Author: Christian Sauvé

  • A Clockwork Orange (1971)

    A Clockwork Orange (1971)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2008) Alternately dull and fascinating, this classic has endured a lot better than you’d expect. The lengths of the film are deliberate traits of Kubrick’s style, for one thing, and not remnants of an outdated editing style. A plot summary seems superfluous given the film’s place in contemporary pop culture and the myriad of references made to it. (Even people who think they recognize the references may be surprised: I was shocked to realize that Rob Zombie’s “Never Gonna Stop” makes a bunch of references to the film, up to and most visibly the “Durango 95”) Yet there’s a lot more to this film than Alex, his droogs and the famous brainwashing sequence: the entire third act is something that tends to be given short thrift in references to the film, and so becomes perhaps the most interesting thing about it. I still don’t believe that it entirely clicks together: the opening act suggests a far more barbaric social breakdown than what is suggested by the rest of the film, a hint that this is best considered as a fable than a serious SF film. Our modern jaded sensibilities may not be appropriate to judge the controversy that the film raised upon release: While “the old ultra-violence” seems ordinary and the torture sequence merely icky, it’s the frequent nudity and the stark symbolism that seems most controversial today. See it at least once to firm up your cultural referents.

  • Choke (2008)

    Choke (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2008) Chuck Palahniuk’s novels are so extreme that any adaptation that doesn’t completely screws them up has already earned a small victory, and so Choke‘s most notable achievement is how it does remain relatively faithful to the novel, translating a good chunk of its sociopathic charm onto the big screen, graphic sexual addictions and all. Sam Rockwell is rather good as a lead character whose obsession for casual sex only matches his habit of fake-choking in high-end restaurants in order to earn strangers’ gratitude and financial help. A suitably strange cast of characters surround him, from a paranoid mother to a curiously amorous doctor to a friend who can’t keep his hands off himself. Fortunately, it remains an amusing film throughout, even when the story appears to take a turn toward the fantastic with the suggestion that the protagonist is a clone of Jesus. Fans of the original novel (one of Palahniuk’s tamest) will be surprised to find out that most of the book has been faithfully adapted to the screen, at the exception of the ending which proves to be less satisfying than the one in the book. While this film won’t make as big an impression as Fight Club did, it’s an adaptation with which Palahniuk and fans can be relatively happy… and that’s already quite remarkable.

  • Zoe’s Tale, John Scalzi

    Zoe’s Tale, John Scalzi

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2008, 335 pages, C$27.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-7653-1698-1

    Some of the most difficult moments in a reviewer’s life come when a highly-anticipated work fails to meet certain expectations, or betrays an author’s otherwise sterling reputation. As much as I normally like Scalzi’s fiction, and as much as I was primed to like Zoe’s Tale, it ended up surprising and disappointing me: For the first time while reading a Scalzi novel, I felt impatient.

    Fans of Scalzi’s work so far will immediately recognize the plot of the novel: As its title suggests, Zoe’s Tale describes the events of Scalzi’s previous The Last Colony from the perspective of John Perry’s teenage daughter Zoe. Being a sixteen-year-old girl, Zoe’s perspective on the story is different, but not too different. Exception made of a small section at the end of the book, the story beats are roughly the same –-although the last few pages of Roanoke colony’s story remains in The Last Colony.

    For readers who read primarily for plot, this makes Zoe’s Tale a surprisingly unsettling experience. While it fills in the beats of Zoe’s story and explains a few passing references in its source book, Zoe’s Tale often feels like a rehash of known material; another trip around the same block in a slightly different vehicle. The Old Man’s War universe isn’t significantly deepened by this entry, nor are we getting a perspective that contradicts John Perry’s. At most, an enigmatic reference is cleared up, and events that are more important to Zoe than her father are told in more detail. (Unlike other parallax novels such as Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Shadow, there’s also little playfulness with what readers are supposed to know from having read the previous book.) Readers may want, for extra credit, to compare a few scenes as told in both books to see the different perspectives of the two characters.

    Fortunately, there is something else than a simple plot re-hash going on here: Zoe’s Tale is perhaps best appreciated as an attempt to re-tell The Last Colony in a YA-friendly female teenager’s voice. As a style exercise, if you prefer. As such, it’s somewhat more successful: Scalzi’s attempt to write like a 16-year-old girl cleanly evokes the confusion, thrills, quirks and friendship bonds of that demographic.

    This being said, it isn’t much of a stretch for Scalzi to map his own usual sarcastic smart-ass prose style onto another sarcastic smart-ass character, even if she happens to be a 16-year-old girl on a brand-new colony world. It just so happens that her friends are, by and large, a generally sarcastic smart-ass group, and that the people she most values around her are also sarcastic smart-asses. (If nothing else, Roanoke Colony’s got a bright future in exporting comedians.) Scalzi’s has previously acknowledged his Heinleinian influences, but Zoe also echoes some of Heinlein’s teenage protagonists in that she’s the prototypical Competent Teenager; rarely wrong and of reliable judgment. It’s a typical SF character type, but the pattern can be amusing once it becomes obvious.

    Plot and characterization, however, haven’t been Scalzi’s strengths as much as his easy prose style and his humor, and in that sense Zoe’s Tale is another success for him. It’s a fast and enjoyable read that won’t disappoint his regular readers who don’t mind some déjà vu. For the others, however, Zoe’s Tale is perhaps Scalzi’s most disappointing novel so far, and one that sends the Old Man’s War universe in diminishing-returns territory. More demanding readers may want to wait until the paperback and lower their expectations accordingly.

  • Burn After Reading (2008)

    Burn After Reading (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2008) Dark comedies are a tough, tough assignment, and if the Coen Brothers have been able to do the genre full justice before, they’ve also had a few misfires along the way, and Burn After Reading skirts particularly close to that edge. Among the film’s biggest problem is a sudden turn for deadly violence after a first half that promises nothing more serious than bloodied noses. It’s a jarring misstep in what is otherwise an absurd story of adulterous urban professionals who just happen to work in intelligence operations. The rest of the film is hit-and-miss, more often amusing rather than frankly funny. All of the actors, from Brad Pitt to George Clooney to Tilda Swinton to John Malkovich, seem to have a lot of fun inhabiting seriously flawed characters. (Indeed, one of the film’s highlight is the precise way Malkovich’s characters enunciates his colorful threats and insults.) The film’s two funniest scenes both star J.K. Simmons as an Intelligence Director completely mystified by the accumulation of transgressions and violence that characterize the film. Otherwise, though, the film ends quickly and with a succession of off-screen developments. There’s little satisfaction here for those who like well-wrapped narratives, nor those who prefer more conventional comedies.

  • Bangkok Dangerous (2008)

    Bangkok Dangerous (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2008) It takes a lot of misguided skill to make a boring film about Nicolas Cage as a gifted assassin, but that’s exactly what this weakly-brewed action thriller ends up being. Cage looks asleep as a weary assassin coming to Thailand for one last series of jobs. Inexplicably, he lets down his usual safeguards, befriend a small-time hustler, romances a deaf local girl, botches his contracts and ends up hunted down by his own clients. There is one single flash of interest late in the film as he fends off killers while his date isn’t looking, but otherwise the film is one single monolith of exasperation. Hampered by cookie-cutter action scenes, trite dialog, glacial pacing and a complete lack of originality, Bangkok Dangerous fuses the worst of Asian and Western cinema to produce something that the whole world will unite to recognize as a bad film.

  • Babylon A.D. (2008)

    Babylon A.D. (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2008) From a promising start, this action/adventure tale sadly devolves into an incomprehensible mess, not unlike the source novel Babylon Babies by French author Maurice Dantec. Director Mathieu Kassovitz has a certain sense of style, and that eye for strong visuals is what props up the film long after it has descended in self-contradictory nonsense. It’s too bad, really, but Vin Diesel and Michelle Yeoh walk away mostly untouched by the mess: There’s little doubt that the worst thing about the film is the increasingly silly script, which goes from a number of interesting premises to an indescribable mess. The film’s reportedly troubled production history shows up in slap-dash action sequences and an abrupt ending that defies audience satisfaction. This is one of those films whose highlights fit in a single five-minute trailer reel; the rest is entirely useless.

  • Bad Monkeys, Matt Ruff

    Bad Monkeys, Matt Ruff

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Collins, 2007, 230 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 978-0-06-124041-6

    For readers, paranoia isn’t such a bad trait. Not when dealing with tricky writers such as Matt Ruff, whose unpredictable output continues to surprise even those who think they know what to expect. None of Ruff’s novels so far has been ordinary, and Bad Monkeys is no exception.

    Harper Collins, at least, has done a good job designing a physical object that’s as odd as its content. Presented as a narrow yellow trade paperback with extended rounded covers, the book is meant to evoke a psychiatrist’s case jacket, which isn’t a bad choice given the content.

    For the novel begins in a white room, a holding cell where a psychiatrist comes in to interview a prisoner. Her name is Jane Charlotte, and she’s been arrested for murder. As she tells her story, we go back in time, to a childhood incident during which she realized the existence of a secret organization manipulating events behind the scenes. And that’s the kick-off to a deeply paranoid novel in which the world we know isn’t as chaotic as we think. There’s a war out there between good and evil, and two rival factions are out there recruiting and setting operatives on each other. The “Bad Monkeys” of the title is a shorthand for the “Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons”, which is to say humans declared so irremediably evil that they have to be taken out —preferably by means of a Natural Causes gun with definitive but undetectable effects. The secret departments of the elusive organization all have bizarre names that allude to their nature (“Scary Clowns”, “Good Samaritans”, “Eyes Only”) but whose true nature remains elusive for a while.

    This, of course, may or may not a be a psychotic delusion from a troubled individual. Jane’s life (as she tells it) has been a tough one, and she hasn’t always been the most virtuous of person. Is all of this an elaborate way to account for the murders she’s been arrested for, or is it all true? Or is the truth even stranger than she imagines?

    You’re better off betting on strangeness without limits, because Matt Ruff is having a lot of fun messing with his readers’ heads throughout the novel. By the time the final twists are revealed, shell-shocked readers may be forgiven if they can’t recall what’s true and what’s not. Such mind-bending won’t be to everyone’s liking, but it does make for a lively reading experience. There’s a lot of strong scenes, a few Science Fiction elements, some good character moments, and a terrific pacing. From time to time, Ruff plays with intriguing philosophical ideas and concepts given practical form by his secret organizations, from Natural Cause guns to ant farms to Nod problems.

    It’s not a particularly long book (barely 90,000 words, by my estimates) and the writing style is deliberately kept simple, so don’t be surprised if you rush through the book in a few sittings. It’s probably best read that way too, in order to fully experience the accumulation of details, confusion and contradictions that make up the novel’s conclusion.

    This being said, the rapidly changing nature of the novel is liable to be a point of contention. While a neat writer’s trick, it also prevents readers from forming a deep emotional attachment to the material as presented: nobody likes to be fooled, and so a bit of detachment may be for the best while reading the story. Only the paranoids will get the most out of Bad Monkeys.

  • In War Times, Kathleen Ann Goonan

    In War Times, Kathleen Ann Goonan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tor, 2007, 348 pages, C$31.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-7653-1355-3

    If you’re wondering what use we possibly can have for awards, let me give you a hint: If Kathleen Ann Goonan’s In War Times hadn’t won the John Campbell Award, I wouldn’t have bothered reading it. The author’s previous works haven’t grabbed me, the subject matter of this book seems to be dedicated to another audience, and while the novel got a favorable number of reviews upon publication, it didn’t seem to establish itself as one of 2007’s must-read novels from word-of-mouth buzz.

    But it did walk away with the Campbell Award, and that strengthens its place in the SF canon. It doesn’t finalize it, of course: part of the attraction in reading this year’s Campbell winner was to determine whether the Campbell jury had succeeded in making a choice as awfully outdated as Ben Bova’s Titan, somehow selected as being a best choice of some sort the previous year.

    From the first few pages, it’s obvious that the Campbell judges have made a better choice: Goonan’s prose is well-written, and her understanding of interpersonal relationships is better than many of her colleagues. From the first few pages, in which a young soldier is seduced and then left by a female scientist during World War II, we can relax: if nothing else, this novel will be well written.

    But for a while, that’s all we get: despite a few ominous lines early on, this is the story of the young soldier, Sam Dance, as he’s shipped off around Europe (and then Japan) in order to take advantage of his top-notch technical skills. He builds a device according to plans left by his ex-lover, but it’s never too clear what the device is supposed to accomplish. Meanwhile, around him, both jazz and modern science are being invented, refined, applied and developed. Goonan’s musical knowledge has been obvious from Queen City Jazz onward, but here the characters have the chance to hob-nob with the early Greats of American Jazz, and readers who know anything about the form will be delighted to read about a few walk-in characters.

    On the flip side is the portrait of the war as seen from Dancer’s eyes, sometimes via diary entries. We eventually learn in the afterword that those entries are excerpted from Goonan’s father’s own real-life WW2 diaries. Again, In War Times is best appreciated by those with some knowledge of the time and place. Four-seventh of the book are spent in WW2, and despite a few intriguing moments here and there, there are few reasons for this book to be classified as Science Fiction rather than historical drama.

    The SF elements become more obvious after the war, although not by much until the last fifty pages. As universes diverge and the mysterious device changes by itself, Sam realizes that there’s at least another alternate universe out there, one that seems far preferable to ours. But then 1963 arrives, and Sam’s family has a chance to change things…

    Other writers would have spent their time playing around alternate universes, cleanly explaining the time-and-dimension-hopping device and the paradoxes surrounding it. Goonan is interested in other things, most notably paying tribute to her own father’s experience. It works if you’re favorably inclined toward that type of thing: It’s really difficult to say bad things about this book other than its best target audience is carefully delimited. (That, and that the final segment of the novel is pure baby-boomer wish-fulfillment, with a dash of conspiracy theory.)

    As a read, it’s worthwhile in that it takes us somewhere else, and does so in style. Does that make it one of 2007’s best novel? That depends, but for all of the Campbell jury’s enthusiasm for the book, it’s easy to see why it didn’t make much of a splash in the wider SF community: Competently written, well imagined, sure, but without the extra spark to make it something more striking. Parallels with Ian McDonald’s Brasyl, which also dealt in parallel universes, are instructive: McDonald’s novel may not have been as carefully controlled, but it had a ton of energy that made it a wild ride. That energy would have been misplaced for In War Times‘s WW2 setting, but any energy supplement would have been helpful in making the novel a more engrossing experience.

  • Infected, Scott Sigler

    Infected, Scott Sigler

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Crown, 2008, 342 pages, C$27.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-307-40610-1

    The recent resurgence of horror as a genre has been, so far, mostly confined to paperbacks, but there are signs that horror may be coming back to hardcover too. After Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box, here’s another widely-available horror novel in hardcover from a new author: Scott Sigler’s Infected.

    Sigler, like many horror writers of his generation such as David Wellington and Brian Keene, is currently breaking out from niche publishers and web fan circles to traditional publishers. Sigler’s been writing for a while, relying on podcast serialization to build a fan base and hone his skills. Now, with Infected, he’s been unleashed on an unsuspecting population of bookstore readers sure to be tempted by the cover illustration’s arresting triangular iris.

    From a certain angle, Infected‘s not much more than another go on a familiar horror story: The idea of an alien invasion via radical body modification, and the fight to contain the infection. Zombies, Ebola, Pod-People: whatever the name, the tune remains the same. The novel may begin with people mysteriously turning psychotic and shooting down their families, there’s a sense that this is familiar territory, even as Sigler has mastered the art of intriguing the reader with hints of the menace looming over every character.

    But the trick’s in the execution, and Sigler’s got a mean streak. If the whole infection plot-line is familiar, what’s far more interesting is the book’s main sequence, in which ex-footballer Perry Dawsey deals with the progressive stages of his alien affliction. From a bad flu, his infection turns into something far stranger. His body is hurting in seven different places, and Dawsey isn’t the kind of man to whimper all the way to professional health care. He’ll take matters in his own hands, especially when it becomes obvious that his infection isn’t a garden-variety plague.

    Because his growing tumors start talking to him. And when he starts digging them out, they fight back using Dawsey’s own body. Faint echoes of other voices (intriguingly presented as chaotic typography) amplify and present a formidable enemy solidifying under the protagonist’s skin. No household implement is ignored as Dawsey cuts out, digs out, burns through or rips apart his growing antagonists.

    Extreme bodily harm is the name of the horror-show in Infected, and it goes without saying that readers with known sensibilities to these kinds of shenanigans shouldn’t even attempt to read this book. Thrill-seeking horror fans, on the other hand, will be overjoyed at the inventive ways Sigler can find to induce winces and gags from his readers. There’s plenty of squishy, flesh-tearing atrocities in those pages, and the result is definitely memorable: every time you think it can’t get worse, well, it does. Our protagonist certainly doesn’t make it intact to the end of the novel.

    In comparison, the overarching plot about fighting an alien invasion feels like a perfunctory attempt to provide some context and pad the story to novel length. The final climax is far more ordinary than Dawsey’s own story, and the entire book deflates a bit because of it. What prospective readers should know (despite this not being written anywhere in the hardcover edition) is that Infected is the first in an unannounced trilogy, and so the connecting material may end up becoming far more important when seen from the entire series’ perspective.

    In the meantime, readers looking for a few gruesome thrills may want to read through Infected for its clean prose, bloody developments and scary self-harm scenes. There’s no deep social message here, nor even any attempt at literary respectability. But unrepentant horror has been absent far too long from hardcover shelves, and Infected is a welcome return to the hardcore rough origins of the genre. Sequel Contagious has already been announced in time for New Year’s Day 2009.

    [February 2009: As the alien infection spreads out, Contagious attempts a bigger story. From the first scenes featuring a new President, the feel is less intensely claustrophobic and closer to wide-screen SF/technothriller. It’s a worthy follow-up (and despite being a second in an announced trilogy, it ends on a fairly definitive note) even though it’s somewhat less memorable than Perry Dawser’s appartment-bound fight against intruders in his own body. The mixture of horror and military elements is intriguings, and the confidence with which Sigler tells the story shows that he’s definitely writing for the big leagues now.]

  • The Raw Shark Texts, Steven Hall

    The Raw Shark Texts, Steven Hall

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Collins Canada, 2007, 428 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-00-200840-2

    The intrepid life of a book reviewer is always thrilling, but some work-related afflictions are more dangerous than others. Somewhere in the upper tier of the job’s hazards is an insatiable lust for novels that play with the very notion of novels. Books such as Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Kim Newman’s Life’s Lottery or Jasper Fforde’s “Thursday Next” series: Not-entirely-serious experiments with the form, borrowing elements from typography, fiction theory, genre analysis and goofy ideas to produce something that can only exist as a novel, yet isn’t “just” a novel.

    This may explain my odd affection for Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, even despite some damning problems with the book’s pacing, achievements and conclusion. It’s a novel that has fun with the idea of being a novel, and in its own way, it’s unlike anything else you’re likely to have read before.

    Readers of the Canadian hardcover edition get a hint of what’s in store from the design of the book itself. A shark-shaped hole has been cut out of the front cover, giving us a glimpse at the text written on the book’s end-papers, which is a curious warning to the reader from the “curator of the Webster Fragment Collection” about the typographic effort spent in reproducing the original text as faithfully as possible.

    For the first few pages of the novel, this is a story that jumps into weirdness. A man awakens with no memory: his name is Eric Sanderson and the only link to his past is a series of written instructions to call a psychologist who will help him make sense of it all. The official story is that Sanderson is prone to occasional memory-wipes, and that he’s erected an entire support network designed to help himself re-emerge from those memory blanks.

    But there’s more to the story, and the story that emerges from the book definitely takes a turn for the fantastic: Sanderson seems to have become the target of a memetic shark feeding upon information, and the shark’s attacks are what debilitate Sanderson’s mind. In an effort to hide from the shark, previous Sanderson instances has planned defenses made of chaotic information and nonsense chaff, but this particular Sanderson iteration doesn’t intend to wait for the next attack: he goes on the offensive, investigates his own situation and comes to realize that he’s in the middle of a fight between opponents who make a memetic shark look downright plausible.

    The best thing about The Raw Shark Texts are the odd bits of invention and whimsy that Hall manages to include in his story. A typographic pipe-bomb; a scene in which the shark is glimpsed in tiles; a flip-book sequence showing and approaching shark; keyboard code-breaking; a hideout made of books; memetic boat creation; various other typographical tricks and so on. There’s a clever smile every ten pages, which goes a long way to pave over the book’s other problems.

    Because ultimately, Hall teases more than he satisfies. The glimpses at his imagined underworld are intriguing, but never cohere in a consistent fashion. The pacing of the book is uneven, with scenes of fascinated interest jammed between other scenes where nothing happens for a long time. The ending is one of those badly-paced sequences, never managing a clear victory where we should have felt triumph. Part of the problem is that Hall chooses to make his story flirt with horror, which invites greater scrutiny than, say, Jasper Fforde’s mostly-comic escapades.

    This may or may not make the novel less appealing to readers who don’t care about genre-bending meta-fiction, but it may serve to explain why some jaded readers will give high marks to this book despite problems that would have poisoned a less-ambitious novel. If your last few reading experiences have been too ordinary, take a chance and leap in The Raw Shark Texts. It’s a promising and inventive debut: Hall’s next novel should be one to watch.

  • Zot!, Scott McCloud

    Zot!, Scott McCloud

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper, 1987-1991 (2008 omnibus), 575 pages, C$26.95 tpb, ISBN 978-0-06-153727-1

    These days, Scott McCloud is best-known as the thinker who came with Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics, three of the most important analytical works about comics published over the past decade-and-a-half.

    But everyone’s got to start somewhere, and for years before Understanding Comics, McCloud was best-known as the writer/artist behind the comic-book series Zot!. Until recently, though, only dedicated collectors or lucky readers could read McCloud’s formative work: Collecting single issues of older comics books has always been an enthusiast’s game, and a decade-old trade paperback reprint series hadn’t managed to collect all issues of Zot!

    That’s partly what makes the news of this new Harper collection so exciting: for the first time, a good chunk of Zot! is back into print, along with restrospective comments by McCloud and some extra material thrown in for good measure.

    Zot!, simply put, are the adventures of a young teenage girl, Jenny, after she discovers a portal to another dimension –a perpetual 1965 utopian retro-future in which lives Zot, a teenage super-hero who takes a liking to Jenny in-between battling super-villains. Jenny’s world is ours, and it’s suitably complicated: Jenny isn’t doing too well at school and finds no solace at home where her parent’s marriage is disintegrating. Zot is a rare ray of sunshine in her life, especially given how his 1965 seems to be incarnated perfection.

    McCloud being McCloud, there’s a lot of clever material at play here: From a first half that seems to present light-hearted superhero stories with unusually good writing, Zot! gradually evolves along with its creator to a second half that’s grounded in our reality, tackling issues of racism, alienation and discrimination. The characterization in the last half of Zot! is daring for comics of its time, and it manages to hit emotional notes that are seldom seen in serial comics. There’s a remarkable five-issue sequence late in the book that simply follows five friends, and moments of it are heart-wrenching.

    In short, fans of the Understanding Comics trilogy won’t be disappointed by McCloud’s “early work”: It’s already witty, ambitious and multi-layered. There’s a fair bit of experimentation here, and most of it does succeed at its own objectives. McCloud’s commentary helps in placing Zot! in its proper context, and reflect on how well his experiments have held up more than fifteen years later.

    If there’s a problem with this Harper anthology, it’s that it doesn’t actually present the entire Zot! run. For reasons of economics in presenting a cheap volume, McCloud has opted to leave out the first ten full-color volumes of the series, along with a guest-illustrated issue. Let’s hope that this material will be collected in another volume entirely: despite McCloud’s assurances that the series was “rebooted” at issue 11, the first few volumes are like dropping into a party already in progress.

    Fans who have some of the previous comics or trade paperbacks may also want to hold on to them for curiosity’s sake: This Harper trade paperback is a bit smaller than the Kitchen Sink full-page reprints, and McCloud has made a few changes to the art: While those changes are all justifiable in context as they clarify facial expressions, there’s a curious pleasure in comparing the before-and-after pages.

    From a wider perspective, it’s interesting to see Zot! Being re-edited in a thick trade paperback, much like how mangas are published in Japan: given how McCloud’s been one of the pioneers in combining the strengths of both comics cultures, the physical form in which Zot! will earn its definitive run is a perfect way to give it form. Don’t be put-off by tags such as “McCloud’s first comic book series”: even today, Zot! more than holds up to careful reading. In fact, it’s a bit of a shame to see that the series ends at #36 when it reads like a prologue to an even longer sequence.

  • Blasphemy, Douglas Preston

    Blasphemy, Douglas Preston

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Forge, 2007, 415 pages, C$28.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-7653-1105-4

    Here’s the plot: In Nevada, a gifted billionaire-scientist has built a super-collider that will allow him to reach back to the conditions that existed at the beginning of the universe. As the inauguration of the machine is slowed down by technical problems, some religious groups politicize the issue. As delays and controversies heighten, the US government send an investigator to find out what’s going on. Deaths occur, and a full-scale mobilization of religious followers against the scientific project erupts even as the scientists on-site glimpse something unexpected in the first results of their experiments. Something is communicating with them via high-energy physics, something that claims to be of divine origins…

    Here’s the spoiler-free review: Douglas Preston’s Blasphemy is a techno-thriller that tackles issues of science and religion, re-using characters from Preston’s previous novel Tyrannosaur Canyon. It’s professionally written, but flawed: it may look daring at times, but it’s really reaching for the hoariest compromise in sight. The conclusion contradicts much of what has gone on until then.

    WARNING: Anything else will be a spoiler, so you may want to skip ahead to the next review.

    If you’re still with us, a short recapitulation of the place of religious faith in American genre fiction may be necessary: While recent volleys of militant atheism have done much to move the goalposts of any discussion of religious belief in the contemporary United States, most genre fiction tiptoes around such questions as so to accommodate the sensibilities of a sizable minority of believers for whom criticizing the very notion of faith is tantamount to heresy. Most genre discussions of phenomenons that may-or-may-not be manifestations of religious beliefs ultimately resolves to a curious compromise in which nearly everything is explained away as science except for a tiny piece that may-or-may-not be divine intervention. Few authors will claim a clear stake in the does-God-exist debate. There are exceptions, of course (Left Behind on one side, many of Arthur C. Clarke’s novels on the other one), but the pattern is as annoying as it’s universal, from any of the Jesus-cloned thrillers out there (see Glenn Kleier’s The Last Days) onward.

    So the tension in reading Blasphemy, at least for jaded readers, is in wondering whether Preston will clearly commit himself, or try another variation on the old “Aw, sucks, all of you can be right if you want” dodge. To Preston’s credit, he does manage to keep things in suspense for a while: the super-collider seems to open up a singularity of supernatural capabilities, up to and including an all-knowing entity communicating with them via a computer link.

    But there are a few more twists and turns to the tale, especially when Wyman Ford (returning after Tyrannosaur Canyon) corners the brilliant scientist behind the entire project and manages to make him admit that most of it was completely made up, taking advantage of a few parlor tricks in order to create a new science-based religion. But just as we think that the rug’s been pulled in one direction, there has to be an added “Strange, though, it said a lot of things I never intended.” that sends the novel in comfortable maybe-land. (Yet the epilogue makes it clear that God moves in mysterious ways.)

    There’s plenty of other stuff to discuss, such as Preston’s final ham-fisted way of portraying religious believers as bloodthirsty idiots willing to transfer their allegiances to a new religion (by the millions!) in a matter of a few days. Or how the book leaves Wyman Ford in a science-fictional world altered by the events of the novel (but don’t bet against a sequel that ignores it all). Ultimately, though, the title suggests that Preston is really about raising a stink, creating false opposition between science and faith, using the oldest non-compromise in the bag of tricks to provide a pat conclusion to satisfy everyone. It’s nothing new, nothing really unnerving. The novel tries to have it both ways, in the time-honored tradition of the hardcover popular bestseller. For all of its other faults, at least it’s a fast and easy read.

  • Tropic Thunder (2008)

    Tropic Thunder (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2008) Can the clown honestly laugh at himself? That’s the big philosophical question to ask after seeing the big mess that is Tropic Thunder. A comedy about big-budget film-making co-written by two actors, Tropic Thunder feels like a broad attempt to hit an equally broad target. Some of the shots find their mark; others miss by such a distance that they defy the notion of a joke. Foul-mouthed and gory (with death played for laughs), Tropic Thunder has the bluster of a cynic but little of the wit: Once past the opening fake trailers and the initial premise, the film seems to lose itself in a vague haze. Occasionally, the jokes flicker back: You may recognize Tom Cruise’s voice, but his hirsute, balding, overweight expletive-spewing studio executive is so far away from his usual personae as to be unrecognizable. Still, Ben Stiller’s previous Zoolander has stood the test of time better than many comedies of its time: it’s entirely possible the Tropic Thunder will feel more interesting with time. But the scatter-shot nature of the jokes, the easy gags and the dumb characters don’t feel as if they’re the ultimate expression of what could have been done with the budget, that talent and that premise. Maybe the clown got complacent, falsely secure in the idea that the crowds would appreciate any attempt at self-deprecation while missing the point that even self-deprecation requires a modicum of effort and grace.

    (Second viewing, on DVD, March 2010) A quick viewing of the DVD edition shows that either quite a bit has changed in-between the theater and “unrated” edition, or my memory hasn’t recorded many of the gags.  Either way, the film does seem slightly better the second time around, although that that much better.

  • Killing Floor, Lee Child

    Killing Floor, Lee Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Jove, 1997, 407 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-515-14142-9

    After going through Michael Connelly’s entire oeuvre in a reading project that took a bit more than a year (“A book per month, every month, until I’m done.”), I set out to find another author I could follow for a while. After considering and reluctantly rejecting Carl Hiaasen (fabulous novels, but ultimately too similar to invite proper reviewing), I have finally selected my new target: Lee Child, whose “Jack Reacher” novels are about as good as grown-up versions of the men’s adventure genre thrillers ever gets. Killing Floor isn’t the first Child novel I’ve read (see elsewhere on this site for my reviews of the superb Persuader and One Shot), but it’s his first one and as such a logical start to my Lee Child Reading Project, as well as an intriguing glimpse at the Reacher formula before its perfection.

    It starts just as the series’ protagonist, Jack Reacher, is arrested in a small Georgia town. Reacher happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time: a murder’s been committed not too far away, and Reacher’s been spotted walking on a nearby road. But as Reacher notices ever-stranger things about the small town in which he’s been arrested, it also becomes obvious to the local police force that his alibi’s ironclad. Yet his freedom is just the beginning, because the murder’s just the tip of the iceberg, and Reacher won’t stop until he has found all the answers.

    Child’s strengths as a thriller writer are obvious: He combines credible nuggets of technical knowledge in a narrative framework that clearly shows his genre awareness. Killing Floor, despite one huge structural problem and a few rough edges here and there, already shows how it works.

    One of the best things about the Reacher novels I’ve read so far are how they initially masquerade their narrative nature. Killing Floor shows the way: from a singular murder mystery, it slips into a grander conspiracy mode as Reacher discovers more and more about what’s happening. For readers, it’s a sure sign that Child knows the mechanisms of the genre in which he’s writing. Better yet, it keeps everyone guessing as to where the story is going until, finally, we can see the whole picture. Most writers practice a form of this misdirection, but Child’s handling of this technique is well above average.

    Looking at the Reacher stories from the narrative ground up, the other distinctive aspect of Child’s thrillers is the convincing integration of technical trivia in the narrative. Reacher is an ex-military policeman, which gives him an expert’s understanding of expert procedures. His arrest in the first chapter is seen through his coolly detached perspective, analyzing the work of his opponents even as he’s the one being put in custody.

    The guy with the revolver stayed at the door. He went into a crouch and pointed the weapon two-handed. At my head. The guy with the shotgun approached close. Neat and tidy. Textbook moves. The revolver at the door could cover the room with a degree of accuracy. The shotgun up close could splatter me all over the window. The other way around would be a mistake. [P.2]

    Thriller fans’ appetite for this type of detail is vast, but it really serves to provide considerable credibility to the narrative. Reacher knows more than the other characters, and that makes him both a good narrator and a formidable protagonist.

    But for all the admiration that I have for Child’s novels in general, Killing Floor is his first, and it makes at least one horrible choice that severely harms the novel: the decision to balance the plot on a single whopper of a coincidence that involves not only Reacher’s wrong-place-wrong-time, but also ties it to his own family. Too much, too tidy: When even Reacher reflects that this is an unbelievable coincidence and decides to go with it, it’s a sure sign that the author’s planning has gone out of control.  [April 2024: Child does try to patch this issue as much as he can in prequel novel The Affair, but it’s not really convincing.]

    Other than that (and I don’t recall such abominable coincidences in latter novels), Killing Floor is a strong thriller entry that roars along with paragraph-by-paragraph readability and overarching structural interest. The first few chapters fly past, the pacing is steady and the final battle is an expensive set-piece that would delight any Hollywood director. It’s not a perfect debut for Lee Child, but it’s an assured one, and a good reflection of the strengths that would ensure a long-running series.

    Consider this the first of the Lee Child Reading Project series.

    [April 2024: Killing Floor is successfully revised, expanded and adapted to the screen in season 1 of Reacher.  Worth watching for fans of the books, as later plotting details vary somewhat.]

  • Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008)

    Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2008) It’s one thing to laugh at Star Wars as being for kids, but it’s another to see the franchise deliberately lower the bar to a point where there’s no possibility for derision: Clone Wars is not just for kids, it’s a pilot for a kid’s TV series. The cut-rate computer animation is sub-par (the dubbing is notoriously off), the plot is meaningless and there’s a teen heroine alongside Obi-Wan and Anakin to make it all even more attractive to the younger set. Not that the problems stop there: Voice impersonators have been hired to fill the roles of most of the live-action actors, the action once again returns to the familiar stomping ground of Tattoine, there’s little freshness to the sights, the anime-style designs are ugly, the beat-by-beat plotting is weak (Let’s hide in a box!) and the dialogue is dull enough to compete with lower-tier sitcoms. Not to mention that in the grand scheme of things, this entry in the Star Wars mythos is basically meaningless: it takes place between movies, doesn’t introduce any new revelation beyond what’s needed to set up the TV series: fans of the movies should adjust expectations accordingly to a quick cash-in product. On the relatively scarce upside, Ahsoka Tano becomes less annoying as time goes by (though making her a teen rebel makes little sense given what we’ve been shown of Jedi indoctrination practices: It would have been better to make her a by-the-book apprentice fit to be corrupted by Anakin’s go-for-broke style.) Some of the shots are set up in interesting ways, though the rest of the film is usually far more ordinary. Finally, Angelina-Jolie-styled antagonist Asajj Ventress gets more dialogue and time than the much-over-hyped Darth Maul, showing that Clone Wars is better than Episode One in at least one respect. But there isn’t much to report otherwise: This is a kid’s TV show pilot branded with the Star Wars logo, and nothing more. In a way, this film was oversold in theaters: it will feel a lot less pretentious once it’s part of the series’ DVD box-set.