Reviews

  • 5150 Rue des ormes [5150, Elm Street] (2009)

    5150 Rue des ormes [5150, Elm Street] (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, October 2009) I’m not going to be particularly objective in reviewing this film: Screenwriter Patrick Senécal (adapting his own novel) has been a good acquaintance of mine for years, I obtained tickets to the premier via a network of friendly contacts and I’ve got distant financial ties to the publisher of the original novel. Yeah, I’m biased. Still, it’s fun being biased when the movie being discussed is an accomplished piece of work like this one: a tight claustrophobic thriller, 5150 rue des Ormes manages to be a fair adaptation and a successful film on its own. The story of a teenager who gets trapped inside an ordinary family house by a psychotic man and his accomplice family, this is a thriller that means to lock you in a suburban dungeon along with an average protagonist. It gets much weirder than that, of course, especially when the true nature of the family patriarch’s madness is revealed, and when the hero comes to buy into his twisted rules. Some of the first hour is annoying: those who are expecting an action movie will be frustrated at the hero’s inability to grab a rifle, assault his captors or fiddle his way out of his dungeon. But this is a psychological thriller, not a shoot’em-up, and so we have to buy into some of the uncomfortable staging in order to get to the real core of the story. Fortunately, director Eric Tessier keeps things moving at a decent pace, and he can depend on a number of capable actors: Normand D’Amour is particularly effective as the evil patriarch, a thankless role on which much of the film depends. It all leads to an increasingly grotesque third act, and a deliberately unsatisfying conclusion that refuses to tie up all the threads. (Senécal fans already know that one of the characters missing in action eventually gets a sequel of sorts.) While not above a few credibility problems (duration of batteries in the video camera, length of beard, DNA evidence left at the scene of a murder, etc.), 5150 rue des Ormes is another solid thriller made-in-Quebec but fit to be seen anywhere on the planet.

  • Capitalism: A Love Story (2009)

    Capitalism: A Love Story (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, October 2009) I don’t need to be convinced by Michael Moore’s message: I see his movies as political entertainment, not doctoral thesis. While his grandstanding and simplifications are often grating, he is bringing a much-needed perspective to an American political discourse seemingly incapable of questioning its own axioms. Capitalism: A Love Story stakes out a rather daring position in questioning the accepted “free market” mantra that seems to run unchallenged throughout much of the US media. Moore’s film brings together a lot of known material, but there are occasionally a few good stories in the mix, and a few reminders of things that should outrage us still (such as “dead peasant insurance”). Much of the archival footage is interesting, and it’s to Moore’s credit that he’s able to mix diverse material (from personal sob stories to cool analysis to overarching theories) in such an entertaining fashion. Still, Capitalism may be tackling too broad a subject: the picture runs from one thing to another, outrageously simplifies complex issues (letting slide the false opposition of capitalism and democracy, it’s useful to remember that capitalism is always regulated in some fashion; the only question is where the draw the line) and doesn’t quite seem to deal with recent history fairly. The election of Barack Obama may have been felt as change, but as far as his financial policies go, it features a lot of the same players Moore sombrely denounces. (Kleptocracy, or plutocracy, would have been a better subject for the film.) The appeal to bailout conspiracy theories late in the movie is also a bit too cheap and easy considering the systemic complicity of everyone (including, especially, the viewers) in sustaining all kinds of get-rich-quick schemes. Ultimately, it also feels as if Moore fails to connect the pieces of his argument as efficiently as he did elsewhere: at times, viewers may feel as if they’re seeing bits and pieces of a much grander theory sketched in Moore’s previous films. It’s a bit ironic that when it comes to the dangers of amoral capitalism and industry captures of regulatory instruments, Moore has best able to express himself in the now-classic documentary The Corporation. Sure, Moore fans and viewers of a left-leaning persuasion will get their red meat’s worth of rhetoric. But there isn’t much here to persuade reluctant viewers to take another look at the unquestionable goodness of the free market.

  • McMafia, Micha Glenny

    McMafia, Micha Glenny

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Anansi, 2008, 375 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN978-0-88784-204-7

    Even as a pimply know-nothing teenager reading well-above his intellectual capacities, I was never completely convinced by Francis Fukuyama’s End of History. For those who missed it at the time, it was a book-length 1992 essay arguing that since the Cold War had just ended in favour of Western democracies, history as we knew it was over: Democracy would prevail, and everyone else could just go home.

    History, since then, has persuasively argued against Fukuyama’s thesis. If nothing else, the end of the Cold War has been the dawn of a far more interesting history than the frozen decades of the USA/USSR stare-off. Misha Glenny’s McMafia has no explicit links to Fukuyama’s book, but it serves as a pretty damning overview of a world unshackled by the end of the Cold War. A world dominated by organized crime, both outside and within the borders of the first world.

    Glenny is no stranger to the subject: Having been a correspondent in the Balkans during the war-torn nineties, he starts his globe-trotting book in Eastern Europe, where he details the changes that took place in the vacuum left by the strong institutions of the Soviet Empire. Prostitution, smuggling, arms trade, protection rackets –the countries change as the book advances, but the criminal tunes remain the same. As Glenny circles the globe (touching the North America continent only long enough to talk about the drug trade), he delivers an alternate occult history of the past twenty years that makes a number of puzzle pieces fit together. Along the way, he discusses trends that seldom make mainstream news in the West: Nigerian scams (and how their perpetrators justify them), the emergence of a sizable Russian minority in Israel, the outsourcing of violent work from the Yakusa to the Chinese Triads, and scores of other gripping vignettes.

    Glenny is an experienced journalist, and some of the best moments of the book describe the various troubles he had in researching his material, along with the people he meets along the way. McMafia is a mixture of high-level statistics and personal anecdotes trying to illuminate a subject that, by its nature, would rather stay hidden. It generally succeeds at portraying an unstable world where developing countries are in a race to outwit their criminal elements. It doesn’t help that the corruption of original institutions is most reliably financed by money coming from developed countries: Sex tourism, drug consumption and cheap caviar are only some of the way “good western dollars” are going to wreak havoc on countries with weaker social institutions. We, obviously, are all guilty of something.

    Where McMafia is less successful is in finding a strong central thesis in its accumulation of criminal situations. For a book that pretty much literally circles the globe, it can feel scattered and flighty as it studies region after region. There doesn’t seem, thankfully, to be a super-organisation of organized crime (although market-sharing agreements come pretty damn close to such a thing), but the book occasionally feels more like a succession of TV programme transcripts than a coherent argument making its way to a specific thesis.

    The other vexing issue with the book is the occasional nagging suspicion that some sensationalism has been slipped in the mix. The portrait of the drug trade between BC and the USA occasionally seems a bit too grandiose (100,000 people involved in that industry? Really? Does that count the gas station attendants where the traffickers fill up?) and there’s a good laugh in the second set of photos when the venerable Bank Street head shop “Crosstown Traffic” is captioned as “The blooming industry in Ottawa, the capital”. Crosstown Traffic as evidence of anything but aged Glebe hippies and pretentious college students? Really? Did you cherry-pick your arguments elsewhere, Glenny?

    Still, the book is a great deal more convincing whenever it flies away from North America and describes in fairly intricate details the lives of Chinese organized criminals, anti-corruption officers in Nigeria, Eastern-European smugglers and all sort of other people taking full advantage of their form of globalization. What ultimately emerges from McMafia, paradoxically, is the portrait of an active, vivid globe where economic inequalities have opened windows of opportunity for the unscrupulous. I suppose that I’m more optimistic than other in seeing here a sign of emerging civilization, perhaps even a temporary phenomenon as more and more countries are working their way to Western-style modes of law enforcement. McMafia is the underground flips-side of those triumphant portraits of how the world is being dragged kicking and screaming into a twenty-first century that will belong to everyone, and not just the United States of America: Dangers ahead, but plenty of amazing things as well.

  • Zombieland (2009)

    Zombieland (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, October 2009) By this point in the zombie-movie craze, some stories are redundant. The basic zombies-take-over-the-world narrative has been to death and back, and anyone seriously considering making a zombie film should find an original angle on the concept –we don’t actually need another dour and nihilistic 28 Months Later. Fortunately, Zombieland takes a not-so-blackly comedic approach to the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. From the opening sequence onward, there’s a playful tone, what with explicit survival rules, kills-of-the-week and on-screen title gags. The picture is anchored by great performances by Jesse Eisenberg as a paranoid nerd and Woody Harrelson as a redneck with a natural talent for killing zombies. It’s a shame that the female characters don’t come across as fully realized, but the pacing of the picture is often too quick to allow for reflection. It’s not quite as brilliant or subversive as Shaun of the Dead, but Zombieland does manage a pleasant, well-executed B-movie vibe. Director Ruben Fleischer uses special effects wisely, has a keen aesthetic sense of slow-motion, keeps things hopping and only occasionally lets the energy of the picture flag in too-long conversation sequences. (Even at a snappy 81 minutes, the film occasionally feels a bit long.) The ending misses full marks by a few inches (the tension is diffused too quickly), but that it gets there at all without letting down the rest of the picture is remarkable. Far funnier than it is gruesome or suspenseful, Zombieland has a good future ahead of itself as a late-evening fan-favourite. The less you know about the celebrity cameo, the better.

  • XKCD: vol 0, Randall Munroe

    XKCD: vol 0, Randall Munroe

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Breadpig, 2009, 111001 pages, US$18.00 tp, ISBN 978-0-615-31446-4

    Faithful readers are probably over-familiar by now with the fact that I’m a proud and unrepentant nerd. As such, there’s probably no better book to prove my hard-core nerd credentials as a glowing review of Randall Munroe’s XKCD: Vol 0.

    Over the past few years, the simple-but-sophisticated stick figures of the XKCD webcomics have become one of the emblems of Internet nerd culture. Making use of everything from philosophy to math theorems to videogames to computer science (with a heavy dose of sentimentality, as appropriate for “A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”), XKCD is now a touchstone for a large chunk of Internet users from reddit to single-user blogs. Even a quick search for “an XKCD for everything” will reveal a surprising number of results. In the past, I’ve been able to refer to specific XKCD comics to instructors, friends, SF fans, online correspondents and other assorted hoodlums knowing that the reference would be immediately understood.

    If you’ve never heard of XKCD, that may not be accidental: part of the peculiar pleasure of Munroe’s humor is the knowledge that very few people in the world can put together the elements of particular jokes. Twelve years after graduation, I’m still getting the most mileage out of my Computer Science degree from XKCD punchlines. As such, XKCD’s humor can be one of clubbish self-recognition more than actual amusement… so when I say that the book isn’t for everyone, don’t take it personally. It also serves to explain why, as of this writing, XKCD: vol 0 isn’t to be found at amazon.com: Mostly sold though the XKCD web site, it’s both a trophy of nerd devotion and a collection of 200 of the strip’s first 600 entries.

    Many of the fan favourites (and perennial references) are there: “userdel megan” and “Cory Doctorow – cape and goggle” share the same page, while “citation needed”, “boom de yada”, “someone is wrong on the internet” aren’t too far after. Of course, other memorable strips didn’t make the cut (Where’s the Xenocide one?!), raising hope for a Compleat XKCD at some point in the future.

    When they do get to that point, I hope that the design of the book is a bit better than the one here. While Munroe and his designer were able to solve such problems as the alt-caption gags (by putting them in the gutters between panels), the book occasionally frustrate by the lack of dates and titles, not to mention the lack of indications when strips are linked to others –the best example being between pages 11110 and 20000. Of course, other design touches just work beautifully. The book is crammed with small mathematical jokes (such as the skew binary page numbering scheme and the Fibonacci sequence replacing the edition number line on the copyright page), various forms of puzzles and additional comments and sketches in red ink.

    Reading all the strips in succession never fails to bring a smile to my face (even paging through the book again while I’m writing this review), but I’m not so sure that the book is completely impenetrable to non-nerds: For one thing, there’s a surprising amount of romantic and philosophical material that benefits, but doesn’t require esoteric technical knowledge. For another, everyone on the Internet is a nerd of some sort or another, and XKCD is really good at finding jokes in mundane web experiences. There’s a mixture of whimsy and absurdity in XKCD comics that should reach even readers left unaffected by obscure references to cryptography theory, 4chan memes and Linux installations.

    For those who do get all of those references, XKCD: vol 0 is exactly the book you need for Christmas. There’s at least half an hour of “Ooh, I can’t believe I remember that!” in stock alongside the more familiar gags and half-remembered punchlines. At a time where the Internet is being blamed for just about every social problem, it’s a comfort to realize that it also enables Randall Munroe to deliver a webcomic to such a highly-specialized readership… and others to make use of the jokes as they see fit.

  • Pandorum (2009)

    Pandorum (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, September 2009) I had been looking forward to this B-grade horror/SF hybrid for generally nostalgic reasons: There hasn’t been any spaceship-monster-movie in a while, and I was starting to miss even dreck like Supernova.  But if Pandorum isn’t much more than a B-grade horror/SF hybrid, it’s at least a bit more ambitious than the usual “latex bug kills everyone” scenario: Subplots add up nicely until there are about half a dozen separate dangers threatening our protagonists, and while the conclusion is so stupid it burns, it does try something a bit more interesting than blowing the creature outside the airlock.  Sadly, getting there is more tedious than fun entertaining: Pandorum has an inordinate fondness for black-on-black color tones, and the pacing dwells far too long on the same pieces of soundstage locations.  There’s little connecting tissue between the film’s episodes, and that tissue disappears almost entirely during the lame shaky-cam action sequences that lift almost everything from 28 Days Later: Events in some scenes can only be figured out until they end, if at all.  No, this isn’t a minor space horror classic like Event Horizon, although the film has a few nice moments and both Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster both do well in their respective roles.  Pandorum does manage to fill its B-movie niche quite nicely, and has a few more ideas than the typical almost-straight-to-DVD feature.  Could have been worse, and it will do until the next spaceship monster movie.

  • I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, Tucker Max

    I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, Tucker Max

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Citadel Kensington, 2006, 277 pages, C$17.95 tp, ISBN 0-8065-2728-5

    Ah, Tucker Max. The champion of frat-boys all over America. The shock-jock of drink-and-tell Internet writing. The best-known thirty-something teenager. The perfect antithesis of, well, me.

    Boiled down to its components, the quintessential Tucker Max story goes like this: Alcohol goes in Tucker; fluids come out. I Hope they Serve Beer in Hell (now a movie!) is 256 pages of essays detailing variations on that theme. Tucker drinks a lot; later, he vomits, excretes or ejaculates. Sometimes, he has friends along with him. Rude put-downs against whoever isn’t with him are often involved. Repeat.

    Tucker Max became a niche celebrity, as many people now do, by writing a series of essays on his web site. He eventually grew into kind of a national phenomenon for a very specific demographic group. Indeed, for college-age frat-boys, Tucker Max is living the life: binge-drinking, bad behaviour, casual sex and earning a living by being celebrated for, well, binge-drinking, bad behaviour and casual sex.

    So it is that we read about wild parties, outrageous semi-public sex in Vegas, the effects of Absinthe, various wild sex episodes, uncontrollable incontinence, Tucker Max’s scales for drunkenness and female attractiveness (they’re predictably related), and various other antics. Most stories have a happy ending in the massage-parlour sense of happy endings. Many will feel sullied for laughing along.

    There’s a little bit more to it in that Tucker Max is a decent writer when it comes to writing about the party lifestyle. No matter whether the tales are invented or enhanced, the anecdotes are told crisply, with a good ear for dialogue and a mounting sense of outrageousness. He acknowledges his own humiliations (the funniest story in the book is all about potty humour at his own expense), writes compulsively readable prose and surrounds himself with vivid characters.

    But no one will comment or review I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell for the quality of its prose. Why do so when the book becomes a lightning rod for discussions of misogyny, college hedonism, man-children, limited intellects and carnal fixations? Anyone making the mistake of thinking that Max’s book accurately reflects the mainstream American college experience will come away from the book despairing for the future of the republic, if not the human race in general.

    My own experience being so unlike Tucker Max’s life (you have probably figured this out on your own, but otherwise here’s the shocking revelation: I’m a nerd), I ended up reading I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell as an anthropological text, spying upon the cruel and merciless life of the americani fratpueris and thanking my own social ineptness that I’ve never been tempted by Max’s specialities. As a humour book, it’s not a bad read. As indicative of social trends, though: gaaah.

    Unsympathetic as I can be about the frat-boy lifestyle, there’s not a lot I can admire in Tucker Max’s life… except for a somewhat disarming frankness about his own failings. He knows that he’s not a nice guy: the title of the book explains his posthumous expectations. It’s also noteworthy that in the vast majority of cases, the women he sleeps with have a good idea of what they can expect: Max’s stories are not about lying and false pretences, but the consequences of very deliberate lifestyle choices. (The question of whether Max is misogynist presumes that Max-the-literary-construct actually cares about women independently of his own primitive impulses –something still left open to discussion.) Many will mistake this subtle distinction and see Max’s example as a license to behave badly, ignoring the warnings that lies at the heart of nearly every Max story: the sunburns, the headaches, the legal consequences, the ways in which casual sex can backfire in ways people are rarely ready to deal with. The book ends on a hair-raising story that’s worth a PSA by itself.

    In some ways, my vicarious glimpse at the life of Tucker Max is quite enough for me: whereas others see glitz and hilarity, I see situations in which I never want to see myself. If nothing else, Tucker Max has lived this lifestyle so exuberantly that there is no need for anyone else to try to outdo him.

    (This is one of the few reviews where I think it’s necessary to point out that I bought my copy of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell at a very-used-book sale. The laughable amount of money spent in purchasing this book went directly to the Ottawa Public Library’s acquisition fund. No Tucker Maxes were enriched in the making of this review.)

  • Surrogates (2009)

    Surrogates (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, September 2009) It’s a truth, universally acknowledged, that the best movies make you think.  But it’s a less-acknowledged universal truth that even bad movies can lead one to conclusions.  In this case, Surrogates is the kind of hit-and-miss film that makes one think that film really isn’t the ideal medium for idea-driven Science Fiction.  On a surface level, some things work well: Bruce Willis is his usual dependable self as a cop investigating unusual murders, Boston makes a great backdrop to the action, and director Jonathan Mostow has kept his eye for good action sequences and efficient storytelling –although, frankly, I would have liked longer cuts during the chase scenes.  The idea of a future where “surrogates” effectively allow one to decouple body from mind is rich in thematic possibilities, and the film does investigate a few of them.  If nothing else, Surrogates is a decent way to spend an hour and a half; at least it’s a bit more ambitious than most other movies at the theatre.  Alas, that’s not saying much, and the credibility problems with the film start with the first few frames.  In flagrant violation of market economics, human nature, bandwidth limitations and just plain logic, this is a film that depends on 98% of the (Boston? American? Human?) population relying on highly advanced and presumably expensive equipment just 14 years in the future.  Never mind that some people don’t even have cell phone today: Surrogates rushes into the bad clichés of a Manichean monolithic society in which everyone has and enjoys a surrogate, except for the easily-dismissible hillbillies and weirdoes who apparently choose to live in technology-free reserves.  Never mind that the world is usually a great deal more complex and that the kind of technological breakthrough that surrogates represents could lead to a world where the very concept of incarnation would be abandoned: Surrogates simplifies issues to the point where anyone with half a working brain will cringe at the way the film ignores possibilities and takes refuge in cheap movie mechanics.  The ending is particularly frustrating, as it all boils down to “press this button to save a billion lives!!!”  That a lot of those issues were present in Robert Vendetti’s script for the original underwhelming graphic novel isn’t much of an excuse when the film takes such liberties with the source material.  (If anything, Surrogates owes more to the I, Robot film than the graphic novel, down to James Cromwell in near-identical roles)  The contrast between Surrogates and thoughtful written SF is strong enough to make one suspect they’re barely in the same genre.  (Compare and contrast with Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon for a particularly enlightening experience.)

  • This Is Not a Game, Walter Jon Williams

    This Is Not a Game, Walter Jon Williams

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Orbit, 2009, 369 pages, C$27.99 hc, ISBN 978-0-316-00315-5

    The first thing I like about Walter Jon Williams’ This Is Not a Game is the title: Direct, dramatic and as blunt as it’s possible to be.  The cover of the US hardcover edition appropriately displays it in big bold letters taking up most of the available space.  It’s a clue as to the nature of the story in more ways than one, especially in flagging how contemporary the novel is meant to be: In Science Fiction history, “This is not a Game” has sometimes been a Hugo-winning third-act plot twist.  It’s also a title that alludes to the recent wave of stories reflecting on the ever-shifting nature of reality at a time where it’s increasingly augmented with other sources of information.  Charles Stross, with Halting State, made quite a splash by looking at the boundaries between life and play and This is Not a Game makes use of similar ideas, albeit with a very different focus.

    But outside the written SF community, the title is a fundamental credo for another interest group:  In the field of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), “This is Not a Game” is a design aesthetic that differentiates this burgeoning type of entertainment from other types of play: Designers of ARGs seek to present an experience to the player that spans the narrow confines of traditional games.  ARGs ask players to scour the web, make phone calls, investigate in person, solve clues and piece together very different pieces of information.  Already almost ten years old, ARGs are a particularly vivid reminder of the blurring distinction between pursuits we’ve been conditioned to consider separate.

    Walter Jon Williams isn’t a stranger to either SF or ARGs: His decades-old SF track record is distinguished, and he has been involved in creating ARGs since 2005, when he collaborated on “Last Call Poker” for market leader 42 Entertainment.  In his newest novel, we get not only a gripping thriller set five minutes in the future, but a look behind the scenes of an ARG, as the puppetmasters writing the game have to deal with an alternate reality with no fourth wall.

    But there’s a bit more at stake than a look at games that bring together thousands of people in a global clue-hunt: As This Is Not a Game begins, our ARG-creating protagonist Dagmar Shaw sees her holidays in Indonesia become a catastrophe as the country is shut down and riots break around her hotel.  Engineering her rescue away from this mess ends up being a problem that not even a well-financed Israeli security contractor can solve: In the end, Dagnar finds greater value in tapping the game-playing community and crowd-sourcing her own safety to the diverse talents of perfect strangers scattered around the globe.

    And that’s just the first act, because once she’s back stateside, Dagmar’s life soon turns into a nightmare when friends are acquaintances are murdered.  It’s clear to her that this is not a game-related development, but the players of her ongoing ARG aren’t so sure.  When the police admit that the investigation may tax even their capabilities, Dagmar sees another opportunity to let the group mind of her plays chew on the evidence.  But as she eventually discovers, it’s hard to get away from the game once it takes over…

    Williams has often challenged genre boundaries, and this latest book marks a return to high-end thrillers just a step away from near-future SF.  This is Not a Game inhabits the same ultra-contemporary territory as William Gibson’s Spook Country, albeit with a far more visible plot.  Given this, it’s unfortunate but forgivable that it’s that plot that ends up being the novel’s weakest link: While the look at the inner workings of ARGs is fascinating and the thriller makes good use of the mirrored halls offered by games that voluntarily don’t take place in an identifiable sandbox, Williams isn’t as successful at creating a sustained sense of suspense: There aren’t enough characters to pose a serious mystery, and the last stretch of the novel is annoyingly linear in how Dagmar turns the tables on the guilty party.  A lot of loose ends remain, but the promise of a sequel (which you wouldn’t guess from the jacket copy) may end up making use of a bunch of those.  There are also a few technical bugs for nit-pickers.  (Regarding P.336:  HTML is not case-sensitive; XHTML is supposed to be.  Web servers very well have to be.)

    Not that it matters all that much: This is Not a Game is a more-than-honorary member of the SF genre partly because it’s a novel of demonstration.  It has a few great ideas and runs us through them.  The opening sequence in Indonesia can’t be equalled, but the rest of the novel remains an intriguing thought experiment, a thriller played with Science Fiction set-pieces that would have boggled minds even a decade ago.  There’s even some meta-commentary on the SF writers’ community and a few nods in store for SF fans with sharp eyes.  The prose is a pleasure to read, and the flavour of the novel is definitely of the times: This is Not a Game couldn’t have been written as such five years from now, and will probably date faster than most SF novels published in 2009.  In the meantime, though, it’s a welcome demonstration of Williams’ skills, a solid follow-up to his previous Implied Spaces and a novel that, given his background, only he could have written.

  • Jennifer’s Body (2009)

    Jennifer’s Body (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

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

  • 9 (2009)

    9 (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

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

  • Extract (2009)

    Extract (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

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

  • Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009)

    Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

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

  • Buyout, Alexander C. Irvine

    Buyout, Alexander C. Irvine

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Informant! (2009)

    The Informant! (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

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