whirlwind dervish, and Jason Statham is just as solid as ever. But little is redeemable about this film, not when it sacrifices basic logic and decency in the pursuit of cheap laughs and gross-out moments. Most will agree that Crank 2 is fantasy cinema, and various elements such as a character running around with an artificial heart, fighting like Godzilla and throwing away disembodied heads will only underscore this. Yet there are moment in this film that can’t be unseen, and it may not be too late for a moment of stark moral reflexion: This film only enables the next and worse step that will push the boundary of moral disgust even further. Have I really written this review? Crap, I’m getting old.

  • 12 Rounds (2009)

    12 Rounds (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2009) There’s nothing deep or subtle about this pure B-grade action-fest, and that’s quite all right: For all of its faults, plot-holes, impassive protagonist or by-the-numbers direction, 12 Rounds understands that it’s there to deliver some car-crushing, house-blowing, fist-fighting action. And that it does, thanks to a simple high concept that requires our square-jawed oxen protagonist (Wrestler John Cena, in a decent follow-up to his role in The Marine) to run all around New Orleans to stop a master criminal/terrorist from killing his girlfriend. It the kind of movie where a trip to Point A to B turns into a demolition derby with a firetruck. Renny Harlin’s direction is just enough above hum-drum to make us care, but this is the kind of film where the audience has to bring its half of the fun. It thankfully doesn’t take itself too seriously, and if the result may not linger too long in memory, it’s about as good as middle-grade action cinema can aspire to be. Not bad, all things considered.

  • Busting Vegas, Ben Mezrich

    Busting Vegas, Ben Mezrich

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2005, 289 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-06-057511-3

    Ah, sequels; always tricky.

    For Ben Mezrich, the challenge was to go back to the story of college whiz-kids using a system to beat casino blackjack without necessarily producing a carbon copy of his hugely enjoyable Bringing Down the House (recently adapted to the big screen as 21). You would think that there’s a limit to the number of blackjack-busting schemes to come out of Boston’s MIT, but it seems that there are at least two: In Busting Vegas, Mezrich gets to tell the true story of one Semyon Dukach (his real name), a student who eventually becomes part of a team dedicated to profitable card-counting.

    Whereas Bringing Down the House depended on a scheme involving aggregate card-counting, many players and a bit of theater, Busting Vegas discusses a number of solo precision techniques that allow players to locate a particular card, know when it’s going to be exposed and then bet heavily on that knowledge. But no matter the technique, the dramatic arc of the two books remains the same. This volume may open on a dramatic plane crash and then go on to a seedy whorehouse meeting between Mezrich and his source, but the story is pretty much the same: See boy bored, see boy learn, see boy win, see boy get greedy, see boy forced out of the racket… As with Bringing Down the House, there’s a shadowy mentor answering to even more mysterious investors, a cute MIT girl to provide romantic tension, and a formidable antagonist to personify the casino security systems. If you’ve seen 21, it’s hard not to picture Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth and Laurence Fishburne smoothly stepping into the same roles.

    As with most non-fiction books never meant to include a reference index, it’s often difficult to figure out where the real story ends and where the writer’s embroidery begins. The tale told on the page often appears too convenient to be entirely truthful. Semyon and his partners in casino-busting are too flamboyant to be credible: You would think that serious players would limit their winnings as well as their losses in an effort to play undetected. But the ticking clock in Busting Vegas, like Bringing Down the House, is to see how long they can get away with it. Alas, the players in this second volume go well beyond the weekend Vegas fantasies to embark on serious capital-building. Any lingering sympathy goes away quickly: Death threats from European casino security personel may be exotic, but they’re issued in response to behavior that goes well beyond anything we readers would consider to be cautious or reasonable.

    In short, Mezrich gambles and loses on the reader’s attachment to the protagonists of his story. By the time he describes the world of the European ultra-rich, Busting Vegas is as likely to inspire a serious case of class resentment than it is to inspire admiration in “the little guy that beat the system”: the protagonist gets too greedy, and the narrative ends up leading the reader to a place where the hero arguable deserves his fall from grace. (Plus; don’t try the card tricks at your local gambling establishment: It’s dead-easy for the casinos to mess with the deck if they think you’re playing games with their games.)

    As with most follow-ups, it doesn’t have the freshness or the energy of the original. The familiarity and thinness of the story leads to a few chapters of perfunctory padding in which Mezrich suddenly becomes interested in, say, the economics of the Vegas sex trade. (He coyly ends the chapter, and his description of a paid interview with an escort, with the creepy “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” [P.211]) Other moments are so unlikely as to strain the credibility of even the most forgiving readers, especially when they include some of Mezrich’s most over-the-top dramatic prose.

    This being said, the book itself remains a pretty good read despite its flaws. Those who pick up the book will get what they expect: a look at casinos, the people who play in them, and the people who make sure the house always wins. As a follow-up to Bringing Down the House, Busting Vegas is intensely familiar… but those who just want another hit of the same reading experience don’t have much of a reason to complain if they, indeed, get more of the same.

  • A Hidden Place, Robert Charles Wilson

    A Hidden Place, Robert Charles Wilson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Orb, 1986 (2002 reprint), 220 pages, C$15.50 tpb, ISBN 0-7653-0261-6

    One of the small ironies of voracious reading is the occasional hollow realization that there are forgotten books out there. Even knowledgeable fans of an author occasionally find out that they’ve missed one or two early titles. So it is that despite having nearly all of Robert Charles Wilson’s books on my shelves, I somehow missed out on his first two novels. Memory Wire is out of print, but A Hidden Place has been available in a nice trade paperback reprint edition for a while now: it took a chance meeting in a bookstore to remind me that I still had a short way to go to complete the Wilson set.

    But reading this book now, years after formerly-underrated Wilson became a Hugo-award winning author (with 2005’s Spin), is a different experience than it must have been to read a first book from a promising novelist. A Hidden Place is now read more as a set of clues about Wilson’s ongoing career than a novel in itself. It’s a bit of research more than entertainment.

    Which isn’t to say that it’s not a fine book on its own. For a novel of its time, especially a first effort by a newcomer, it’s got quite a few strengths, and its weaknesses will not be a problem for all readers.

    Being firmly set in Wilson’s pre-Harvest period, the book is light on SF elements, and rather conventional in the way it deals with them. Set in Depression-era middle-America, A Hidden Place begins by describing the adventures of a mysterious vagabond named Bone, but soon turns its attention to a young man, Travis Fisher, as he travels to a new town and accidentally starts unraveling the mystery surrounding his new foster family. He’s come to a new place to escape the shadow of his mother’s death, but there’s no shortage of drama in his new home: Whether it’s the mysterious woman living with them, or the growing conflict between Travis and his uncle, A Hidden Place crackles with early conflict, and it’s one of Wilson’s distinguishing characteristics, even in this first effort, that the novel is often more interesting for its mainstream drama than its SF elements. As Travis struggles under mundane concerns such as keeping his job, arguing with his relatives or deciding which girl he wants to date, A Hidden Place becomes a charming small-town historical novel well before delving into the more mind-expanding vistas of Science Fiction. The historical details are convincing (our protagonist gets a job in an ice factory that’s starting to feel the effects of consumer refrigeration), and there’s a real pseudo-nostalgic charm in spending some time in a simpler era.

    When the SF elements appear, they’re so watered-down as to take the quasi-mystic form of fantasy, with alien visitors sharing symbiotic links and transcendental travel mechanism. Frankly, I ended up liking the more realistic aspects of A Hidden Place better than the SF moments. But this, too, is a part of Wilson’s continuing development as a writer. His emphasis on recognizable character interaction has always been one of the best part of his fiction, but it took until The Harvest for his SF imagination to catch up with the quality of his writing, and then until The Chronoliths to really develop both aspects of his craft to a level that the wider SF community would stop to acclaim. It’s no accident that his best work to date, Spin, successfully manages both tight character drama and large-scale SF ideas.

    A Hidden Place is certainly recognizable as an integral part of Wilson’s career: With its clean prose and attention to character, it shows a writer with high literary ambitions. The strengths remain in latter works, as the weaknesses disappear and the result is one of the best SF writers in the business today. Everyone has to start somewhere, and A Hidden Place is a respectable debut. Even fans weaned on latter-day Wilson will find much to appreciate here.

  • Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama

    Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Three Rivers Press, 1994 (2004 revision), 457 pages, C$16.95 tpb, ISBN 978-1-4000-8277-3

    Sometimes, the most important part of a book isn’t the text.

    So it is that the most vital line of Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father is found on the back cover of the 63rd printing of the book’s revised paperback edition: “Barack Obama was elected President of the United States on November 4, 2008.” Much to the dismay of the author who, in 1994, promoted his autobiography-so-far as an original contribution to the ongoing American racial debate, most people will read the book knowing much about the author as a career politician.

    Written in the early nineties, Dreams From My Father predates Obama’s formal political career and, as such, offers a very different type of memoir than you would expect from a politician. It’s essentially a narrative of a young bi-racial man as he tries to navigate the shoals of America’s racial identity issues. From a very unusual background (white American mother; black Kenyan father; born in Hawaii before being raised in Indonesia; then back to studies in Hawaii, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago), young Barack Obama ends up trying and rejecting various ways of thinking about himself: He learns racism, rejects black nationalism, meets people of all kinds of backgrounds and tries to come to grip with the absence of a father in his life. The book leads almost inevitably to a defining visit to Kenya, where he comes to learns about his father’s true history and where that leaves him as a person.

    Dreams From My Father is written as a personal narrative that incorporates elements of fiction-writing: dialogues are recreated, scenes are pieced together, composite characters are meant to represent various ideologies, and so on: It’s a surprisingly readable book, and if the language can become occasionally florid, it’s a book that people will read while hearing Obama’s voice. (Sometimes literally so, as the audio book of the book -occasional profanities and all- was read by Obama himself… and netted him the first of his two Grammies.) After eight years of a president who barely appeared literate, it’s a bit of a shock to find out that an actual author (and a pretty good one at that, even allowing for the possibility of editorial assistance) is actually now sitting in the While House.

    But my ideological colors are showing. It’s still a bit of a shock, though, to read a long passage about social inequity, about how black/white divisions can be a distraction from class issues, and realize that this contentious community organizer, this careful, conflicted young man (having outgrown early drug experiences –yes, he does talk about how “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it.” [P.93]) is now sitting in the White House, shaped by his experiences and ready to apply his best judgment to the crises confronting the nation. It almost enough to warm the heart of even the most comfortable cynics, although those same cynics may have trouble reading the weepy grave-sweeping epiphany that serves as the book’s conclusion.

    Because, no matter what the author may have intended in 1994, we are reading this book to get clues about the current president: where he comes from, what experiences had an impact on him, and how he’s likely to react from this depth of knowledge. Modern readings of Dreams From my Father turn the book’s initial goal inside-out: We’re not reading about an unknown author considering overarching issues, but reading about a specific person’s thoughts on those specific issues. Some Obama fans are bound to be disappointed at the book’s early genesis (Michelle barely makes an appearance in the book’s closing pages, and we get almost no glimpse of Obama’s post-law school experiences), but that’s the nature of the first tome in any autobiography. The follow-up volume, The Audacity of Hope, has been out since 2004… and no matter what happens, Tome 3 and beyond are being experienced right now. They’ll make fascinating reading.

  • The Hard Way, Lee Child

    The Hard Way, Lee Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dell, 2006 (2007 reprint), 477 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0-440-24103-4

    After ten Jack Reacher novels in a decade, it can be difficult to find something fresh and interesting to say about every entry in the series. By now, Lee Child’s strengths are obvious: He’s a top-notch thriller writer who fully understands the genre and the permutations it takes, writes in a clean and efficient prose, knows how to imagine tough-guy protagonists, never loses sight of the telling details that make his prose credible, and can be counted upon to deliver a satisfying experience every single time. Even his weakest novel so far (Running Blind) is still better than most average thrillers, and if The Hard Way isn’t one of his best, it’s still the kind of novel that has earned Child his legion of fans.

    It starts, like too many of Child’s novels do, with a simple coincidence: Reacher happens to be sitting in a New York cafe for the second night in a row when he’s asked a few probing questions by men who appear to know their business: Has he noticed anything strange about some guy entering a car the day before? It wouldn’t be a Reacher adventure without our protagonist being a master of detection: His precise and insightful description of what he’s seen the previous night soon leads to a meeting with an employer who wants to retain Reacher’s service.

    As it turns out, coincidentally enough, Reacher has seen the payoff to a kidnapping: His new employer is a rich ex-mercenary whose wife and daughter has been abducted, and he needs Reacher’s help in tracking down the guilty parties. Reacher may have doubts about his employer, but the knight-errants archetype of the series won’t let him walk away: despite the promise of a lavish pay-off, Reacher is really tracking down the woman and child for their own sakes.

    The now-expected twists aren’t long in coming. Reacher’s new employer and colleagues have spectacularly nasty pasts, someone else is tracking them down, and the whole thing quickly becomes something else than a simple kidnapping case. After books such as One Shot, few will be surprised to find out that the climax of the book pits Reacher against a numerically superior force in an isolated location. The novel itself spends its time going from the urban richness of New York to the wide-open landscapes of rural England. (This is the first time that part of a Reacher novel takes place in the United Kingdom: quite a milestone for a writer who lived there prior to the publication of the Reacher novels.)

    What’s slightly different this time around is that Reacher is starting to feel his age: He’s been out of active service for years, now, and his detection skills are getting rusty. The Hard Way sees him making bad assumptions and knock down the wrong doors. More so here than in previous novels, Reacher is conscious of his slowing body and his failing intuition: what that portends for the rest of the series will have to be seen.

    While the novel’s last-third migration to rural England may take away from the tension of seeing Reacher rampage through New York, The Hard Way is as good as the series’ high standards. While it’s true that the series is repeating itself at this point, this tenth entry is starting to acknowledge its own tiredness. Hopefully, Child will know how to take advantage of this idea while winding down the series to a satisfying conclusion or another character. It’s getting harder to keep Reacher going through the same motions (significantly, he never seems to acknowledge the fact that London is where one of his ex-girlfriends stayed for a while), and I wouldn’t be surprised if Child starts a new series soon –although given the author’s penchant for pseudonyms, this may have already happened.

    In the meantime, The Hard Way doesn’t detract from the fact that Lee Child is at the top of the tough-guy thriller genre, and is likely to stay there for a while longer.

  • Content, Cory Doctorow

    Content, Cory Doctorow

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tachyon, 2007, 213 pages, C$14.95 tpb, ISBN 978-1-892391-81-0

    Cory Doctorow’s non-fiction collection Content is both essential and redundant.

    It’s hard to imagine that there’s someone out there who knows Cory Doctorow but isn’t aware of his stance regarding intellectual property. Doctorow’s an Internet celebrity, and everything he does seems influenced by his copyfighting, from editing Boingboing.net to writing novels celebrating open-sourced resistance to working for various organizations as a political/technology activist. He has written extensively about those issues on-line, and a book collecting those essays hardly seems like something worth much more than a passing note.

    What’s more, copyfighting seems so native to the Internet that the idea of a paper book about it has a quaint mustiness. Nearly every piece printed in Content already lives on the web, where they can be linked, discussed and annotated as times goes by. Since the debate around intellectual property seems to evolve on a weekly basis, is it useful to time-bind Doctorow’s essays in a permanent format even as the context around the book keeps evolving?

    And yet that’s a fairly narrow view of things. It may be hip to dismiss those paper-ink-glue devices from the virtual pulpit of a web site, but there’s no denying that by virtue of their collection in Content, Doctorow’s non-fiction pieces become something grander than what they are at the moment. Because, as strange an idea as it may seem to plugged-in cyber-nerds, not everyone is so taken with ideas circulated on the Internet. There is still a place for paper-set arguments, for respectable books that take actual space on a desk, on shelves or in briefcases.

    In short, there’s still a physical life out there for Internet-native advocacy pieces. The nebulous notion of “Cory Doctorow’s ideas on intellectual property” gets an actual rectangular shape with Content, with the non-inconsiderable benefit that the object can be sold, bought, lent or cited. Content becomes something from which others can book conferences or consulting gigs.

    Then there’s the old-fashioned entertainment aspect. While Doctorow’s non-fiction pieces are usually read on-screen between two (or two hundred) other things, Content can be read at leisure, with a good bookmark. It’s a pleasure to read in more ways than one: Not only are the ideas interesting, but the style in which they are expressed is vivid and argumentative, with plenty of examples and extrapolations.

    There’s a flip side, of course, one that becomes nearly inevitable when putting together a number of similar essays: repetition. Cory Doctorow’s advocacy tends to revolve around a few common themes, and the examples can be very familiar. Many will note that Content doesn’t package all of Doctorow’s non-fiction between 2001 and 2007: It picks a few more famous earlier pieces (such as his 2004 DRM talk to Microsoft), then skips ahead to a more diverse selection of his 2006-2007 pieces, including a number of columns for Locus and Information Week. Readers may want to let some time elapse in-between essays, or risk quite a bit of deja lu.

    The other nagging issue about this book is how instantly dated it was. For every timeless piece like his ever-relevant 2001 essay on the illusion of the semantic web, other essays are already creaking under dated references and shifting goalposts. Content may be as fresh as 2007, but 2009 is already a different world from two years ago: Many of Doctorow’s points have already been conceded by industries that have come to terms with economic realities: Both the RIAA and MPAA are far less aggressive about intellectual copyright than they once were (losing a number of court challenges hasn’t helped), and “DRM-free” has become an actual selling point for no less a former enemy than iTunes. Meanwhile, TV networks are voluntarily putting freely-downloadable material on the web. Finally, Cory Doctorow himself is not the Cory Doctorow of 2007: He’s now a proud father, a husband and a New York Times best-selling author thanks to the runaway success of Little Brother —a book that widened open-computing principles to include not only copyfighting, but civil disobedience in the face of eroded freedoms.

    So it is that “a science fiction writer” (a description that never totally quite fit Doctorow’s full-bandwidth activism) is well on his way to becoming no less than An Authority. A book like Content can be invaluable in the process: it can be placed on reading lists, passed around firewalls and content filters, cited in major newspapers (even if they’re moving to the web themselves) and bought by the crate-load whenever Doctorow’s speaking at conferences. It’s a neat bit of irony that most of this review has been spend arguing in favor of a real book: in some ways, Content is its own best demonstration.

  • Gradisil, Adam Roberts

    Gradisil, Adam Roberts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2006, 458 pages, C$12.99 tpb, ISBN 0-575-07817-0

    I’m not the first person to link the old “familiarity breeds contempt” with the new “uncanny valley”, but I don’t think anyone yet has used to expressions to refer to Adam Roberts’ interestingly flawed Gradisil.

    Every one of Adams’ novels so far has tackled different sub-genres of science-fiction along with some stylistic experimentation. Results have been mixed: Roberts is very clever, but this doesn’t always translate in a satisfying reading experience.

    I’ve been waiting a while for the Adams novel I would wholeheartedly embrace, and I had high hopes for his hard-SFish Gradisil. After all, hard-SF is the type of SF I know best and like most: I’m considerably more lenient about it than I am about other kinds of science-fiction. But I hasn’t counted on the possibility of someone trying to write hard-SF and getting it wrong.

    We can quibble endlessly on the definition of hard-SF, or on whether getting the details is more important than portraying the correct attitude. Given Roberts’ iconoclastic output so far, it would have been unrealistic to expect slavish devotion to the often-simpleminded ideals of the crudest hard-SF, but that doesn’t excuse any of the gigantic science blunders that repeatedly slap readers across the brow as they try to make it through Gradisil.

    The first and most obvious one almost gets a pass: The idea of harnessing unexplored properties of electromagnetic fields to get to space more efficiently than chemical rockets is pretty unlikely, but it’s integral to the rest of the novel. But what does not manage to suspend disbelief as well is the conceit that private individuals would seize upon this to colonize near-earth orbit while NASA, the military and large telecommunication companies keep struggling with traditional launchers. You would think that after a few successful private launches, the Big Players wouldn’t just move into the field, but would own it outright.

    But Adams’ insistence on presenting a deformed mirror of American-libertarian hard-SF is pure enough that he ignores historical precedents, real-world technology and elementary physics on his way to the story he really wants to tell. In his imagined future, for instance, the might of the American military has somehow forgotten to track orbiting objects the size of buses, even while real-world satellite tracking is something that’s not much more than a Google query away. This gets pretty hard to explain when entire subplots of Gradisil depend on people hiding in plain sky while authorities look befuddled. Other blunders are much funnier to anyone with a good understanding of high school physics: The orbital colonists of Gradisil are somehow able to suck refreshing oxygen from the atmosphere out of 50-kilometer long capillaries and pumps that are somehow more efficient than, oh, space itself.

    Sometimes, it’s hard to decide whether Adams is just kidding, because even his heart doesn’t seem into it. At the end of the novel’s first section, he introduces a fan-based pseudo-gravity system (in which, yes, big fans push you to the “ground” of a space station) that is so stupid that even the characters complain about it. It’s justified as another one of those dumb military innovations, which is perfectly in-character for a novel that tries to portray the military as being both terminally stupid and dangerously clever at the same time. After so many mistakes and missteps, the real question about Gradisil becomes why Adams has attempted to write something that looks like a hard-SF novel if he thinks so little of the form.

    Because Gradisil is a pseudo-hard-SF novel. It attempts to disguise itself under jargon and science, but its obvious lack of authenticity only reinforces the fact that it’s an pretentious poser. It ended up annoying me like few novels I’ve read recently. It got on my nerves with a loathing born out of familiarity. I won’t always try to defend hard-SF’s failings, but it’s got a real heart underneath the mechanical trappings: A vision of a better world through human ingenuity and advanced technology. Good old-fashioned hard-SF may be too blunt for the rarefied sensibilities of the literary set, but it’s literature for the rest of us readers who would rather play around with high-tech toys than discuss literary theory. Gradisil makes a big show of being literature for engineers, but it ends up looking foolishly like a snarker dressing up with oversize glasses and pocket protectors. It’s not fooling anyone, and it falls right in the uncanny valley of novels that pretend to be “down with it” but really don’t have the slightest clue what “it” is and think they can fake it with big brains and fancy language.

    I haven’t mentioned the characters or the story yet because, in many ways, they’re the most disappointing part of the novel. In another twist from the hard-SF gold standard, the characters are built to be hated. Meanwhile, none of the hilarious science errors are redeemed by the overlong multi-generational plot that barely warrants the “saga” description, nor a narration that gets increasingly showy as language drifts away from turn-of-the-century standard. It’s very clever, see, but it’s not doing much to make the novel better.

    The flip-side of my annoyed, vaguely disgusted reaction to Gradisil is the very real possibility that someone else without as big an attachment to hard-SF would like it a lot more than I did. That’s OK in more or less the same ways I used to like some pop-music groups before learning better. Gradisil is, like many of Roberts’ novels, an outsider’s attempt to play with the toys of a subgenre. The problem is that in many cases, those toys are tools, and Robert doesn’t know what to do with them. Faced with such a flawed simulacrum, I’d rather see Roberts doing something else.

  • Watchmen (2009)

    Watchmen (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2009) As someone who has read the original graphic novel about four times since the mid-nineties and owns the deluxe slip-case Absolute Watchmen edition, I’m really not the reviewer to go to for a cold appreciation of the film as a film. But as an adaptation of a dense and iconic source, it’s about as good as it can reasonably be: the thrill of the film becomes the variations where director Zack Snyder (who here directs his best film to date) plays a bit with the source. The opening credit sequence is a wonderful example of respectful deviation, and the squid-less ending actually works better than the book in reinforcing the whole “you must kill your gods” theme of the material. Not so good is that the implicit thematic rumblings of the source become dull explicit dialogue when they’re simply not left behind entirely. (I suspect that for all of the gore in the film, it’s a bit thematically bloodless, and never quite gets down to ordinary people) Meanwhile, the soundtrack choices are of the hits-you-on-the-nose variety. Characters are faithfully rendered, although some (namely, Silk Specter II and Ozymandias) shine less brightly than others. While the film is more than two-and-a-half hours long, its never feels dull –although the pacing of the film felt far less urgent than I would have preferred. On the other hand, there’s a lot of material to process here, especially for those who can’t quote the lines along with the character. I hope that the upcoming DVD extended edition (which I will faithfully buy) works a little bit better as a film rather than an adaptation. But you will have to ask others regarding that, because at the moment, I’m a happy fan.

  • Sita Sings the Blues (2008)

    Sita Sings the Blues (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Downloaded, March 2009) They say that you can find anything on the Internet, and that’s usually a code phrase to describe the depravity of humanity. But it also includes the best along the worst, and so it’s thanks to the Internet that we can download and view the absolutely delightful animation film Sita Sings the Blues, an endearing mixture of Indian mythology irreverently remixed with American jazz songs from the 1920s. It doesn’t sound like much (and the first ten minutes are a bit too long), but when it gets cracking, it’s utterly charming. Deftly mixing four levels of narration with tons of hilarious sight gags, cleverly integrated music and lush visuals, Sita Sings the Blues exudes artistic merit and entertainment, stomping over most Hollywood features with ease. It’s a lot funnier than it has any right to be, and the animation is an eye-popping mixture of styles and approaches. It’s coquettishly feminist, intensely personal, multi-layered and toe-tapping infectious at once. A gem, purely and simply.