Author: Christian Sauvé

  • Death Race 2000 (1975)

    Death Race 2000 (1975)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2005) Man, this film has everything. Nazis, nudity, car chases and political satire. False French antagonists, Sylvester Stallone, decapitation and fistfights. It’s true that they don’t make ’em like they used to: On the other hand, 2005’s loss is 1975’s gain, as this film has endured through thirty years and looks poised to survive yet another thirty. The plot is thin (just look at the title for a clue), but the details are enjoyable and the film runs with a fast-paced streak of audacity. Yes, the acting is awful, and so are the special effects. The script is more promising than fulfilling, but the cheap B-movie charm overpowers everything else. Truly, this is one film that deserves a revival, though maybe not a remake.

  • Corpse Bride (2005)

    Corpse Bride (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2005) Goth-geekmaster Tim Burton does it again with this impeccable stop-motion tale of a morbidly amusing love triangle. The story is simple and the outright laughs are often scarce, but it’s a non-stop smile from start to finish. Visually, the film owes a lot to Burton’s design style (each character is its own caricature) and sensibilities. (Has there ever been a sexiest plasticine figure of a decomposing dead girl? No, don’t tell me.) Snappy songs, grotesque gags, astonishing stop-motion work and constant invention all put this film on the top shelf and a contender for the year’s end Top-Ten. It may not be as striking as The Nightmare Before Christmas, but it’s well worth a look. Wonderful stuff. It will endure long after most of 2005’s films will have been forgotten.

  • From Time to Time, Jack Finney

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 1995, 303 pages, C$20.00 tpb, ISBN 0-671-89884-1

    Time travel is, by now, one of Science Fiction’s most well-worn themes. In steady use since at least H.G.Wells’s The Time Machine, is it still possible to do something, anything new with it? Whatever the answer, it won’t be found in Jack Finney’s From Time to Time, a disappointing novel that illuminates more by its failure than its qualities.

    It is perhaps unfair to attack the novel with the cognitive tools of SF criticism. From Time to Time is, after all, primarily a sequel to Finney’s own Time and Again (1970), a time-travel fable that mishandled its SF element in much the same fashion, for much the same goals.

    Finney, despite non-trivial genre credentials (he was the author of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, mind you) isn’t terribly interested in the verisimilitude of time-travel in either novel. In Time and Again, protagonist Si Morley discovers through a government agency that he, alone among perhaps billions, is able to self-hypnotize himself in an earlier time. The hand-waving explanation involves individuals being “bound” to their time-lines by countless details, but immersing themselves so completely in another time that they literally project themselves in the past. No, it doesn’t make sense. No, you’re not supposed to think about it.

    Your not supposed to nit-pick the time travel mechanism because the whole point of both books is to allow a contemporary character the chance to experience another time. Both books are historical novels in disguise, wrapped in some mubo-jumbo science-fantasy and structured along the lines of a thriller. Both books sometime stop for entire chapters as Finney spends his time describing this or that aspect of the period. I suppose that fans of New York in 1882 and 1912 will be delighted at the amount of period detail. For others, it can be all a big bore.

    This isn’t to say that Finney is unsuccessful. If his goal was to deliver a hidden chronologue, it works: He’s got an eye for detail, and there are a number of small culture shocks that are reasonably striking. Unfortunately, Finney’s romantic vision of the past is so often selective that it loses its credibility. His rose-tinted nostalgic vision of past New Yorks really grates after a while.

    It goes without saying that his protagonist is a healthy white male: One suspects that Si Morley’s enchantment with long-gone New York wouldn’t last as long had he been part of any oppressed minority, or had he found himself in need of medical treatment. The past may be an interesting place to visit, but one would definitely want to avoid living there. Alas, that’s exactly what Morley comes to prefer at the end of Time and Again, taking the opportunity to destroy the government’s time-travel project after some unconvincing moustache-twirling from the book’s antagonists.

    But don’t worry: Time appears to be as resilient as the author’s thirst for sequel dollars, and so From Time to Time begins with an intriguing coda in which time anomalies are studied. This notion of a “correct” time-line isn’t terribly convincing, but at least it’s some real SF content. But as Si starts travelling again, as is the case, from time to time, he discovers the unremarkable elasticity of time and finds himself unable to change the past, or the future. As an SF concept, it’s not terribly original (nor carefully explored), but it’s better than nothing at all.

    On the other hand, the lengthy digressions are maybe even more obvious in the sequel, as Finney stops the action for a chapter and takes us to vaudreville, or flying around 1912 New York. Again: history buffs will be taken. Others will skip ahead.

    Reading Time After Time, it occurs by contrast that the vast majority of written SF often treats time-travel as an instrument for change, as a way to explore other ideas. Here, time-travel is merely a device to blanket oneself in comfortable nostalgia, a quick way to describe historical details to modern readers. Should you find yourself obliged to explain why Finney’s two books aren’t science-fiction despite featuring time-travel, begin with this difference in intention.

    Obviously, this book -like its prequel- isn’t written for the SF audience. The cheap candy-coated nostalgic sentimentality, the eye-rolling time-travel mechanism and the lack of willingness to engage in serious speculation makes it a failure as a genre novel. Given the book’s continued longevity in print, mainstream readers obviously had a different reaction.

  • The Constant Gardener (2005)

    The Constant Gardener (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2005) Skillful, low-octane, high-intensity thriller that tackles an original premise with a great deal of cleverness. It’s first-world versus third-world in this tale where commercial interests mesh with diplomatic power. Rachel Weisz and Ralph Fiennes are both fine in yet another fine film from director Fernando Meirelles (after City Of God). It’s a quiet little thriller, but this restraint makes the standard “thriller moments” even more visceral: When our protagonist loses his passports, receives death threats or is chased by another car, you feel it a lot more than in a Bruckheimer production. The palette of the film is interesting, bathing first-world scenes in cold grey-blue while giving a colourful hand-held kick to its African moments. The Constant Gardener also proves to be in-tune with the geopolitics of its era, mentioning the Iraq invasion and dealing heavily with the reality of a superpower-heavy era where corporate profits bend national righteousness. The conclusion is at once sad and appropriate, capping off a film that doesn’t mis-step all that often. Call it a thriller for adults, well-worth watching with your brain turned on.

  • The Cola Conquest (1998)

    The Cola Conquest (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2005) This special-interest DVD presents the three episodes of the Canadian-made “Cola Conquest” documentary, which digs in history to present a socioeconomic picture of the soft drink industry as dominated by Coca Cola and Pepsi. From origins in the dubiously effective “remedies” of the early twentieth century, the soft drink industry becomes a poster child for marketing, and even starts affecting politics during World War 2. The first episodes is the best, as it explains how sugared drinks attained their current position in today’s culture. Plenty of revealing information about the power of marketing! The second episode spends a bit too much time in the depths of the Cold War, but does a fine job at linking soft drinks to politics. The third one is a bit less focused, going from globalization issues to taste-tests. It’s all quite fascinating, though the pace of interest is somewhat uneven. Makes an interesting companion to Super Size Me.

  • American Splendor (2003)

    American Splendor (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, September 2005) Given how Harvey Pekar’s “American Splendor” series of comic books is all about the fascinating dullness of ordinary life, it’s entirely appropriate for its movie adaptation to be similarly interesting and boring, with a little real-life twist. Paul Giamatti is Harvey Pekar, but Pekar is also in the film, commenting on what’s being shot about his own life, with friends and family similarly reacting to the depiction of themselves. What’s more, the film regularly makes use of comic book iconology, flipping through actual “American Splendor” illustrations and switching back to film. It’s an unusual approach, maybe even one that makes the film a must-see for serious cinephiles. As far the rest of the content goes, well, it’s about a comic book writer struggling to make ends meet: There isn’t much that’s interesting there, and that is the whole point of the film. American Splendor is remarkably successful at juggling uneasiness with interest, an approach that will either be cause for admiration, boredom or scorn. Or sometimes all three.

  • 1945, Newt Gingrich & William R. Forstchen

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Baen, 1995, 382 pages, C$30.00 hc, ISBN 0-671-87676-7

    In the Science Fiction community, heck, in the publishing community, 1945 has an unbeatable reputation as a commercial failure of epic proportions, an albatross that seriously damaged Baen Books’ financial statements for years. Published in 1995 and backed by an enormous publicity push, 1945 thundered in bookstores… and stayed there. No one was interested in buying it. Reviews weren’t just bad: they were viciously mean. Legend has it that over 80% of the entire print run was eventually returned to the publishers, costing Baen beaucoup dollars and scrapping the plans to conclude the trilogy launched by 1945. It wasn’t much later that Gingrich (who was, at the time, the Speaker of the House in the Republican-led US Congress) exited public life in a cloud of public ridicule partially generated by the book’s failure.

    So. Wow. What a reputation: The Book That Nearly Sank Baen Books, Threw Gingrich Out Of Congress And Whose Legacy Is Still Whispered About. (Even editor Jim Baen himself called it “perhaps the greatest failure of my career”) In this episode of publishing history, the book itself has nearly been forgotten. So: bad or not?

    Well, certainly not good. Not terrible either, but certainly not good. The main problem is that 1945 was probably conceived in the kind of cool conversation that doesn’t deserves to be novelized:

    Newt: I’ve got an idea for an alternate history!

    William: What is it?

    Newt: Hitler in a coma in 1941! He never declares war on the US! We beat the Japs, the Nazis never attack Russia, they conquer all of Europe except for England! Then in 1945, they start bombing the Oak Ridge facility which is building the Project Manhattan nukes!

    William: Cool.

    Yeah. Cool. But that type of pure speculation is a bit thin unless you’re a really good writer who can take this concept and beef it up with good characters and a compelling storyline. 1945 (which, by the way, takes place mostly in 1946) all too often reads as a deluge of historical facts loosely discussed between cardboard placeholders. We’re not reading about characters, but about names and occupations whose moral alignment closely match their nationalities. As for subtle or even entertaining prose, well, reach for another book.

    The infamous first three pages star a “pouting sex kitten” Nazi spy (Page 2, third paragraph) and believe me, it never gets more interesting than that. In the time-hallowed tradition of awful military techno-thrillers, half the book is spent putting together a Really Fiendish Attack, which then takes place more or less as expected in the rest of the book.

    1945 is not without interest, but it’s the kind of interest you get while reading non-fiction accounts of the Reich’s grandiose plans and high-tech equipment. There are also a few nifty cameos, which are probably more interesting for historians than lay readers. As I said: Cool stuff, but hardly worth slogging through a novel. The last few pages are a geeky wank-fest of cool ideas taken from WW2 drawing boards, all vigorously pimped as previews for the next novel.

    Which, fortunately, will never be written, let alone published. It says much for the quality of the book that this prospect doesn’t even offend my sensibilities as a completist: I cared so little for the characters that remembering them will be a challenge, let alone anticipate more of their adventures.

    [February 2005: William Forstchen was kind enough to write and point out, with far more tact than I deserved, that his subsequent Civil-War-Era novels co-written with Newt Gingrich have been well-received by critics and readers alike. This raises bigger questions about 1945, up to and including who truly had the “last cut” on the book. Genre historians wishing to investigate this issue in more detail may want to start with a look at a 1995 profile of Forstchen, a contemporary confession by Jim Baen (who “admits to reporter David Streitfeld that these much-snickered-over words were actually his creation”), details about the book’s returns and a fascinating blog post telling the rest of the story. Owners of 1945 may also want to take another look at the back cover and realize why Jim Baen is pictured alongside the two co-authors.]

  • Market Forces, Richard Morgan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Gollancz, 2004, 386 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 0-575-07567-8

    Anyone who has read Richard Morgan’s previous Altered Carbon already knows that the man’s not afraid to pull punches when it comes to sex and violence. Morgan may not appeal to more delicate sensibilities by successfully combining science-fiction elements with big boy toys, but he has managed to carve himself an impressive readership. Now with Market Forces, Morgan one-ups himself and delivers the equivalent of a big Hollywood action blockbuster in book form.

    The comparison with a big-budget film is no accident: As Morgan acknowledge in his preface, Market Forces was a script at one moment in its checkered history, and the central premise owes more to studio high-concept thinking than to serious sober extrapolation. What if, in a world where ultra-capitalism is dominant, one takes “corporate warfare” to its logical conclusion… on the roads?

    This is not such a new idea. ROLLERBALL 2000 and MAD MAX 2 are also mentioned in the preface, while more experienced readers will remember satiric works such as Alan Dean Foster’s “Why Johnny Can’t Speed” or Harlan Ellison’s “Along the Scenic Route”. Morgan’s newest entry in the infernokrusher canon attempts to be somewhat more sophisticated, reflecting current concerns about globalization, runaway corporations and the widening divide between social classes.

    As the novel begins, renowned carfighter Chris Faulkner joins a new employer in their Conflict Investment division, in which he makes deals with third-world civil war leaders in exchange for considerations once the dust settles. Dirty stuff, but not all that detached from current practises. What is different is the way companies vie for contract and corporate climbers eliminate their competition: On the road, with cars and guns. Whoever wins, suggests Morgan, brings back the other driver’s plastic cards.

    If that sounds like a perfect excuse to include car chases, gun battles and hot women, well, you’re absolutely right. The universe of Market Forces is one where corporate executive go joy-shooting poor people in the disenfranchised zones, where every woman is either a bland wife, a hot mistress or an icy ball-breaker. It’s hard to take it very seriously, and that eventually becomes a problem: Morgan’s satire is earnest about its left-wing stance (this may be the first guns-and-babes action novel ending with a bibliography suggesting works by Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore), but it requires a lot of suspension of disbelief to work. When Morgan gets down to explanations in the pivotal Chapter Thirty-Four, he doesn’t give the reader a believable rationale as much as an excuse to go along with the whole carfighting concept.

    But don’t thing that this makes Market Forces any less than a bang-up read. Morgan writes with an unbeatable narrative energy, and as a result you’ll be hard-pressed to tear yourself away from this novel even as you roll your eyes and mutter that this is all very unlikely. Faulkner’s corporate struggles with competitors, enemies and friends are gripping, and so are the various incidents on his road to moral redemption. A twisted example of Morgan’s skills is found in Chapter Thirty-Three, as an incident of unbelievable violence is felt as a cathartic triumph, and then becomes a comic punchline for the rest of the book.

    The book falters near the end, as it tries to reconcile dramatic inevitability and moral considerations with its action-driven atmosphere. The way Morgan is willing to criticize ultra-capitalism and yet deliver an ambiguous conclusion is admirable, but it may also strike some as trying to sell a cake and eating it too. Too bad that in the process, a number of threads are cut abruptly, or left unresolved.

    There is no doubt that Market Forces is a remarkable book. At a time where “left-wing” often means “wimpy”, it’s unusual to see a vigorous political argument taking a form more appropriate to the bloodthirsty young males. It’s a fascinating study in the contradictions of satire, with serious themes supporting silly concepts. It’s almost wonderful in its capacity to make fascinating characters out of repellent people, and in creating narrative interest even as the events unfolding are almost unbearably awful. It certainly solidify whatever credentials Morgan has established with his first two novels, and is making hard to wait until his next.

  • Saucer, Stephen Coonts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 2002, 340 pages, C$21.95 tpb, ISBN 0-312-28342-3

    There are no perfectly sane writers.

    There is always a little trapdoor in every author’s mind, a trapdoor that normally blocks dumb ideas, stupid beliefs, sexual kinks, wrong impulsions and other things we don’t really want to know. If the author is reasonably self-cognisant and if his agent/editor is at least mildly competent, the trapdoor stays closed and readers never have to hear about any of the silliness hidden behind it.

    But as authors’ careers advance, as they become so successful as to dictate terms to his editor, or as their thirst for money grows outside all reasonable bounds, the trapdoor opens and what comes out isn’t pretty. In the techno-thriller field, take a look at the brief but spectacular flame-out of Payne Harrison’s career. Two excellent novels (Storming Intrepid and Thunder of Erebus), followed by one mildly entertaining potboiler (Black Light) and then Forbidden Summit, one ludicrous straight-to-paperback UFO-are-real conspiracy thriller complete with an afterword claiming that the conspiracy was real. Exit Payne Harrison: he never wrote a novel under that name again.

    Now the brain-eating, trapdoor-opening disease has firmly lodged itself in the head of Stephen Coonts, as he trades his credibility for extra bucks with the trade-paperback original UFO thriller Saucer. To be fair, it starts promisingly, as an engineering team discovers a long-buried flying saucer in the Sahara desert. So far, so good: there’s no trace of a conspiracy, and there’s still a science-fictional thrill in contemplating alien relics left on Earth thousands of years ago. What’s more, Coonts anchors his novel around an endearing young protagonist, and if the result may not rise much above adventure fiction for the first hundred pages, it’s decent adventure fiction.

    It gets more interesting when the characters figure out that the saucer has been shaped by and for human minds. Savvy SF readers immediately reach for the good old time-travel explanation, with maybe a wince when remembering Michael Crichton’s Sphere. But Coonts then takes his accumulated momentum and runs off a credibility cliff: You see, explain the book’s mouthpiece scientist, humans are the descendant of an alien race that landed on Earth thousands of years ago, and then devolved into tribalism and forgot all about their technological origins.

    This, to put it too mildly, is nonsense. It flies in the face of everything we know about early human history, culture and biology. (There’s more than enough genetic linkage between humans and other animals to make it patently obvious that we share a common biological origin.)

    But it gets worse, a lot worse as Saucer abandons adventure fiction to focus on the machinations of an evil tycoon, the duplicity of the US government, and romance in a “get me the super-duper MacGuffin!” plot that was better-handled in books like Dale Brown’s classic Day of the Cheetah. Even our likable protagonist loses his charm, as his characterization oscillates between boy genius, dumb teenager (“thirty-year-old women are old!”) and stone-cold killer. Saucer, in other words, gets silly, gets dumb and gets old real fast.

    The cherry topping on the sundae comes late in the book, as the protagonists figure out how to hook up the saucer’s advanced computer to a plain old laser printer. Gaaah. At this point, it’s obvious that Coonts just doesn’t even care about his readers: as long as he’s got their money, it’s all good. (But now try to convince those readers to buy your newer books, chump…) This “my readers are morons and that’s a good thing” thinking extends to the mechanics of the saucer’s anti-gravity mechanism, which make no sense and, if I’m reading latter sections correctly, would even prevent the saucer from leaving the ground.

    Fortunately, it’s not all bad,: Despite the considerable lengths and silly plot mechanics, Coonts still gives to Saucer a basic readability. Part of it is based in “just how dumb is this going to become?”, but part of it is also based on a scattering of intriguing characters and neat reversals. But this doesn’t change that of all of Coonts’ book, this is the first trade-paperback original, and that it’s nowhere near the quality of his latest books, even the disappointing Hong Kong.

    I now see that Saucer somehow warranted a sequel (Saucer: The Conquest, which I seriously think lacks an exclamation point.), which strengthens my whole “Dumb readers! Money! Dumb readers! Money!” theory. Memo to authors: Writing fun adventure fiction doesn’t give you an excuse to ignore logic and good sense. Unless you don’t have any left, the trapdoor having sprung open.

    [January 2009: Re-reading the above before tackling a cheap used copy of Saucer: The Conquest, I briefly wondered if the novel really deserved my bucketful of vitriol. After reading the sequel, I’m now worried that I may have been too lenient: The second adventure of boy genius Rip Cantrell is just as bad, if not even a bit worse, than the original. From Area 51 conspiracies to AUSTIN POWERS-grade lunar death beams to the machination of a French tycoon (who, being French in an American thriller, obviously turns out to be evil), Saucer: The Conquest is another damaging piece of nonsense for Coonts, whose recent novels have proven to be more and more erratic. It’s not enough for him and his fans to take refuge behind excuses of “light adventure science-fiction”: This is bad fiction, period.]

  • Olympos, Dan Simmons

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    EOS, 2005, 690 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-380-97894-6

    Well, it’s over and it was about time it was.

    It’s not that I disliked Dan Simmons’ Ilium. But even ambitious novels trying to tie together science, literature and the human condition can leave some lingering resentment after lasting about twice as long as what they should have. Obviously, mine was a minority view: Ilium went on to earn critical raves and was nominated for the 2004 Hugo Awards. But it was still, after all, half a story and now that Olympos is out, we can learn how it all ends.

    It ends well, fortunately. Olympos is not without its own considerable lengths, but at least it ties everything together and enlightens us as to the nature of Simmons’ artistic and thematic choices for Ilium. Picking up a few months after the Iliad-changing conclusion of the first volume, Olympos continues the adventures of the humans, moravecs, post-humans and even stranger entities of a far-away future. At last, issues are settled and questions are answered. (Not the least being “why the parallels with classic works of literature?”)

    Olympos is an epic work not especially because of the subject (which is ambitious, but still small-potatoes compared to some of the most overblown space-operas out there), but because of the amount of time readers are expected to sink into the entire 1,100-pages story before getting a good payoff. The “eloi” plot thread never started cooking for me until well into the second half of Olympos, and given the density of the book’s 600-odd pages, that’s a long time awaiting. (Simmons fan will note that a similar problem affected the Endymion diptych: The first volume wasn’t terribly useful, but the second one was the whole point of the setup.)

    This being said, it’s entirely possible that the Ilium/Olympos series may be too big for my own little head to contain. The references to classical literature kept eluding me (heck, says “Achilles” and I picture Brad Pitt in TROY.) and the thematic underpinning of the book seemed a lot more obvious after reading an interview in which Simmons himself explained what he was trying to do.

    Still, none of my perceived inadequacies at understanding the text invalidates my feeling that it ought to have been much, much shorter —say, the entire story in a slim 500 pages. There’s a notably jarring sub-thread about a doomsday submarine that I found particularly out-of-place, especially given how it relates to one of the book’s most egregious plot-cheats, a honking big coincidence that ties two threads together. Neat stuff, but it may have been better as a stand-alone novella than a part of the series.

    On the other hand, there are a number of lovely images and concepts here and there, from the nature of genius to a road sliced through the ocean. The moravecs are interesting characters (some will say that they’re more human than the humans) and the reconstructed twentieth-century human observer Hockenberry is still a dependable viewpoint character. There’s also a pleasing complexity in the levels of technology exhibited by Olympos‘s assortment of gods, demi-gods, robots and humans of all descriptions. This isn’t a simple side-A-versus-side-B type of arrangement, but something scaling all the way from plain humans to the functional equivalent of world-altering magic, and all points in between.

    Obviously, this isn’t quite enough to overcome my lack of patience with the book’s length, and for that reason alone I would suggest to leave it out of the Hugo Award ballot next year. There are already a number of faster, more interesting works out there this year, and Olympos certainly isn’t a perfect candidate. (It’s a candidate from a well-respected, well-known writer, however, and that changes things.) I suppose that readers with patience and a classical education will have another take entirely.

  • Jarhead, Anthony Swofford

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Scribner, 2003, 260 pages, C$21.00 tpb, ISBN 0-7432-4491-5

    Even at this politically-charged time where “support our troops!” has become a hollow synonym for “shut up!”, the first requirement for supporting our troops would be to understand them. And we won’t do that by listening to journalists, bloggers or self-important pundits: the troops themselves remain their own best advocates. Fortunately, every generation produces its share of able witnesses, and one of the latest ones is Anthony Swofford with his blisteringly honest autobiography Jarhead.

    Swofford, we quickly learn, was an odd Marine. Equally prone to spending his time reading classics or drinking to excess, Swofford was an insider and an outsider at the same time, completely part of the Marines Corps and yet (especially with hindsight) capable of stepping out and describing the Corps as an observer. This dual perspective, as a participant and an bystander, is invaluable in describing his experience to us.

    Jarhead is structured in an non-linear fashion, alternating between Swofford’s experience in the Marines with flashbacks to his personal history. Training, initial postings, difficulties with his family are all covered here, up to and including Swofford’s posting in the Gulf. As a Marine Sniper, Swofford could reliably be called one of America’s elite soldier. But the reality he reports is nothing like the spit-polish image of the army that some people would like you to believe. We all suspect that boys together will do some pretty stupid things, and this book confirms whose suspicions. We all know that war is hell, and being paid to go to war doesn’t leave much room for mellowness, even in horsing around. But what Jarhead does better than any other military book is portray the absolute boredom of being a soldier most of the time.

    Maybe it’s a generational thing. Maybe it’s in Gen-X genes to consider boredom to be a pervasive yet intolerable state of mind. Maybe it’s a modern affliction to say “but I was bored!” as if it was worthy of compassion. But maybe it’s what happens when you take thousand of soldiers and put them in a desert, waiting, waiting, waiting for what they were trained to do.

    Suffice to say that in time, Swofford gets what he wants: He gets to shoot and be shot at, even though his active participation in the Gulf War may be more underwhelming than you’d expect. Fortunately, Swofford writes with an eye for the killer detail and an excellent sense of place. Jarhead pulls no punches and presents the military life with all of its problems and whatever glory it offers.

    Clearly-written, this is a book that demands to be read almost all at once, page after page, chapter after chapter. Swofford knows how to write a story, and he’s got plenty of them to tell. Funny, direct, profane, sometimes infuriating in kind of a “what-are-you-doing-you-moron?” fashion, this autobiography can’t be confused with another era or another generation.

    I will let others debate the accuracy of Swofford’s depiction of Marines service. From my perspective as a civilian (and a Canadian one at that), Jarhead rings true, maybe a bit truer than I’d like to believe in an effort to keep some of that “support our troops!” feeling. It certainly made me re-evaluate BUFFALO SOLDIERS as a mite more plausible than I initially thought, what with Swofford’s tales of pervasive drug usage and self-destructive peacetime behaviour.

    It’s impossible to read Jarhead today without at least a passing thought about the current American-led occupation of Iraq, and the hardships endured by the military personnel stationed over there. Even if the Gulf War was a lightning romp compared to the lengthy nightmare of Iraq, even if tactics and equipment have changed, it’s hard to avoid linking the two. Swofford doesn’t exactly encourage us to think otherwise with his cynical view of oil as being the honest reason behind Desert Storm. Swofford had plenty of time to think about the reasons why he was stuck in the Arabian desert, and some of his conclusions can be jarring when juxtaposed against the mundaneness of wartime experience. Old men sending young men to die so they can profit…

    But even as candid as it becomes, Jarhead doesn’t do much to diminish a civilian’s awe for professional soldiers. At a time where one hears about war in clinical terms, as if it was yet another corporate challenge to be managed, it’s good and just to be reminded that war is a deadly matter, fought between men who curse, and bleed, and cry, and suffer. Support our troops; try to understand what they’re really going through.

  • Wedding Crashers (2005)

    Wedding Crashers (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2005) I’m really not a fan of frat-boy comedies, so please excuse my bemusement as Wedding Crashers goes on to shatter every R-rated comedy box-office record. Womanizers triumphant? Meh. It’s the kind of box-office success that leads one to think dark thoughts about the collective intelligence of the American ticket-buying public. It’s not that Wedding Crashers is bad as much as it’s featureless. Obvious. Dull, sometimes. Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson play their own respective typecast roles, and if I’m still a sucker for Wilson’s brand of surfer-type laid-back smoothness, Vaughn’s usual loudmouth shtick is getting thin. Ironically, Wedding Crashers is never as good as when it’s behaving badly: the film seriously tanks in the third act as it discovers a conscience and attempts to reconcile itself with mainstream values. Boring! Speaking of which, Rachel McAdams makes no impression as the lead girl whose role is to shut up and look pretty. Meanwhile, Isla Fisher steals every scene she’s in as the not-so innocent sibling. (Heck, she even steals every scene she’s not in given how badly we wish she was in more of the film.) There are a number of good gags and some inspired set-pieces, but in most ways, it’s a perfectly ordinary film. But then again, it’s made for other people.

  • Stealth (2005)

    Stealth (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2005) Damn you Rob Cohen! Just as I was ready to tear this insipid script apart, here you come with those fantastic action sequences, virtual cinematography and the good sense to cast Jessica Biel! How can I resist your film, even if it’s one of the dumbest thing I’ve seen all year? As a big fan of military techno-thriller, I can point at the screen every five seconds and darkly mutter “Mistake!” (That whole survival-and-evasion sequence ought to be shows at SERE courses as tutorials on what pilots should not do.) But why bother when I know that the film will reliably knock my socks off with a boffo action sequence every fifteen minutes? Curse you and praise you for that refuelling sequence, both moronic and exhilarating. Every time I thought about leaving the theatre in disgust, you showed more of Jessica Biel’s curves and I stayed. I hope your career implodes, because otherwise every other director will learn how to shore up a bad script with cool directing tricks and fast-paced editing. It took a while, but fortunately you relented and delivered a truly awful last ten minutes, minutes during my brain re-surfaced and managed to get some perspective on the film. Did you really go into one of those silly “humans are better than machines” speech, or was I hallucinating that? Did the film argue for the intelligence and decision-making power of humans even as the United States are stuck in Iraq? Did you even try to stuff an MP3-downloading killer A.I. zapped by lightning in the oldest and lamest of all Frankenstein plot rip-offs? Surely I should be tracking down every copy of this film for destruction purposes. And yet I feel the need to buy the DVD to watch it again…

  • Sky High (2005)

    Sky High (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2005) Every summer has a pleasant surprise or two, and to my mind this is the sleeper film no one was expecting. Made with a tight budget, cheap special effects and a decent script, Sky High shares a number of common preoccupations with The Incredibles (especially the “superhero family” vibe) but stands on its own as a witty hybrid between superhero films and teenage comedy. It goes along much better than expected thanks to some good supporting roles from Kurt Russell, Dave Foley, Bruce Campbell and Lynda Carter. The script has weak patches (especially the “yearbook reveal” slip-up, which pretty much gives away the rest of the film), but its sharp dialogue and steady rhythm keeps it chugging along nicely. The lead actors are suitably sympathetic, and the film at least has a rudimentary sense of its place in genre history. Is it any accident if the only worthwhile superhero films these days are those which tinker at least a bit with the concept, from The Incredibles to Batman Begins? In any case, I tend to think of Sky High as this year’s Bring It On or Mean Girls: a fun teen film fit for more demanding audiences, with plenty of charm and good jokes to tell.

  • Silver City (2004)

    Silver City (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, August 2005) Long, slow and dull political thriller that is nevertheless smarter than most of what you’ll see in theatres this year. John Sayles is, of course, an independent film-maker’s legend, and the quality of Silver City‘s execution clearly shows why: Not only has he crafted a good script and filmed it in a clean, sparse style, but he has also managed to attract an impressive number of known (and semi-known) actors on the sole basis of the project. Sayles intention with this film is (among other things) to expose the modern pseudo-conservative ideology in which politics is but another mean for businessmen to further their ambitions. It’s certainly no accident if Chris Cooper, playing a puppet candidate, acts and sounds exactly like a certain current American president… But perhaps the most impressive thing about Silver City is how it manages to cover so many themes in scarcely more than two hours. It exudes an Chinatown aura of hopeless corruption, a contemporary society built on lies and exploitation. Sure, the pacing could have been improved, and a meditative thriller is no excuse to put viewers to sleep. Still, there’s more good stuff than bad here, and it’s just too bad that the film is such a hard sell to mainstream audiences.