Reviews

  • The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown

    The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday, 2009, 509 pages, C$36.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-385-50422-5

    Six years after the release of The Da Vinci Code (surely you’ve heard of it?), Dan Brown has a brand-new novel in store: The Lost Symbol.  The good and bad news are, indeed, the same: It’s an almost identical reading experience.

    There are a few differences between Brown’s latest novel and its predecessors, but not that many.  Consider this: Robert Langdon runs around a world-class city with a beautiful scientist, piecing together historical clues to avert a terrible event while trying to outwit a spiritually-motivated antagonist with a penchant for self-mutilation.  Familiar?  Yes.  Good enough for a third go-around?  Well, why not?

    This time, “Symbologist” (aka; trivia-master) Robert Langdon is called to Washington, where he gets to talk masonry with a woman studying pseudo-sciences.  They race around and under official buildings, survive attempts on their lives and spend half a day citing encyclopedia snippets at each other.  Surprisingly enough, it’s fun: While The Lost Symbol is a bit too familiar to create the same enthralling feeling as its predecessor, its accumulation of cheap stock thriller situations, short cliffhanging chapters, plausible-sounding details and compelling imagery makes it hard to stop reading.  It’s not refined but it’s got the essence of genre fiction entertainment.  The writing is even a bit better than in the previous books… or at least not quite as awful.

    The Lost Symbol even shows that Brown can have a sense of humor about himself: Early on, he takes potshots at the controversy about his previous novel (“My book group read your book about the sacred feminine and the church! What a delicious scandal that one caused!” [P.8]), his image (“He was wearing the usual charcoal turtleneck.” [P.8]) and, later on, editors complaining about the lateness of his novel (“You owe me a manuscript.” [P.176]).  While the suspense is usually too talky to be gripping, there are at least two memorable sequences in the book, one taking place in a completely dark hangar, and the other one pushing the whole “Character’s dead.  Dead-dead-dead.” shtick as far as it can go, and then a little bit further for good measure.  Cheap twists abound, although Brown does manage to do a few interesting things with parallel storytelling at times.

    Sadly, The Lost Symbol occasionally gets muddled on the shoals of yadda-yadda pseudoscience discredited back in the seventies but revived today as “noetic science” thanks to quantium jargon.  Brown may swear up and down that all the science in his book is true, but we know better.  (As a computer specialist, I’m usually disappointed whenever Brown discusses computers, and this novel has its share of IT nonsense as well.)  The pseudo-science, thankfully, doesn’t really affect the major plot lines of the book, but it’s a distracting-enough subplot that the novel could have dispensed with.

    Ironically, it almost takes mental muscles shaped by science-fiction to truly appreciate what Brown is attempting in the last tenth of the novel.  What he frequently does well (and what many imitators often forget) is to present a series of conceptual breakthroughs, big and small, that reveal the true shape of the world to protagonists and readers alike.  This is rarely as obvious as in the last fifty pages of The Lost Symbol: Once past the final action climax, the main plotline of the novel has been wrapped up with a few chapters still left to go.  It’s all over but for a few more revelations, which may be more conceptually important to Brown than the end of the thriller plot-line: The novel concludes on a pair of scenes meant to evoke a strong sense of wonder, and science-fiction readers will have been trained to respond well to such revelations.

    As for everyone else, well, the old saw hold true: “If you liked The Da Vinci Code, then…” yes, you’re going to like The Lost Symbol.  Conversely, those who hated Brown’s previous novels won’t be seduced by this one.  It is what it is, and if the same mixture of elements could have been quite a bit more interesting in better hands, it does manage to outdo many of the so-called “Da Vinci clones” in delivering the mixture of trivia, thrills, nonsense and fast pacing that we’ve come to expect from Brown.  It may be late in coming, but it does deliver.

    (Amateur puzzle-solvers will be happy to note that the US dust jacket sports at least four puzzles, and a few Easter Eggs.  I wasted an enjoyable thirty minutes solving two puzzles before rushing to read the solutions on-line.  As for the Easter Eggs, one of them will make you feel better about the recent loss of the traditional Doubleday “Anchor” logo.)

  • Whiteout (2009)

    Whiteout (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, September 2009) Thrillers are often as much about setting than about plot, and so the best thing about Whiteout is how it really tries to take advantage of its Antarctic environment.  It’s -50c outside on a white plain of ice, and the film occasionally does its best to give us all the claustrophobic, glacial, howling implications of that fact.  (The rest of the time; not so much, as any Canadian will tell you: no dripping shoes, no chapped lips, no frost-burn on the cheeks)  Unfortunately, there isn’t much more than that in store in this long-delayed B-grade thriller: The murder mystery is a bit of a bust, and the plot holes appear faster than the twists and turns.  Culprits are obvious early on (otherwise, why spend so much time featuring bit players?) and the way to the ending is littered with curious narrative choices: Why drag on the film for another 5-10 minutes after the action climax?  Why rely so heavily on coincidences, egregious oversights, dumb mistakes (such as, oh, not shooting someone coming at you with an axe?) and a generally linear plot?  Everything even remotely interesting is usually told twice (including flashbacks) and the intriguing fog of the first few minutes is so thoroughly dispersed that it has us wishing for more mystery.  (Can you believe four people wrote this?)  Even the execution feels off: it all leads up to a snowy fight in which it’s tough enough to know who’s who –let alone what’s happening.  Pretty Kate Beckinsale may have sold many/most of Whiteout’s tickets, but she’s miscast and overly made-up: an older, more world-weary heroine would have been far more believable. On the other hand, she’s not making any better impression than the film’s other actors.  As for director Dominic Sena, he’s done both better and more ludicrous in his career (Swordfish, anyone?) and either qualities would have been welcome here: he should consider going back to action movies.  As it is, Whiteout is just frozen in place, offering only a few meagre reasons to see it: people used to shoveling snow off their driveways every winter will have more thrills doing so.

  • Batman Forever (1995)

    Batman Forever (1995)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Second viewing, on DVD, September 2009) In retrospect, the post-1989 Batman movies neatly fall into a trio of pairs, with Batman Forever being the first of the Joel Schumacher duo that would reach such a nadir with Batman & Robin.  While Batman Forever is noticeably worse than Burton’s Batman Returns, it still carries itself with flashy colourful blockbuster grandeur, with ridiculous set-pieces that nonetheless show a certain breadth of conception.  As a result, it hasn’t aged all that badly… but don’t expect much: there are still plenty of ridiculous moments in the mix, and Jim Carrey as the Riddler now feels like Ace Ventura in costume: his tics are so recognizably his that they don’t mesh all that well in the bigger tapestry of the movie.  The rest often feels overlong and underthought, with a campy atmosphere that never completely meshes with the rest of the film.  The special edition DVD is both interesting and disappointing in that it does present a number of interesting deleted scenes that deepen the film (and those themes would later pop up in the Nolan-era Batman movies) but almost never acknowledges its troubled production history.  Even Schumacher’s commentary presents a rosy view of Batman Forever’s production: it’s not an uninteresting commentary, but it seems to skirt around essential material.  The rest of the features aren’t much above promotional fluff.

  • Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

    Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Little, Brown, 1996, 1078 pages, C$40.00 hc, ISBN 0-316-92004-5 sept12

    So, I finally made it through David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.1

    1. Since this is a novel that defies the notion of a novel, I can’t really review it.  But have a few notes instead:

    • For those who aren’t aware of Infinite Jest, here are a few essential pointers: It’s a 1078-pages novel with 388 endnotes (some of them with their own endnotes) spread over nearly 100 pages.  It’s dense and full of show-off moments: Pages without paragraph breaks are not uncommon, and Wallace seems determined to approach even the most ordinary scene with an oblique, ever-changing angle.  The novel takes place in a world that features “an entertainment” so compelling that it sucks viewers into compulsive re-viewing.  Still, the real point of Infinite Jest is a series of sequences about tennis players, addicts and separatists.  No plot summary will ever do it justice: there’s simply too much stuff in this novel.  It’s both elusive and verbose and fits just about every criteria that identifies experimental fiction.
    • It took me forever to get to it, and almost-forever to actually read it.  I had actually purchased the book years ago, thanks to its reputation, but kept pushing it aside for shorter reads.  It took the Infinite Summer online reading project to get me to finally get cracking on the book, and even then that wasn’t as smooth as I had hoped for: I ended up reading the first half of the book in early July (ironically, on a road trip from Ottawa to Montréal to Boston and back, which is pretty amusing given where Infinite Jest takes place) and the second half in a frantic week in September, just in time for the end of the Infinite Summer reading schedule.
    • A good chunk of Infinite Jest’s reputation is built upon an accumulation of intricate details about esoteric subjects that makes one reluctant to challenge the author’s authority.  Fortunately, the novel does deal a lot with French-Canadian themes, from French-language quotes in the text to frequent mentions of Québécois separatists as antagonists of the tale.  To anyone familiar with either separatism or the French language, however, it quickly becomes obvious that Wallace’s understanding of either subject is superficial at best: references to Quebec history are ludicrous, and about half of the French-language expressions in the text are simply wrong in ways that would be obvious to francophone grade-schoolers.  This, ironically, made the author seem more human and the novel consequently more accessible.
    • I rarely relate to novels as a writer of fiction, since my fiction output is infrequent, awful and thankfully unpublished.  But Infinite Jest made me realize how far one could go in the intricacies of writing fiction.  Much fiction writing is about finding a way to express world-building, character interaction, inner feelings or plot development.  Wallace goes so far in the direction of trivial overload (ie; putting meat around the bones of his plot, even if plot isn’t a primary force in his novel) that he ends up reassuring everyone unwilling to follow.  That revelation dawned on me during a ten-page endnote that appears to be a filmography but is really a chronology of some events in Wallace’s future history.  At some point, readers are bound to hit a wall of self-questioning and ask themselves not only why they’re reading Infinite Jest, but why they’re reading fiction at all.  What’s the point?  Why spend so much time and mental energy reading things that, to put it simply, don’t and will never exist?a
    • I didn’t like Infinite Jest as much as I admired its audacity and loved specific moments of it.  There are some terrific passages in this book (the history lesson on pages 391-410 is a tour de force, equal to the Eschaton wargame sequence and about a dozen other “good bits” as the highlights of the book), and its conceptual audacity has enough to warm the hardened heart of any jaded reader.  This being said, most of the time Infinite Jest seems to suffer from an acute case of verbiage.  My patience runs thin when I’m bored…
    • My confession: I invoked a good chunk of Daniel Pennac’s “Rights of the Reader” (PDF) while reading Infinite Jest, if only because they seemed essential to making it to the end of the novel.  I skimmed so many passages that it’s an open question as to whether I actually read most of the novel.  I re-read parts when something interesting started while I was reading diagonally.  I went on-line and memorized contextual material about the novel.  I read the novel anywhere I could carry it (which was limited by the book’s bulk).  I even read some of the good bits aloud to whoever was around.  I dipped in and out, and even began this review a hundred and fifty pages before the end.  In short, I read Infinite Jest my way, and don’t let anyone else try to tell you that there’s a right or wrong way to do it.  If you decide to spend time reading this novel (while you could read four or five others for the same amount of effort), be sure to make it yours.b

    a. An answer to that question is to be found on page 200-211, a list of things learned in a halfway house that feels like a glimpse at the universal human condition.

    b. But consider the advice of those who tell you that you’ll need more than one bookmark.

  • Songs of the Doomed, Hunter S. Thompson

    Songs of the Doomed, Hunter S. Thompson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 1990 (2002 reprint), 355 pages, C$24.00 pb, ISBN 0-7432-4099-5

    As my sequential reading of Hunter S. Thompson’s work progresses onward, I have to read about the worst years like I read about the best: After the glory years of the early seventies, Thompson’s output during the eighties became a lot more fragmented: Generation of Swine (1989) collected a hundred of his San Francisco Examiner columns, while Songs of the Doomed riffles through Thompson’s archives to present snippets of material written between 1950 and 1990.  It’s billed as a retrospective, but it feels a lot like the publication of redundant material wrapped around a few worthwhile pieces that followed The Great Shark Hunt.

    Part of this impression is formed by my extensive readings about Thompson, much of it published after Songs of the Doomed.  While the publication of excerpts from The Rum Diary must have caused a sensation back in 1990, it’s more interesting today for comparative purposes given how the entire novel manuscript was revised and published in 1998.  Some of the letters included here are also available in one of the two books of letters published so far.  On the other hand, the snippets from Prince Jellyfish in Songs of the Doomed still remain today the only publicly-available chapters from Thompson’s first novel.

    From time to time, it seems as if Thompson is either recycling notes, or reprinting familiar material.  It doesn’t help that we’re rarely told when excerpts are reprints or take-offs on familiar material.  “The Edge” passage from Hell’s Angels is reprinted as “Midnight on the Coast Highway”, whereas what looks like another draft of the high-water mark in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is presented as, indeed, “High-Water Mark”.  Thompson scarcely introduces his pieces either: in-between text, we get italicized anecdotes that don’t offer much to those who have gone through the rest of his (auto-)biographical material.

    Still, there is some more interesting material at hand.  Thompson may have officially published very little outright fiction, but he kept having ideas for novels and stories, and some of those abortive segments are included here, including notes on The Silk Road (a crime thriller inspired by the influx of Cuban refugees in early-eighties Florida) and a promising beginning called “Fear and Loathing in Sacramento”, intriguing despite elements that approach self-parody.  The snippets of Sacramento were apparently published as part of Thompson’s final columns for the SF Examiner, and they go well with other pieces that seem just as determined to dip into pure fiction.

    But the real gem of the book is one of the few gonzo articles written too late to be included in The Great Shark Hunt: “Love on the Palm Beach Express: The Pulitzer Divorce Trial” is one of the last articles that Thompson would write as a journalist, and it’s a savage look at the lifestyle of the rich and scandalous in Palm Beach, Florida.  Thomspon scholars already know that this was the article that made Thompson realize that he was too famous to keep doing journalism work: his presence disrupted the trial he was supposed to cover, although it’s ironic that we get no trace of this very gonzoesque incident in the article itself.

    Even for those who start reading Songs of the Doomed with an open mind and the best of intentions, the sheer familiarity of the material makes it tough to disagree with the assessment that Thompson was a shadow of his former creative self by the eighties.  The last chunk of the book focuses on the writer’s early 1990 legal problems, but the impact of that section seems to operate on an entirely different level than Thompson intended: while he portrays himself as a downtrodden citizen persecuted by a police state for political reasons, many readers will see this section as the culmination of the rest of the book: after a life spent “in the passing lane” advocating drugs, insanity and violence, Thompson got caught.  Numerous Thompson biographers have noticed that the writer was never more comfortable than when he was the source of whatever craziness went around; his loud protests when he got arrested show how different things looked when he was at the receiving end of some good old-fashioned fear and loathing.  It’s enough to make one become a bit more sceptical of Thompson’s oft-quoted slogan “it never got weird enough for me.”

  • Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S. Thompson, Ed. Anita Thompson

    Ancient Gonzo Wisdom: Interviews with Hunter S. Thompson, Ed. Anita Thompson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Da Capo Press, 2009, 411 pages, C$22.95 tp, ISBN 978-0-306-81651-2 sept4

    Depending on your level of cynicism, there are at least two ways of looking at Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, a lengthy compendium of interviews with Hunter S. Thompson.  You can see it as an homage to an American writer whose career spanned decades, an over-sized personality whose personal excesses were as legendary as his best-known works and an infamous wit who almost unfailingly provided interviewers with great material.  But you can also see it as yet another brick in the growing cottage industry that revolves around Thompson, an industry that began in earnest a decade before Thompson’s suicide in 2005.

    Since the mid-nineties, we’ve seen the publication of two volumes of his letters, re-editions of his rarer out-of-print books (in matching sets, even), a number of personal memoirs and a few more dispassionate biographies.  Given Thompson’s lifelong obsession with money, it would certainly please him to understand that he now accounts for a small sliver of the publishing industry’s revenue stream.  For fans and readers, though, it raises the question as to when we’ll reach saturation point.  As the wait drags on for The Mutineer, a third-and-last volume of his personal letters, the arrival of Ancient Gonzo Wisdom sidesteps the issue by offering fans exactly what it promises: a highly enjoyable collection of interviews.

    Spanning decades between 1967 and 2005, this book follows Thompson’s career as he goes from an obscure writer solely known for a book about the Hell’s Angels, to his growing fame as the first gonzo journalist, to the elder curmudgeon whose words passed into legend.  A media biography of sorts, Ancient Gonzo Wisdom is perhaps most interesting in the look it offers at those who talk to Thompson: their questions change as Thompson’s celebrity grows, and different venues focus on different aspects of the writer’s life.  By their inclusion here, a few landmark pieces are now easily available to Thompson scholars as well: The infamous 1974 Playboy interview by Craig Vetter is reprinted (albeit edited) and those who are curious about Thompson’s lectures to college students will be glad to see a few of them transcribed here.

    Some of the most interesting pieces go beyond the usual interview format to tackle specific venues or subjects.  Early on, a lengthy and detailed interview for a Boston radio station focuses almost exclusively on politics.  Twice, High Times discusses drugs with “elderly dope fiend” Thompson, first in 1977 and then again in 2003.  In-between, the Washington Journalism Review and the Paris Review discuss journalism.  Perhaps the strangest piece is self-avowed fan Phoebe Legere’s interview for Puritan adult magazine: the two seem to know each other intimately, and the interview soon takes on airs of a comedy skit in-between discussions of sexual techniques: “Phoebe screams, he brandishes the gun” [P.245]

    Not all interviews are coherent, though, and (even leaving aside the further editing specific to the book) there can be a dramatic difference from venue to venue in how well they edit Thompson’s words.  Some interviews are barely understandable, while others distill Thompson’s words into quasi-epigrams: One of the best editing decisions is to close the book with a posthumous May 2005 Playboy piece which boils down a week’s worth of discussions into solid “postcard wisdom”.

    More than half of the pieces presented in Ancient Gonzo Wisdom date from the last ten years of Thompson’s life, which can be explained by the wider availability of recent material but also end up presenting a view of Thompson biased toward the latter-day legend.  It’s both amusing and dispiriting to see that Thompson saw the Bush administration in a clear light well before most Americans did; on the other hand, some of the last interviews show Thompson sliding toward conspiracy theories from the JFK assassination to the “9/11 was an inside job” truthers.

    If nothing else, Ancient Gonzo Wisdom presents, in a nutshell, the evolution of Thompson as seen by popular media.  The introductions to the pieces (as writers frequently have trouble reaching Thompson) are often as interesting as the interviews themselves, and the sheer force of Thompson’s personality has no trouble shining through the page.  This may not be an essential Thompson book, but it’s a good read and a decent addition to the Thompson bibliography.  But seriously, when is The Mutineer coming out?

    [November 2009: There is another compilation of interviews out there: Conversations with Hunter S. Thompson, edited by Beef Torrey and Kevin Simonson for the very-serious University Press of Mississippi.  Much of the material will feel familiar to veteran Thompson readers, and even more so for readers of Ancient Gonzo Wisdom.  The emphasis here is usually placed on Thompson-the-writer or Thompson-the-Journalist, although latter pieces tend to focus on Thompson-the-Difficult-Interview-Subject: Typical post-1990 pieces tend to include a lengthy description of the interview process as prologue, sidebar and epilogue to Thompson’s words.  Unlike Ancient Gonzo Wisdom, the interviews here have not been edited and are printed as they first appeared –including the Vetter interview for Playboy, which appears in both collections.]

  • Gamer (2009)

    Gamer (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, September 2009) It goes without saying that I’m about twice the age of Gamer’s intended audience of XBox-addicted teens who would think that a real-life FPS with remote-controlled convicts is a cool idea.  Nonetheless, even the most enthusiastic gamers will have no trouble recognizing a lousy film when they see one.  Light on SF ideas and just as disappointing in strict action-movie terms, Gamer pushes the lightning-quick editing craze as far as it goes until it shreds to tatters.  The irony, of course, is that gaming usually takes place within a long continuous shot that allows players to build a strong mental landscape of their surroundings: Chopping up an action scene in a flurry of split-second shots is the exact opposite of that kind of aesthetics.  But this is starting to sound like old-guy complaining, so let’s focus on Gamer’s more substantial failings: the cookie-cutter plot that feels like a re-thread of so many other “real game” movies (I don’t usually bring up Death Race in conversation, but there’s an exception to everything), the wasted thematic foundations of a film using gaming as a metaphor about control, the sheer weirdness of -say- a dance number confrontation between hero and villain… Gamer is a bit of a mess, really, but it doesn’t even have what it takes to become an enjoyable mess.  Aside from Gerard Butler’s credible presence as an action hero and the pedigree of writer/directors Neveldine/Taylor, there’s little, in fact, to distinguish Gamer from so many dull straight-to-video SF thrillers.  Why don’t you fire up the console instead?

  • Dance of Death, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    Dance of Death, Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner Books, 2005 (2006 mass-market reprint), 560 pages, C$10.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-61709-1

    This one is for the fans.

    Readers completely new to the Preston/Child novels should enjoy this latest magisterial demonstration of why they reign as the most popular team in contemporary thrillers, but it’s really the fans who have read all nine of their previous collaborations that will enjoy Dance of Death to its fullest extent.  It bring together elements of nearly everything in their shared bibliography, exploits existing relationships, puts recurring characters through tough situations, upsets a few familiar truths and delivers extra payoffs for readers with long memories.

    It is, after all, the second volume in the “Diogenes Trilogy”.  But unlike its predecessor Brimstone, the duel between FBI Agent Aloysius Pendergast and his brother Diogenes is not a subplot: it takes center-stage, and Diogenes is a featured character as plan for a “perfect crime” unfolds in and around New York.  Aloysius, predictably, has survived the sombre conclusion of Brimstone, but people around him may not fare as well as Dance of Death begins and a number of his acquaintances are killed.  Could Diogenes’ plan have as an ultimate victim his own brother?  How could it not?

    Those acquaintances include practically everyone in the Preston/Child universe, and so Dance of Death feels like an extended reunion with walk-in roles for nearly everyone ever featured in their previous nine novels.  Some of those appearances aren’t much more than one-scene mentions; others have a far greater role to play in the story.  Fans of The Ice Limit, in particular, will get not only a cute meta-fictional wink (as characters see a copy of Ice Limit III: Return To Cape Horn), but a pair of spellbinding chapters in which thought-to-be-dead Eli Glinn goes head-to-head with agent Pendergast.  Readers will even decode a sequel of sorts to The Ice Limit from the various clues left in plain view by Preston/Child.

    Other links cleverly exploit various characters’ particular talents and skills: NYPD Laura Hayward is a dogged investigator looking into Pendergast’s role in the murders, while her boyfriend Vincent D’Agosta makes a perfect brawny companion to the cerebral FBI agent.  Even elements of the plotting seem to echo previous Preston/Child collaborations, as yet another big exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History goes spectacularly awry; it goes without saying that both curators Nora Kelly and Margo Green are involved in some way –one of them more dramatically than the other.

    In sheer thrills, it’s always amazing to see Preston/Child manage to re-use old classic elements and wrap them into something new.  Jaded thriller readers won’t help but smile at the accumulation of well-worn plot devices crammed in the novel: Sane people wrongfully committed; diamond thievery (twice!); characters framed for murder; love interest held hostage… there’s even a pair of thrilling car chases to keep things rolling along.

    But the real thrill of Dance of Death is in seeing a duel of masterminds.  Agent Pendergast has always been a ridiculously overpowered protagonist, and novels such as Still Life with Crows only proved how tricky it was to match him with a challenging opponent.  Now it looks as if The Diogenes Trilogy is designed to provide a fair adversary for Pendergast.

    The novel ends on a note that will send fans rushing to get the third volume: Dance of Death keeps going about thirty pages longer than it could, building up a sense of anticipation that another phase of the story is starting… and that it’s interrupting itself just when it’s getting good.

    As usual, it’s this combination of familiar characters, solid thrills, catchy prose and overall forward rhythm that continues to mesmerize Preston/Child readers.  Dance of Death does not transcend the contemporary thriller genre, but it fully exploits that storytelling mode and provides the entertainment that genre fiction should reliably provide.  The Diogenes trilogy concludes in The Book of the Dead, and only the strongest-willed readers won’t drop everything in order to see what happens next.

  • The Final Destination [Final Destination 4] (2009)

    The Final Destination [Final Destination 4] (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2009) By the fourth entry in this horror franchise, we already know what we’re going to get: a nihilistic string of Rube-Golbergian mechanisms of death, with a side order of dark humour.  The Final Destination may struggle to present anything distinctive, but it certainly delivers the bare minimum of what the audience is expecting.  As a piece of carnography, it’s assembled with skill and a willingness to keep things moving at a fast clip –within the confines of slick B-grade teenage horror, that’s already not too bad.  Of course, it never comes close to escaping the confines of its own expectations: The plot is the same as the first three instalments (albeit with even less justification), the nihilism is even stronger, the gore just as excessive and even when the film seems to display an attempt at wit, it never bothers going the extra step forward.  The filmmakers will want you to believe that the 3D conception of The Final Destination somehow put it apart, but aside from the requisite impalements and things-through-your-eye (non-horror 3D movies love to throw things at your face; horror 3D movies love to throw things through your face) the film is going to be just as bland on 2D-DVD.  Film geeks will spot a number of references to the other entries in the franchise (including a 3D CGI gallery of the previous three film’s “best-of” deaths, along with a nasty little coda in the same style), but little approaching real effort: even the meta-finale, taking place in a movie theatre where they’re showing a 3D movie, seldom bothers to go beyond the superficial.  The characters are bland, some deaths feel perfunctory (readers of Chuck Palahniuk’s “Guts” will chuckle at one) and the lack of evolution in the series’ mythology reinforces the creative cash-in nature of this sequel.  But don’t worry: The Final Destination may be pretentiously titled, but there will be another one in a year or two… and chances are that you can already figure how it’s going to go and how it’s going to end.

  • Desolation Road, Ian McDonald

    Desolation Road, Ian McDonald

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pyr, 1988 (2009 reprint), 365 pages, US$15.98 pb, ISBN 978-1-59102-744-7 aug28

    Desolation Road may have popped up in US bookstores in the summer of 2009 as a trade paperback edition featuring artwork by SF look-du-jour artist Stephan Martiniere, but it’s not a new book.  This is really Ian McDonald’s first novel, published in 1988 and repackaged by Pyr books following the success of River of Gods and Brasyl.  McDonald, sadly enough, has had a rough career in the US: While his early novels were published in America by Bantam Spectra from the late-eighties to the mid-nineties (back when Bantam Spectra was, you know, good), he went into UK-only eclipse shortly afterward, until the success of 2004’s River of Gods brought him renewed transatlantic attention and a happy coincidence of interests with then-new publisher Pyr.

    My own experience with McDonald’s work mirrors his overall success in North America: While I had generally positive feelings toward Evolution’s Shore/Chaga (albeit tempered by my ignorance that it was the first book in a series), Terminal Cafe/Necroville practically convinced me for five years that McDonald was writing SF that was too literary for my tastes.  It took the rave reviews for River of Gods to convince me (and how!) that I had to pay attention to McDonald again.

    This being said, Desolation Road is nothing like McDonald’s latest books.  While River of Gods and Brasyl brought common SF themes to richly believable extrapolations of developing countries, Desolation Road takes on a half-phantasmagorical tone that owes more to Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles than to the state of SF published in the mid-eighties.  It flows across genre boundaries –and not necessarily the ones you expect.  A three-decade-long tale of a city set deep in the Martian desert, Desolation Road often feels like a soap opera Western with wild SF tropes.  The prose doesn’t even attempt transparency: It’s an integral part of how the story is told.

    The principal character being the city of Desolation Road itself, it’s no surprise if the (many) dozens of human characters have mere supporting roles.  People pop in and out of the story, sometimes bringing along their own storytelling mode and often making Desolation Road feel like a particularly well put-together collection of short stories.  The ever-shifting style contributes to this impression, as the novel will occasionally touch upon comedy, fantasy, horror or techno-SF.

    The diversity of ways to tell the story often carries through to the tools used to advance the story.  McDonald is shameless in riffling through the entire roster of SF tropes to solve (or complicate) his characters’ problems.  Time travel, terrorism, robots, labour disputes, tangled lineages, snooker and corporate dystopian comedy all live one alongside others in this book, and it’s not nearly as confusing as it may sound.  In fact, this rich brew of elements is one of the best reasons why this novel feels just as fresh today as it did in 1988: It wasn’t trying to be part of the mainstream then, and contemporary readers have been trained to react well to genre-blending.  In fact, it wouldn’t take much to call Desolation Road an early example of SF-heavy New Weird given how it feels like a blend of well-known elements thrown in a genre-spanning framework.

    It’s not a perfect novel (some segments are less interesting; the cast of characters gets a bit too large to manage effectively; the prose can occasionally feel too precious), but as a resurrected 1988 novel, it’s vivid enough to make me re-evaluate my top-five novels of that year.  While this re-edition has a number of issues (the typographic design of the book occasionally feels odd and there are numerous copy-editing mistakes), it’s an enlightened choice given how today’s readers are more likely to enjoy it as a cross-genre romp.  It’s a sobering reminder that McDonald’s has always been at the forefront of SF (even two decades ago) and that even his early work warrants a look.  Of course, I can’t help to wonder if the past ten years have made me a reader better-prepared to appreciate his work… and so begin the hunt for the rest of McDonald’s back-list.

  • Inglourious Basterds (2009)

    Inglourious Basterds (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2009) Quentin Tarantino is, if nothing else, a film-lover, and that’s why his movies are always worth seeing by those who feel let down by the rest of American cinema: There’s always something interesting in what he does.  This doesn’t mean that his material is always successful… but that too is part of the fun.  Few would expect Inglourious Basterds to be such a surprising film, for instance: The film promised by the premise and the trailer (American Jewish soldiers go killing Nazis in occupied France) is replaced by a talky drama that manages to make World War Two hinge on a movie showing.  Characters die when one doesn’t expect them to, and even the fabric of history isn’t immune to the twists.  One can quibble with the film’s casual regard for historical fact, but on the other hand it’s hard to dismiss a film that dares push a revenge fantasy to its logical extreme.  It’s easy to say that Inglourious Basterds is too long at two hours and a half, but at the same time the dialogue seems so tight that it’s difficult to say exactly where snippets should be cut: the deliberate atmosphere of the film is such that when character engage in a round of game-playing, we can rest assured that we’re going to see the entire thing play out.  Oh well; fans of Tarantino’s usual violence will be reassured that the bloody incidents are few, but explicit in all of their head-scalping, skull-batting, forehead-slicing gore.  The result is both satisfying and unfulfilling: While the film we have seen is a good chunk of cinematic goodness (and the performance of Christoph Waltz as the Nazi antagonist is simply magnificent), it wouldn’t have hurt to actually see the film promised by Brad Pitt’s superb southern cadences.  But, hey, my feeling is that Inglourious Basterds is going to be even better once the fully-loaded DVD edition comes out.  Which, considering Tarantino’s glacial pacing when it comes to special-edition DVD, may not be anytime soon.

  • Shorts (2009)

    Shorts (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2009) Robert Rodriguez’s own brand of low-budget high-creativity filmmaking is always fun, even when it’s aimed squarely at kids: His movies move fast, take chances, show new faces and aren’t afraid to let things slide almost to the brink of anarchy before bringing them back in.  So it is that Shorts may be a middle-of-the-pack effort when it comes to his films-for-kids (above Shark Boy and Lava Girl, below the first two Spy Kids, roughly equal to Spy Kids 3D) and yet it warrant quite a bit of interest –especially once it will be available in a DVD edition with filmmaker’s commentary.  But in theatres, it still plays pretty well, with a fragmented storyline in five sections that are presented discontinuously: some running gags and set-ups are understood only in retrospect, and the shuffled presentation adds to the wild energy of the story.  The story is generally about a wishing rock that delivers on its promises, but it’s really an excuse for Rodriguez to riff on a few concepts (wishes going wrong, giant robots running amuck, small aliens helping out too much), create a bunch of pretty good kid characters and goof off for a while.  The manic energy of the film makes it hard to lose interest, and the kids are surprisingly non-annoying.  What Shorts lacks is higher artistic ambition and an overall lack of polish, but that’s not much of a problem considering what it does well.  But then again, it’s not as if I need to be convinced of Rodriguez’s brilliance.

  • Waiter Rant, Steve Dublanica

    Waiter Rant, Steve Dublanica

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Perennial, 2008 (2009 paperback re-edition), 302 pages, C$18.99 pb, ISBN 978-0-06-125669-1

    I might as well get something unpleasant out of the way: I hate tipping.  I really, really hate it in the same way my Cartesian mind hates the unwritten rules of social interaction.  Oh, I still do it, sticking to the socially-acceptable “15% plus a bit more” standard, but I’m one of those who would rather pay more on my bill for fully-salaried workers and dispense with the added complication.  I like cold, hard printed numbers.

    But after reading Steve Dublanica’s Waiter Rant, you can be sure that I won’t spend as much time raging against tips.  Part biography of a professional waiter, part anthropological exposé of the job, Waiter Rant tells you about life on the other side of the dining table.  Readers with an interest in fine web writing may recognize the title: After all, “Waiter Rant” was the name of a relatively popular pseudonymous blog.  Now the author, revealed during the hardcover publicity campaign to be Steve Dublanica, has stepped up to the demands of a major book contract.  Fans of the blog may be relieved to learn that the book is no mere reprint of blog notes, but that it arranges many of those incidents in a cohesive narrative.

    It starts about seven years ago, as Dublanica becomes a waiter after professional setbacks.  At the time, it’s a temporary job at a pretty dysfunctional restaurant.  But Dublanica soon ends up working somewhere else as a waiter/manager, and the years pile up… by the time the narrative truly starts in Chapter 4, our narrator has been waiting tables at “The Bistro” for six years, and the pressures are piling up.  Waiter Rant tells us about the last year that Dublanica spent at The Bistro.

    It goes without saying that Waiter Rant is an exposé of the waiter’s job.  The subtleties of the situations, the difficult clients that they encounter on a regular basis, the terrible things that happen even in high-end restaurants, the special holidays, busy shifts, tricks of the trade and ways to land on a waiter’s black-list: Waiter Rant has it all, and it’s told in crisp, hypnotically readable prose.  Dublanica has peered deep in the human condition, seen unspeakable things and he is gifted enough to tell us about it.  Bad patrons beware: Waiter Rant leaves you with no excuses and little justification. (There’s a handy 40-point checklist at the back to tell you how to behave. And so-called “foodies” can be the worst.)

    But what could have been just a book of anecdotes and trade secrets soon becomes something else, as Dublanica’s facade as a professional waiter cracks to reveal a man stuck in his set patterns, a developing writer afraid to take the next steps, a waiter taking refuge in the known certitudes of his once-temporary job.  The external pressures on his job, as tensions at the restaurant escalate to an untenable climax, merely confirm his inner struggle to do more with his life.  It’s during those moments that our smooth and cynical “Jedi Waiter” becomes a well-rounded character: It’s a tricky balance, especially at first, but it develops in a successful narrative structure that does a lot for the book.

    Dublanica’s strengths as a writer are obvious: He has a sharp eye for details, doesn’t embarrass itself with useless details, and often ends chapters on ironic notes.  He’s able to stand in the middle of his anecdotes, yet tell them from a detached perspective, using specific incidents to illustrate larger points of etiquette, sociology or economic theory.  Some of his techniques feel a bit too on-the-nose (such as a “dialogue” that passes off as a lecture on the merits of proper financial management), but they’re usually blips on an otherwise smooth narrative.

    I picked Waiter Rant on not much more than a whim and ended up with one of my favourite reads of the year so far.  I may not like tipping because it’s so wide open to interpretation, social customs and the whim of the moment, but after reading the book, it feels as if I’ve been given the keys to understanding what tipping is about… and why it matters.  Until all of American society comes to realize the advantages of fully-salaried waiters, my 15% “and change” is likely to weigh a bit heavier on the “change” side from now on.  After all, as Dublanica writes, don’t eat out if you can’t afford the tip.

    (One recommendation for savvy readers: pick up the paperback edition, which not only properly credits Dublanica on the cover, but includes an afterword discussing his success after the publication of the hardcover edition.  It makes for a truly satisfying epilogue.)

  • Post Grad (2009)

    Post Grad (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, August 2009): How appropriate that a film about a confused young woman should be so conflicted about its own intentions.  A limp mix of drama, comedy and romance, Post Grad struggles with an unremarkable protagonist, an episodic structure, dull scenes and intermittent comic wit.  Alexis Bledel never engages as an apparently-perfect protagonist who still can’t get a job: her lacks of distinctive skills make for a bland lead that never earns any sympathy.  (It gets worse once we realize that this supposedly-smart woman with editorial ambitions never once considers moving to where the action is –New York- even when Columbia beckons another character.)  The script isn’t much better, mind you: Oscillating between wild comedy and family drama, Post Grad never seems to know what to do next: the dramatic threads are all underdeveloped, events happen without character intervention, and the whole thing soon feels like a slog.  The highlights are few and minor: Michael Keaton is a refreshing presence as a doofus dad, and the film makes a surprising amount of comic mileage out of a flattened cat.  One can only imagine the screenwriting process that led to such a scattered result: Was it a wild comedy toned down to a more general tone, or a hum-drum drama punched up with a few zanier moments?  We may never know, especially since it’s hard to imagine someone re-watching Post Grad to hear a director’s commentary.

  • A Perfect Getaway (2009)

    A Perfect Getaway (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, August 2009): The good news about this latest film from writer/director David Twohy is that it’s a pure genre thriller working solidly within the conventions of the genre.  Unfortunately, this also means that it’s a thriller working against its own audience, lying to them in order to set up a surprise third act.  That shouldn’t be a surprise given the script’s meta-humour about “red snappers” and second-act twists, but it’s not so impressive when one consider the contortions the script has to inflict on itself in order to put the audience where it needs them to be.  There’s a technical term for those tricks, and it’s “cheating”.  This being put aside, the film in itself isn’t a bad piece of suspense cinema: Characters and handled well, the cinematography takes full advantage of its Hawaii location and Twohy understands a few things about directing action sequences.  As a piece of genre cinema, A Perfect Getaway is more engrossing than most, and the cheating required in order to deliver the twist may not bother some audiences.  In fact, it may be better to know in advance that there’s a twist: If you feel, watching the film, that it’s focusing on the wrong characters, well… hold on to that idea and don’t let the film trick you out of it.