Author: Christian Sauvé

  • The Rainmaker, John Grisham

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Island, 1995, 598 pages, C$9.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-440-22165-X

    At his best, John Grisham delivers a satisfactory re-telling of his favourite story (“Young southern lawyer fights evil organization”) but never strays too far away from it. It’s a good niche, when you think of it: there’s regional colour, a crowd-pleasing plot, solid movie material and the potential for a sympathetic hero. (There are worse ways to earn a living than being a best-selling author.) But the real fun starts when Grisham starts playing tricks and variations on his familiar elements: Often, those quirks and structural choices can become the central point of interest of a book.

    Nowhere else in Grisham’s oeuvre so far is this truer than in The Rainmaker, an obvious David-against-Goliath story whose courtroom component is one of the most lop-sided legal contest you’ll ever encounter in legal fiction. If the courtroom drama was the main focus of the book, we’d have a problem justifying the existence of The Rainmaker as a piece of fiction. But it’s not. For better of for worse, Grisham has other things in mind for the novel, and I’m not sure they all fit together.

    The break from Grisham’s other books is obvious from the first page: For the first time in his career, Grisham uses first-person narration (present-tense, no less) to tell the story of one Rudy Baylor, a law student about to graduate. At the beginning of the story, most things seem to be running in Rudy’s favour: He’s got cash-flow problems, sure, but he’s also weeks away from a job with a well-regarded law firm. But then the hammer falls. In short order, Rudy loses the job, files for bankruptcy, moves out of his apartment and finds himself with next to no prospects. Still, he’s got a file in his hand, a civil suit that just may be worth millions…

    Plot-wise, Rudy’s fight with the eeevil insurance company of Great Benefit Life is one of the most one-sided contest you’ll ever read. Sure, it’s the whole single-David against corporate-Goliath fight again, but Grisham stacks the deck so ridiculously in favour of his populist protagonist that the courtroom becomes the vicarious blooding of an easy target. Rudy’s corporate opponents make every mistake in the book, and face the added difficulty of having the facts against them. Rudy, on the other hand, has a sympathetic jury, a friendly judge, two or three dirty tricks up his sleeve and some killer pieces of evidence. It’s not much of a contest, and not much of a drama either (though it makes for cheerful reading).

    If that was all there was to The Rainmaker, there wouldn’t be much point in going on. But there’s more. You could argue that the real point of the novel isn’t the insurance case, but the portrait of a young lawyer during difficult times. Rudy doesn’t come from a good family, can’t depend on a trust fund and doesn’t display prodigious legal abilities. But he works hard, never gives up and scrapes by on the strength of his conviction. The first-person narration is an ideal vehicles for the elliptical asides, the showy supporting characters and the day-to-day drudgery of being a working lawyer. Tasty stuff; fans of Grisham’s other thrillers won’t be surprised to learn that this novel is as compelling as Grisham’s previous onces. Set aside some free time to make your way through this one.

    Still, the novel is also filled with loose ends and choices that don’t ring true. A number of those things (a mysterious fire, for instance) seem to be kept in reserve for a final revelation that, ultimately, never comes. All, including a romance, seems rushed and crammed in an ending that doesn’t conclude as much as it gives up and throws everything back onto the table in desperation. Conscious choices by Grisham, I’m sure, but the purpose of which still has me dubious: Sure, part of it is an attempt to subvert Grisham’s own favourite story… but the way it’s handled seems just as contrived as the one-sided courtroom theatrics.

    But don’t let that stop you from grabbing a copy of The Rainmaker. Grisham devotees will note the blueprint of The Runaway Jury buried deep in The Rainmaker, what with the emphasis on civil suits and the passing mention of jury consultants. But even readers without an encyclopedic knowledge of Grisham’s fiction will be so completely swept along by the narration that the book’s problems will hardly register. And that’s a trick that sets the magicians apart from the other authors, whether or not they’re telling their favourite story all over again.

  • Mou gaan dou [Infernal Affairs] (2002)

    Mou gaan dou [Infernal Affairs] (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2005) Hong-Hong crime cinema’s traditional fascination for the criminal/policeman duality here finds its masterpiece. Tony Leung and Andy Lau play polar opposites as (respectively) an undercover policeman infiltrating criminal gangs and a criminal infiltrating the ranks of the police forces. After an effective opening sequence, the cards are on the table for all to see and the game begins as to which man will uncover the other before he is himself discovered. But the plot is only half the story as this tense crime drama is developed with great skill and grace. The direction is fluid and the suspense runs high. While some leads go nowhere, the film a s a whole is a superior cops-and-criminals drama in much of the same vein as Heat or L.A. Confidential. This is world cinema at its accessible best.

  • The Stepford Wives (2004)

    The Stepford Wives (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2005) When considering America’s evils, the culture war between conformity and individualism is far more important than the so-called battle between the sexes. The satiric potential of obedient wives may have found its audience in 1975 (hey, that’s the year I was born!), but thirty years later, it’s wasted when it’s placed besides such juicier targets as the need to conform to outdated ideals. This remake misses the point and yet, in its last five minutes, shows signs of at least understanding that. Rumours of last-minutes re-shoots may have something to do with the incoherency, but as it stands, The Stepfords Wives is a mish-mash of half-gelled ideas, contradictory information (what; robots and control chips?), lame gags, idiot plotting, absent suspense and groan-inducing developments. Watching this film today, after years of training in watching suspense movies, is an exercise in seething exasperation: how can characters act so stupidly? How can they miss the obvious clues? Gaah. A tiny argument can be made that this remake is really a parody, but that’s a hollow excuse for a bad film. At least Bette Midler is amusing in her un-Stepfordized character, and there’s maybe a handful of good laughs here and there. Otherwise, forget it: this film isn’t worth the aggravation of seeing the potential for good satire wasted on such tired subjects.

  • Robots (2005)

    Robots (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2005) It’s hard to be overly critical of this type of film. Sure, it’s no masterpiece –heck, it’s nowhere near the level of quality of Pixar’s CGI animated films. Plot-wise, it’s a Saturday-morning cartoon special: Young robot goes to the city, makes friends and enemies, saves the day. Robots may feature an all-robots cast, but it’s straight-up comedy rather than Science Fiction. But you don’t need to be flawless to be entertaining, and so few will fail to be amused by Robots: The level of wordplay and visual invention alone is worth a look, what with its joke-every-five-seconds pacing. It’s not high-level humour (Farts and big body parts: Comedic gold!), but there is an awful lot of it, and at least some of the gags are bound to amuse you. As with other recent CGI films (Monsters, Inc., for one), the elaborate animation allows for a few frantic action pieces and some amazing depth to the film’s imagined world. Tons of stunt voice casting may make for an impressive credit sequence, but they don’t do much to raise the interest in the characters –at the exception of Robin William’s usually hyperactive delivery. It all amounts to a quirky comedy that’s just too likable to kick too hard. It’ll do for kids, and it’ll do for adults too.

  • Assemblers of Infinity, Kevin J. Anderson & Doug Beason

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Bantam Spectra, 1993, 278 pages, C$20.00 hc, ISBN 0-553-29921-2

    The gradual endangerment of the Science Fiction mid-list over the past decade and a half has already been discussed to death elsewhere, but that doesn’t make it any less important. The conglomeration of publishing under ever-hungrier multinationals has increased the drive for clear profits. Authors who used to sell profitably but not spectacularly have been driven away in the hope of finding strings of best-sellers. This, in turn, has affected what gets into bookstores. Authors are encouraged to do series, to do novelizations, to “co-write” something with a celebrity.

    Unfortunately, what has gotten lost in this evolution is what I call the meat-and-potatoes genre novel. The kind of adequate, but unspectacular standalone book that entertains despite not breaking any genre convention. Novels like Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason’s Assemblers of Infinity.

    The story is one we’ve seen many times before: Twenty-five years in the future, astronauts on the moon discover a strange alien artifact that is both intriguing and dangerous. People die, scientists are sent to investigate and soon enough, we’re stuck in a race against time, between revelation and annihilation. Simple enough: that Anderson and Beason choose to exploit nanotechnology as the Danger Tech is a sign of the times, but otherwise there isn’t much that’s not instantly recognizable by SF fans.

    Not that this is a bad thing: From the opening prologue, in which a discovery turns deadly, fans will slip into Assemblers of Infinity like in an old set of clothes. The technology-heavy vocabulary is familiar. The easy prose is unobtrusive and compulsively readable. The characters are engineers and scientists, bright folks with just enough back-story to avoid charges of cardboard characterization. In short, it’s a perfectly lovely hard-SF story in the Clarke mold, with enough ambiguity to make it interesting: the characters don’t neatly divide in good/bad bins, and that’s already nice enough. In retrospect, few fans will be surprised by the twists and turns taken by Assemblers of Infinity, though there are a number of pleasant developments here and there (much like the authors’ previous Lifeline, which tweaked a few genre conventions by the nose). The somewhat gratuitous suggestion of ESP power is old-fashioned, but not in an intolerable way: Everything ends up fitting together nicely.

    Assemblers of Infinity is not meant to be innovative, but comforting. Working away from genre spotlights, the Anderson/Beason team has produced more than half a dozen interesting Hard-SF/techno-thrillers that are well-worth a quick read. Comfort food for the SF audience, meat-and-potatoes novels that are fulfilling but hardly spectacular. And that’s fine, because those mid-pack novels are the true backbone of the genre, the structural blocks that define what people imagine when they think about SF. The genre classics stand out over the background noise that is generated by novels such as this one. Without a strong fuzzy stream of good solid SF novels, there isn’t much of a genre. Assemblers of Infinity may be a middle-of-the-pack book, but there’s no dishonour in that.

    Ultimately, this thought brings us back to why the much-heralded “death of the mid-list” hurts the genre. Without a support net of mid-list building blocks, SF is stuck without references, without a way to keep readers from abandoning the genre while waiting for the next Big Thing.

    So authors adapt and evolve. Like Kevin J. Anderson, they start massive trilogies and series. They turn to comic-book writing. They shill themselves to cults and celebrities. They write novelizations. They try other genres in the hope that they’ll find a magic formula. But most of all, they stop writing those mid-list novels that define the genre. Assemblers of Infinity may not be publishable today (The Anderson/Beason team has certainly stopped writing anything like it), and that’s a real shame.

  • The Quick And The Dead (1995)

    The Quick And The Dead (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2005) The Western genre has rarely been faithful to the historical reality of the American west, opting for operatic grandeur and machismo myth-making over the true grime and uneventful routine of the era. This film cheerfully won’t do anything to correct the record: here, the wild west is only a backdrop to a series of shoot-em-up duels, aggrandized by ridiculously overblown personalities and heightened visuals. I say this like it’s a bad thing, but it really isn’t: The Quick And The Dead is most enjoyable when it goes for broke in its quest for the ultra-Western, and at its weakest when it tries to inject realism (or its boring cousin, “motivation”) into a framework that doesn’t need it. As a tongue-in-cheek take on the pistol-duel shtick, it’s hugely enjoyable. Too bad that it chose to saddle itself with a clogging revenge story, complete with lengthy flashback and barely-repressed rage. But that takes maybe ten minutes, and the rest of the film is a lot of fun: The impressive cast is awe-inducing even today: Gene Hackman has rarely been better at chewing scenery, and any film that managed to snag both pre-stardom Leonardo Decaprio and Russell Crowe is nothing to dismiss easily. Sharon Stone herself has lost a lot of starpower in the decade since this film (and her middling screen presence here may show why), but she looks cute enough as a female gunfighter. The fifth cast member worth noticing is director Sam Raimi, who infuses the film with some much-needed style. Realistic? Absolutely not. As tight as it could be? Heck no. Fun to watch despite everything? Oh yes.

  • How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days (2003)

    How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2005) Fluffy, slightly original romantic comedy that shows promise but then devolves in the usual yadda-yadda. There’s interest in the basic premise (dual bets: she has to break up; he has to stay with her; hijinks ensue) but once it’s properly presented, it’s immediately discarded in favour of the usual idiot characters, dumb misunderstandings and wacky chase sequences. The whole film is contrived, but the last quarter hour overdoes things in this regard. It’s still not an entire waste of time mostly because of the charm of the two leads: Kate Hudson is even pretty cute in her “Kathie Lee Gifford on crack” mode. Matthew McConaughey is blander (in keeping with Romantic Comedy male lead tradition) but not entirely boring. It all amounts to a fair film, slightly too long but still pleasant enough.

  • Hostage (2005)

    Hostage (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2005) There isn’t much that is remarkable in this Bruce Willis film, if not for the fact that it brings to mind about half a dozen similarly unremarkable films in Willis’ career. Bland villains, by-the-number developments, pedestrian directing, somber cinematography: Without the big-name headliner, this could have been a straight-to-video release and few would have noticed. The gritty cinematography is annoying, but not as much as the lack of involvement with the characters. Daddy is a mob accountant and the bad people are teenage hoodlums: why is it difficult to care about these people? Even Willis is more of an enigma than a hero. Oh, there are a few quirks here and there, but almost nothing here comes to the level of The Negotiator, to name another relatively recent hostage-rescue drama. Made to fill the shelves of your local video-club, this film acceptably competent, but just that and no more.

  • Crush Depth, Joe Buff

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morrow, 2002, 449 pages, C$37.95 hc, ISBN 0-06-000964-0

    By now, Joe Buff fans should know what to expect from his third novel. Cutting-edge near-future submarine warfare. Shaky grasp of story-telling techniques. An absence of political complexity. A story that emerges out of the water mid-way through, to conclude with yet another duel between submarines. At least Joe Buff is getting better with every following book, though Crush Depth doesn’t show the same stark improvement that set Thunder in the Deep apart from the debut Deep Sound Channel. In fact, it’s such a small improvement that some readers may come to question why they’re reading the entire series.

    For it is obviously a series, and there’s no hope that it will conclude anytime soon. Buff is slated to write nearly a dozen novels in the “Jeffrey Fuller” universe, each one describing a campaign in a fictional near-future war opposing English-speaking Allies to a new Germany-led Axis. In this third book, captain Jan ter Horst and XO Gunther van Gelder both return from the first novel, while our stalwart hero Jeffrey Fuller must once again go head-to-head against enemies that are as smart as he is. Plot-wise, that’s all you need to know: You can infer the structure of the novel from Buff’s previous ones: There will be a submarine fight, a terrestrial raid and another submarine fight. One wonders if all twelve Fuller books will suffer from the same structure.

    What’s new here is a land-bound prologue in which Fuller and series love interest Ilse Reebeck tour a wartime New York city. Unfortunately, this segment only highlights how Buff’s political sense comes nowhere near his expertise in military affairs. What becomes obvious is that Buff is merely using his future history to re-fight “The Good War”: Wartime New York suffers from rationing and plays big-band music as if it had escaped from a romantic WW2 film, whereas the big bad Germans are only one snappy salute short of being total Nazis. Given the pacifist learnings of real-world Germany, let’s just say that a German civil war is more likely than them presenting a credible challenge to the Anglo-speaking power bloc. Buff constantly tries to hand-wave “nuclear weapons!” as the big equalizer, but that excuse doesn’t excuse much given, once again, the anti-nuclear forces at work within Germany these days. (Don’t try to make me believe that massive executions would resolve that problem.)

    The political unlikeliness at the root of Buff’s future history have always been problematic, but it becomes even more so as the series advance and Crush Depth, for instance, suggests an escalation of warfare from countries lining up against the US. Now, I would pay good money for a military thriller in which the US was the antagonist that a righteous alliance of nations would try to contain (heck, we’re already half-way there today), but somehow I don’t think that this is what Buff has in mind. (Wouldn’t it be a fantastic twist, though?) Oh well, onward, what with tactical nuclear weapons raining down on our protagonists like so many cheap fireworks.

    Buff’s strength has been in portraying submarine warfare as a complex interrelationship between psychological, military, oceanographic and technological factors. While the degree of innovation is smaller in Crush Depth than in the series’s previous two volumes, there are still a number of good ideas and scenes here and there. Particularly noteworthy is a third act taking place under the Antarctic Ross Ice Shelf, though the final conclusion seems weak after all the build-up leading to it.

    In terms of story-telling, Buff is still improving, though he still has a way to go before delivering a novel that can be enjoyed by laypersons: There are a number of hilariously unconvincing dramatic blunders in Crush Depth, including the clumsy introduction of Fuller’s father (“I haven’t thought about my father in months because I don’t like him… wait… who’s that man at the urinal? It’s my father!”) and a fake death that just isn’t unconvincing (no one will buy in it), but doesn’t even make sense in the internal logic of the series.

    Given that even this type of stuff represents an improvement over the previous novels, you can see why I’m sceptical as to whether I’ll ever truly enjoy one of Buff’s novels. I happened to have the first three books on my shelves, but now that I’m done with them, it’ll be a challenge to convince myself to pick up the follow-up Tidal Rip. Maybe at a used book sale. Provided it’s really, really cheap.

  • Elf (2003)

    Elf (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2005) There are two movies warring for attention here: An innocent kid’s film about the meaning of Christmas through the antics of an elf lost in New York, and a silly comedy that has to please the adult fans of Will Ferrell. No surprise, then, if the film gives out such a mixed impression. Parts of it work, but they come from different films. Ferrell is sweetness incarnate as the Elf lost in New York, but Elf is equal part amusement and embarrassment as he’s confronted with the very grown-up streets of New York City. The romance and the last-act thriller may have worked in other contexts, but here they just feel forced and badly integrated to a kid’s film. Not entirely pleasant to watch nor particularly funny, Elf exists in a demimonde of conflicting goals. Only Ferrell’s compelling performance saves it from complete disinterest.

  • De-Lovely (2004)

    De-Lovely (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2005) I’ve never been able to let bad wordplay stand in the way of a nuanced review, and so I can’t help but write: De-Lovely is De-Boring. Granted, I know next to nothing about Cole Porter, but it’s not this tepid musical biography that will make me rush to know more. Granted, I did like some of the staging and the way some numbers were integrated into the overall story. But then the music starts and I can’t muster much enthusiasm for the types of show tunes Porter was known for. The framing device can’t do much to counter-act the increasingly wearying impact of the film, which runs about half an hour too long and gets less and less interesting as Porter’s life goes by. (“Just die already!” becomes the rallying cry in my living room) I suppose that devotees of musicals will get a kick out of it; as for myself, this movie just can’t make me care. Which is ironic because when you take a look at all the good material that’s stuffed in this film, you’d expect much better.

  • Dawn Of The Dead (2004)

    Dawn Of The Dead (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2005) Now that’s how you make a zombie film. Re-inventing absolutely nothing and taking no ironic distance to its material, this entry in the undead sub-genre nevertheless manages to deliver the requisite amount of bloodshed, action and grim humour that is required of such movies. Director Zack Snyder knows what he’s doing, moves the story along at a decent clip and does surprising things with an average script by James Gunn. While there are numerous wasted opportunities (the satiric bite of the original film, for instance, has been completely eradicated), too many annoying characters and only occasional flashes of wit, Dawn Of The Dead at least fulfils the basic requirements of zombie film. “Shoot’em in the head” has seldom been more graphic than its depiction here. Stay during the credits for the full story. The DVD includes many, many extra features.

  • Something Rotten, Jasper Fforde

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Hodder & Stoughton, 2004, 393 pages, C$24.95 tpb, ISBN 0-340-83827-2

    There’s something rotten in the state of England. Fortunately, Thursday Next is back on the case, two years after the events of The Well of Lost Plots. As Something Rotten begins, the twin pressures of Jurisfiction leadership and homesickness are getting to her: After a problem in a genre Western is solved in an entirely unsatisfactory fashion, she decides to get out of the Bookworld, come back to Swinton and finally get her eradicated husband back.

    This fourth book in the Thursday Next series is meant to be a conclusion of sorts to the series, and so a whole bunch of errant plot threads are tied back together one after another in the madcap fashion by now so familiar to Fforde fans. Something Rotten reaches back all the way to The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book for references and in-jokes, successfully concluding the series. (Maybe.)

    This being said, there’s enough new material here to keep everyone interested. Next doesn’t come back alone from the Bookworld. For one thing, her infant son (Friday Next, of course) comes back with her, giving rise to all sorts of complicated situations of which finding day care is the least difficult. For another, she’s shepherding Hamlet as he visits the real world to assess his own reputation. This wouldn’t be a Fforde novel without tons of subplots, so you can also expect Thursday Next to confront assassins, coach a cricket team, save the world, team up with agent Spike for another supernatural adventure, get news from her deceased time-travelling father, deal with Neanderthals, find cloned Shakespeares, deal with the Goliath corporation and fight the evil Yorrick Kaine. Whew!

    Given the depth and complexity of Fforde’s imagined universe as developed over the first three books, I can’t imagine how a new reader would react at the sight of all this stuff. But for faithful fans of the series, Something Rotten is pure gold. Fforde doesn’t necessarily preclude further volumes in the series (you can even see hooks for something called The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco buried into the plot-line of the novel), but we should be grateful that he’s willing to bow out in style. After setting most of The Well of Lost Plots in the fictional Bookworld, Fforde wisely re-sets Something Rotten to take place almost entirely is Next’s “Real World”. It gains in plausibility, but loses in invention. While it would be an exaggeration to say that the world of Thursday Next has gotten boring, it’s true that it doesn’t offer as much that’s completely new.

    Still, Swinton is a pleasant place to visit, and the fevered pace of Fforde’s invention is almost as manic as in the previous books. What’s more, it even finds a very dramatic ending that deftly balances real emotion and amusing slapstick. Also included is gentle political satire (as Denmark is designated as the root of all evil as part of a dastardly plan by Yorrick Kaine), the usual typographical finds (here, a historical figure speaking in Gothic fonts) and two or three revelations about the characters’ future. All told, Something Rotten is just as readable, just as enjoyable and just as amusing as the first three books of the series, giving form to a quartet that’s well worth recommending to every ardent reader on your Christmas list.

    With this, a natural end to the Thursday Next series, Fforde and ffans find themselves at a branching point: The author surely has some other universes to create, but it remains to be seen whether he’ll allow his readers to box him into a narrow series of books that is perhaps best left complete. We’ll see: His next book, The Big Over Easy, is supposed to be a stand-alone book. Better a singleton than overcooking a series which, at this time, seems to have reached its potential.

  • City Of Angels (1998)

    City Of Angels (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, March 2005) It would be too easy to dismiss City Of Angels as romantic clap-trap about angels, impossible fairytale romance and cheap existential questions. It would be even easier to dismiss the film as a slow-moving morass of fabricated sentiment with an unclear mythology and a script that couldn’t be more obvious if it included subtitles about the screenwriter’s intentions. But to do so would be to ignore, unfairly, the delicious frisson of wonder at some of the film’s visuals: The “angels” watching over Los Angeles like so many dark crows. The idea that angels hang out at libraries (oh, c’mon; even stone-cold atheists would like this one to be true). The handful of scenes that make you go “hey… that’s nice.” Dennis Franz’s performance as a fallen angel who has learnt to appreciate life. Granted, in order to get to these things you have to suffer through love scenes between Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage. (Ergh.) And possibly fast-forward through chunks of the film. And certainly try not to giggle at the splat-ending, or the contrived death scenes. But even cynics may find two or three things worth keeping about this film, and that’s almost two or three more than they would expect.

  • Beauty Shop (2005)

    Beauty Shop (2005)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, March 2005) This second spin-off of the surprise hit Barbershop dilutes the formula so much and treats it with such contempt that you’ll have a hard time seeing it as anything better than a fluffy comedy. Queen Latifah is often irritating as a protagonist who doubles as the film’s most racist character (seriously, why bring the “coloured” word in discussions that have nothing to do with it?). The supporting characters aren’t much better as the whole range of black stereotypes are exploited without a moment’s worth of self-reflexion. Heck, the entire female gender is exploited without a moment’s self-reflexion: It may be nice and all to see bootyology elevated to a science, but curvy actresses aren’t much of a relief when the script they have is so bad. It’s not just the bad jokes as much as the lame plot, the awful coincidences and the dumb characters. Suuure, the annoying vid-kid just happens to catch a payoff between the antagonist and the city inspector (both white). Suuure, the beauty shop just happens to be underneath an electrician’s apartment, an electrician who just happens to be handsome, single, artistic and non-threatening. Suuure, the client who walks though the door in a panic just happens to be a famous radio DJ. Such plot cheats are unforgivable, and it’s not just a white/black, male/female thing: Dumb is dumb, lazy is lazy and even my panting fascination for Andie McDowell has its limits.