Reviews

  • Cooking Dirty, Jason Sheehan

    Cooking Dirty, Jason Sheehan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    FSG, 2009, 355 pages, C$32.50 hc, ISBN 978-0-374-28921-8

    Anyone looking for another hit of that crazy professional kitchen attitude can stop re-reading their Anthony Bourdain: Jason Sheehan is here to tell his story as a cook in America’s kitchens, and he has both the life experience and the writing skills to produce a memorable book.  Unlike Bourdain, who graduated from the Culinary Institute of America and eventually demonstrated enough supervisory skills to assume leadership positions in his kitchens, Sheehan’s biography remains that of a professional kitchen cook, occasionally climbing up then sliding down as Sheehan goes through the rough life of an American line cook.

    Because working in a kitchen is similar no matter where you go: It’s about working in an environment that tolerates no weaknesses, about beating the dinnertime rush, about lasting as long as you can and then stepping away.  It’s a tough life, and Sheehan’s description of his years in the kitchen is unflinching.  The book’s subtitle is “A story of life, sex, love and death in the kitchen” and only the death part is over-promising.  (On the other hand, we get plenty of gruesome injuries, including what happens to hands when they reach into a vat of boiling oil.  Nightmares guaranteed.)  Sheehan is a spokesperson for an entire class of working cooks who find the rhythm of professional kitchen to be compatible with their scattered lives.  They may live paycheck-to-paycheck on a string of cheap drugs, easy partners and low-rent apartments, but their cooking skills are good enough to carry them no matter where they go.  Over and over again (until Cooking Dirty’s last third), Sheehan is able to walk out of kitchens when thing aren’t working out, set out for another restaurant or even another state, and pick up working when he wants.  This is expected: No matter where he is, the kitchen atmosphere remains the same, with colleagues that largely share his own ambitions.  And that may be the crucial difference between Shehan’s book and Bourdain: When Bourdain talks about his kitchen crew, it’s with the knowledge of someone who fit there for a while, but had the potential to grow into increasingly senior positions.  Sheehan’s identification to the lifestyle is much stronger: if it wasn’t for an accident of relationships, economic recession and luck with an editor looking for another Bourdain, Sheehan may very well still be in the kitchen.

    He is also just as good as anyone in describing the hectic rush of dinnertime in a crowded restaurant.  His description of a kitchen battered to the breaking point is unforgettable: the craziest passage (in chapter “Will Work Nights”) involves a new guy, sabotaged frozen fish on a busy Friday night, and a natural gas build-up that results in an explosion in the kitchen.  They kept cooking; the new guy never came back.

    All the while, we get another reminder about the nature, temperament and personalities of people working in kitchen to serve food to, well, you.  There is little new in learning this (as readers of other restaurant memoirs will find out) but the difference is the vividness with which Sheehan can tell his story.  His career as a cook is peppered with odd and amazing stories, from being the bartender at a swingers’ night to working in an industrial kitchen, to serving catered food in a convention hotel.  Incidentally, Science Fiction and Fantasy fans will even recognize in Sheehan one of their own, as he peppers his narrative with geek-chic references –and even gets beaten up for reading Michael Moorcock.

    When Sheenan’s self-destructive streak finally catches up with him in late 2001 in Albuquerque and he finds out that he can’t get a job in the kitchen, there’s only one escape: writing.  One stroke of luck follows another, and so Sheehan finds himself in Denver reviewing restaurants and winning the James Beard Award for food journalism.  And that’s how, improbably, a food mercenary ends up telling his story: not just as a Bourdain clone, but as a writer with an authentic voice and a terrific sense of narration.  While Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential remains the top example of the form, Cooking Dirty is a look in the trenches that some cooks never escape, partly by lack of opportunity, drive or talent, but also sometimes by choice, however misguided they may sound to others.  As a look in kitchen culture, it completes Bourdain’s book and makes for a heck of a read.  The Amazon recommendation engine has seldom served me better than when it coughed up that title.

  • Shopportunity!, Kate Newlin

    Shopportunity!, Kate Newlin

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Collins, 2006, 240 pages, C$31.00 hc, ISBN 978-0-06-088840-4

    There are many ways in which a given book can fail to achieve its potential, but Kate Newlin’s Shopportunity! is one of the rarest blend of misguided intentions, flagrant elitism and inane chatter.  It’s easy to read, written by a smart person, filled with interesting factoids and yet fails to cohere in a fascinating fashion.  It frustrated me in ways that simply-bad or dull books simply can’t even dream of.

    Its biggest problem is that it simply doesn’t know what it’s about.  From the cover blurbage, we get the impression that this will be, in the footsteps of Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy and Call of the Mall, an exposé of the contemporary American shopping experience and how it fools the average shopper into making suboptimal choices.  But then again, it may be an instruction manual for shop owners: Newlin, after all, works for a consulting firm that specializes in retail business advice.  A quick look at the first paragraph tells us that the contemporary shopping experience has become soulless and mechanized: Is Shopportunity! an ironic title meant to propel an acid critique of today’s big box stores and their devastating impact on the nature of consumer choice?

    This confused, perhaps even schizophrenic impression grows stronger as the book advances.  Because it’s possible to find all three messages in Shopportunity!, along with brain-damaged passages in which Newlin summarizes her main arguments in bullet-points meant to enhance our shopping experience.  (“Rule #17: Break Out of the Big Box” [P.165])  As if what we really needed was a retail consultant telling us how to become a better, more satisfied shopper…

    Oh yes; in between the looks at the psychology of the modern shopper, savage anti-Wal-Mart diatribes, explanations on how bad stores drive away customers and a lament on the terrible cost of “cheap”, Newlin actually aims part of her book to people who love shopping and want to make it even more fun.

    It’s not necessarily a contradiction in term, although my own prejudices are having trouble coping with that concept.  I’m not, after all, a happy shopper.  Like many men, I see retail stores as places for hunting, not gathering: I know my prey, I’m a busy guy, and my ideal store minimizes the nonsense between me and what I want.  So when Newlin flies in a rage against Costo/Price Club, I take it personally: I love Costo in ways that airy discussions about the chain’s efficiency, logistics and force concentration can’t fully convey.  (But I don’t always shop there.)

    On the other hand, I do boycott Wal-Mart and love my upscale(ish) neighbourhood grocery store.  Yet when Newlin blasts a suburban (read; poor and lower-class) IGA while praising Whole Food, I can’t help but twitch an eyebrow.  That reflex is confirmed pages later when Newlin talks about a simply wonderful, dahrling shopping afternoon in trendy upscale Manhattan boutiques.  It then becomes reasonable to suppose that Newlin has lived the Manhattanite life for too long to be able to relate to most of her shopping readership: much of the (short) book isn’t about shopping as it seems to be about pure class exhibitionism, and the demonstration that Newlin’s tastes are unarguably better than those poor schlubs trucking it to their local IGA.  There’s a difference between having the means to consume better products and rubbing one’s self-designated superiority in everyone else’s faces, and Shopportunity! comes revoltingly close to the second.  As a result, I found myself disliking the book long after Newlin moved on to other topics.  In fact, I found myself disliking the author (who, I’m sure, is a perfectly nice person when she’s not writing books), and there’s little coming back from that point.  I hope it burns her to learn that I got the book at a remainders table.

    But even ignoring the class issues, Shopportunity! is just a mess, destined at about four different and incompatible audiences.  Those looking at business advice will resent being treated to incoherent “Shopping Tips” like brain-damaged Valley Girls (“Rule #3: Let Brands Transform You” [P.40]), while socially-conscious shoppers will be put off by Newlin’s effortless arrogance.  While there is substantial insight buried in-between the dumbed-downed bullet points and the shoppier-than-thou arrogance, Shopportunity! never gels, and comes across as an unsatisfactory mixture of material found elsewhere in purer, more coherent fashion.  There are so many fundamental social problems in the way retail outlets are set up nowadays that building about around how it’s “not fun to shop anymore” is the dumbest possible way to approach the issue.  Shopping technicians are better off reading Paco Underhill’s books; shopping activists are better off with Naomi Klein or Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Cheap and shopping fans are better off at the mall.

  • The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron, Rebecca Keegan

    The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron, Rebecca Keegan

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Crown, 2009, 273 pages, C$29.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-307-46031-8

    Admitting that James Cameron is one of my favourite directors is endangering my movie-reviewing license and exposing myself to endless mocking.  Somehow, the more successful his films become, the most acceptable it is to dismiss his achievements.  But as someone whose mind was blown away by Aliens and Terminator 2, someone who still likes Titanic and Avatar despite the faux-chic scorn they attracted, it was hard to pass up Cameron’s latest biography, one that picks up twelve years after Christopher Heard’s poorly-sourced Dreaming Aloud.

    Rebecca Keegan has one big advantage over Heard, and it’s that she wasn’t limited to newspaper clippings and a few meagre interviews: she reportedly had full access to Cameron, his family and his long list of friends and acquaintances in Hollywood.  As a result, The Futurist is a rich and well-researched book, one that remains interesting throughout and not just when its subject hits the big time.

    Of course, the notion of “big time” for Cameron starts early, as he’s been helming his own celluloid visions since 1984’s The Terminator.  Every subsequent Cameron film after that is a study in increasingly complex endeavours, with making-of stories that rival the film itself.  “Just another day on a Cameron set” may include everything from hanging off a plane suspended by a crane over the Miami skyline, nearly drowning in an abandoned nuclear reactor cooling tower, building a near-full-scale model of the Titanic with period detail, or inventing new technology to get unprecedented visuals.  From its very title, The Futurist aims to show how much of a visionary Cameron truly is; how he has the mind of an engineer, the hands of an artist and the eye of a filmmaker.  Tales after tale show Cameron doing things no one else has ever done before, winning large bets against those who said it just couldn’t be done.

    The flip-side of this incredible forward drive is Cameron’s abrasive personality, one that has annoyed a number of award-watchers, left film crews rebellious and broken four of his own marriages.  Cameron delivers fantastic movies, but he’s a demanding master in making them.  But then again, he has paid his dues: One of the best-known stories about him involve feverish sickness in Rome while fruitlessly re-editing his first film (an episode that would lead, as fans know, to the genesis of the Terminator films), but Keegan also reports on a lesser-known story about his first shoot that involved Cameron literally mopping up blood on the set and trying to keep the rest of the lunching crew from finding out what happens when you shoot in a real morgue.  Keegan doesn’t shy away from describing Cameron at his worst or identifying who has said they would never want to work with him again, but she does her best to show how the same facets of his personality can lead to good and bad.

    The rest of the book is just as skilful.  With deft and clear narration, Keegan moves from project to project, weaving industry facts with recollections from Cameron acquaintances.  For moviegoers, The Futurist is a lot of fun to read.  I don’t follow gossip much, and so there were a number of new anecdotes to me here and there, including one in which Cameron helped arrange for the safe release of Guillermo del Toro’s father after a kidnapping.  Perhaps the most revelatory section of the book follows Cameron in the twelve years between the release of Titanic and Avatar.  Flush with cash and acclaim, Cameron chose to step away from Hollywood and spend a decade indulging in his passions, from deep-sea diving to space exploration and setting up the new technology that we would need to deliver Avatar.

    Given all of this, the flaws of The Futurist are slight, obvious and inevitable.  Released to coincide with Avatar’s release, it hopes for another Cameron success but really has no idea how big the movie would become, and how warmly it would be greeted by audiences.  Then again, updated material is what paperback editions are meant to feature.  (One wishes, though, that some of Keegan’s most ridiculous claims about Cameron’s predictive powers would be toned down: Using Arab terrorists in 1995’s True Lies doesn’t make him anticipate Al Quaida any more than did contemporary thrillers such as Executive Decision and Air Force One.)

    It’s not quite the ultimate Cameron biography (one hope that he still has a few great movies in him), but it’s a very good one.  It’s certainly the best and most complete book about Cameron’s life so far (even though Paula Parisi’s Titanic and the Making of James Cameron remains a resource for Titanic minutiae) and a pretty good compendium of arguments for those willing to argue that Cameron is among the most important directors of the past quarter-century.

  • Daybreakers (2009)

    Daybreakers (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, January 2010) Every genre fan comes to develop a fondness for “the B-movie that could”, the twice-a-decade film that comes along with a little budget and big brains to take the genre in a newish direction.  While that’s a lot of praise to dump on Daybreakers all of a sudden, consider that it manages to combine horror and science-fiction to imagine a future society that has adapted to the fact that most people are vampires.  Add a few action scenes, Willem Dafoe playing a redneck with a fondness for crossbows and muscle car, tons of special effects and a script that doesn’t devolve into total silliness and the result is an impressive piece of work, especially in the doldrums of January.  It’s a savvy piece of work, one that privileges quantity of special effects, little details and genre-blending to deliver a mean and lean movie.  The direction is pretty good, the thematic underpinnings are solid, the pacing always accelerates and we have the sense of watching something that hasn’t been done before (no, Ultraviolet doesn’t quite compare).  It’s not a perfect piece of work: Ethan Hawke is a bit dull, some of the details make no sense, and the revelation on which the third act depends seems quite a bit… convenient.  Nonetheless, Daybreakers is a vigorous, stylish, entertaining B-movie that will earn quite a few admirers.  It’s probably my favourite vampire film since Blade II, and it pumps some blood back into what was becoming a tired monster.  I’m not sure what the writer/director Spierig brothers will do next, but I’m already interested.

  • The Rebel Sell, Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter

    The Rebel Sell, Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Perennial, 2005 updated edition of 2004 original, 374 pages, C$19.95 tp, ISBN 978-0-00-639491-4

    Shortly after reading Naomi Klein’s virulent No Logo, I ended up buying myself a copy of Adbusters magazine despite Klein’s own misgivings about the publication. It was the first time I purchased the magazine since high school: I wanted to see what I had been missing in the years since then, and gauge the current state of the anti-consumerism movement.  I wasn’t impressed: In-between spastic graphic design, incoherent articles and a message that didn’t seem to have evolved since the early nineties (and which may, in fact, have regressed into further insularity), Adbusters seems more self-satisfied than relevant, a charge that also broadly applies to a number of activists on the left end of the political spectrum.

    So imagine my pleasure in finding kindred spirits in Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s The Rebel Sell. –also known as Nation of Rebels in the US market.  The book’s subtitle promise to tell us “why the culture can’t be jammed” and the demonstration is more than a discussion of co-optation.  Indeed, the authors demonstrate, there was never a need to co-opt, since counter-culture does nothing better than reinforce culture itself.  Their argument is complex and I’m not up to the task of summarizing their dense tapestry of ideas, but it generally breaks down in the realization that the mainstream doesn’t really exist.  Mass culture is made of many sub-cultures, including the counter-culture.  Nothing really stops anyone from adopting counter-cultural ideas as part of their individual identity, and there is a lot of money to be made selling ideas of rebellion.

    So far so good; but what really sold me on the book were Heath and Potter’s demonstration that the current (Canadian) system, albeit imperfect in countless ways, actually works better than anything else tried so far.  Whereas the far left thinks it will settle for nothing less than revolution, the author point out that small incremental changes have, historically, been the surest way to chip away at social inequity… not to mention the losing gamble that is the complete replacement of an established system.  It seems like a common-sense point, and yet one that’s not often taken seriously.  Of course, small incremental changes are boring.  They require work, tenacity and, at the very least, some involvement in the messy real-world conflict of interest that is organised politics.  The Rebel Sell may be a triumph of conventional thinking, but it’s also far more reasonable than anything it criticizes.

    Not always reasonable, though: The Rebel Sell is, in many ways, a sneering dismissal of left-wing power fantasies and at times it can’t avoid the trap of acting like the smartest kid in the class.  While most of the book is solid, it sometimes becomes wobbly in specific criticism.  They authors point and laugh at Naomi Klein’s musings about the gentrification of her neighbourhood in a way that almost makes me suspect that they must have had an argument with her at a Toronto social event or something.  (Not to mention their dislike of Alanis Morrissette!)  They also, regrettably, sketch a bit hastily over the point that not all No Logo-inspired left-wing activism is posturing: criticizing third-world sweat shops is about improving lives, not simply selling counter-culture merchandise.  (Maybe that point seemed obvious to the authors who, despite their targets, actually hail firmly from the left side of the political spectrum.)

    But none of this changes the fresh thinking in this book.  It’s articulate, a bit smart-alecky, almost daring in its embrace of middle-of-the-road progressivism.  It’s very Canadian in how it speaks from the middle against forms of excess, and uses the ideals of the left to police its own worst excesses.  (In a formula I’m adopting from now on, they point out that the left has trouble differentiating dissent from deviance.)  This review barely scratches at the fizzy intellectual fireworks of the book, but it’s a joy to read and great way to complete the picture painted by Klein and company.  It’s perhaps most useful as an antidote and vaccine against some of the most inflamed rhetoric that starts to sound so good after eight years of the Bush administration.  Most people are, after all, reasonable people.  They don’t all subscribe to Adbusters magazine and would rather live well than climb to the barricades.

    (Bonus Trivia: You can scour early-nineties Adbusters magazine and spot my name once in their letter columns.  If my memory of what I wrote there is correct, you will find out that I haven’t changed much since then.)

  • Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

    Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    McClelland & Stewart, 2003, 378 pages, C$37.99 hc, ISBN 0-7710-0868-6

    When a talented mainstream author tackles a science-fiction novel, quite a few interesting things start to happen.  The novel is read by two largely distinct audiences (the author’s audience, and the genre SF audience as well), leading to what can be hilariously divergent takes on the result.  Historically, mainstream authors writing SF did so without the bag of tricks drilled into the heads of budding genre writers (consistent world-building, incluing, social complexity, etc.) and without any lifelong affection for the genre either.  The result tends to read like well-written, but substandard science-fiction: The background doesn’t hold together, the extrapolation is superficial and there’s a suspicion that everything is supposed to be a metaphor standing for something else.

    But Margaret Atwood is not just a “talented mainstream author”: In fact, despite her occasional protestations, she’s perilously close to qualifying as a true science-fiction writer.  She has written at least three SF novels so far, and one of them, The Handmaid’s Tale, remains a minor landmark of the genre.  Mainstream fiction novel The Blind Assassin even included a subplot about a hack SF writer in mid-twentieth century New York.  Atwood has apparently read a lot of SF in her formative years (which may explain her familiarity with an often-outdated notion of the genre) and clearly understands how it can be used to do things that mainstream fiction can’t explore.

    So it is that Oryx and Crake is a return to Science Fiction for her: While the framing device is about a man, a quest and a post-apocalyptic world, the meat of the story is the imagined biography of three people growing up in an increasingly unpleasant future.  Jimmy (later Snowman) is the main viewpoint character, and his experiences growing up with his friend Crake, and then meeting Oryx, form most of the bulk of the novel.  It’s not a pleasant future, what with deadly violence figuring prominently in popular entertainment, and genetic manipulations resulting in ever-stranger life forms.  When humanity is wiped out in the last third of Jimmy’s narrative, just in time to make place for the post-apocalyptic landscape Snowman has been inhabiting in-between telling the story of his life, we feel as if it’s a deserved end.  After all, it has already engineered its better descendant to inherit the Earth once they’re gone.

    Genre readers poking at Atwood’s imagined future won’t be impressed by the originality or depth of the SF elements.  Much of it appears recycled wholesale from other post-apocalyptic genetically-engineered nightmares.  Atwood loves portmanteau words and can’t resist the impulse to label everything in cute fake trademarks, surrounding her characters with a blizzard of consumerist tags.  Her future society, pre-catastrophe, seems to be one in which everyone is gleefully complicit with competing corporations, unchallenged pornographic entertainment and rotten “human” behaviour.  It’s not a nice novel, and even pointing out that it’s supposed to be dystopian satire doesn’t do much to quieten thoughts that we’ve seen all of this before, in more fully imagined settings.  This being said, Atwood does not embarrass herself with paper-thin future elements like so many of her mainstream colleagues: There may not be a lot of SF here, and it may not go far, but it’s good enough to suspend the disbelief of the average SF genre reader.

    But reading Oryx and Crake for the SF elements is like using a Ferrari to commute to the nearest bus stop: It’s a bit of a waste, and it denies the book’s greatest assets.  An Atwood novel is meant to be read for the writing, the sly humour, the deadpan take on human weaknesses.  Never mind the obviously converging plotting; it’s a book meant to be appreciated line-by-line.  Reading it is, if you want to go back to clumsy car analogies, like experiencing a performance engine put in an otherwise unassuming beater: The writing is polished to a level that would cause lesser writers to weep openly.  It doesn’t amount to much in the end, but it’s a ride to get there.

    Oryx and Crake even fans the deep and undying crush that mainstream-friendly SF genre readers may have on Atwood, who will always remain Canada’s hottest writer no matter how much we can take her for granted.

  • Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder (2009)

    Futurama: Into the Wild Green Yonder (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2010) Every one of the four straight-to-DVD futurama features has been less interesting than its predecessor, and so it is that Into the Wild Green Yonder in the least interesting of them all.  It’s still worth a look for confirmed Futurama fans, but there isn’t much here that sticks in mind: While the early Mars Vegas sequence is promising, the mini-golf throwaway joke becomes a stretched subplot, the environmentally-focused theme becomes overbearing (the eco-feminist subplot?  Eh.)  and by the time we’re supposed to realize that the film may be the last Futurama episode ever (thanks to an ending that wraps up a few romantic threads, and sends the entire crew somewhere else), it’s a bit of a relief that the thing actually ends.  There is a surprising amount of continuity with the entire series, another proof (if it was needed) of the intricate nature of the Futurama series, where nothing is quite a throwaway joke.  The best thing about Into the Wild Green Yonder may be the sales figures pushing toward another season of Futurama, hopefully in episodic 20-minutes installments for suited to the show’s nature.  The DVD adds an audio commentary that is up to Futurama’s entertaining standards, as well as a few other short features, the best of which being a hilariously misleading “making of” documentary that should satiate even the most rabid Amy/Lauren Tom fans.

  • From a Buick 8, Stephen King

    From a Buick 8, Stephen King

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Pocket, 2003 reprint of 2002 original, 487 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-7434-1768-2

    At this stage of his career, Stephen King can take risks that a younger writer wouldn’t dare.  Risks like a novel that consciously withholds complete satisfaction from the reader, wrapping everything in a preachy blanket of “there are strange things we’re not meant to understand”.  No, I’m not talking about The Colorado Kid, but From a Buick 8, an uncanny novel that does things in ways few genre readers would expect.

    Which is just as well, because a very superficial look at the novel immediately summons memories of another King novel: his Christine is the first example that comes to mind whenever talking about “evil car horror novels” for instance.  But the similarities end there: In From a Buick 8, things are far more complicated than just a car haunted by evil spirits.

    After all, it’s not even a car.  When Pennsylvania State Troopers are called to a gas station to pick up an abandoned vehicle, they quickly find out that the object that looks like a Buick Roadmaster really isn’t: Not only do the details don’t match (extra decoration elements, oversized wheel, etc.) but the car won’t even move by itself.  Never mind how it got there, or where its driver has gone: Soon enough, the Troopers discover that the materials used to build the car are quite unlike anything they know, and that the car self-repairs when damaged.

    But wait: it gets worse.  Periodically, the car starts bending reality.  Temperatures next to it drop by several degrees and the inside of the car lights up with eerie electrical light.  Soon after those events, things either disappear or appear next to the car.  One trooper goes missing.  Repulsive plants and animals pop up next to the car.  Faced with such phenomenon, the troopers safely shutter the car in a shed.  Years pass.

    Don’t expect a tidy chronological third-person telling of the tale.  From a Buick 8, also much like The Colorado Kid, is a novel in which a younger protagonist is told things by older, wiser people who have seen it all happen.  In this case, a young teenager, whose recently-killed father knew the secrets of the Buick, prods and asks his father’s colleagues about the car he discovers hanging around the barracks.  Their tale goes from 1979 to the early years of the new century, in bits and pieces given how they don’t want to acknowledge all at once the piece of pure strangeness in the back shed.  The narration is one filled with regional expressions, jaded details, blue-collar vocabulary and homespun turns of phrase.  The teenager wants to know everything as soon as possible, and have it make sense, whereas the older folks know that it’s impossible: The car has been in their lives for decades, and it’s unexplainable as far as they know.

    In many ways, it’s a novel about storytelling and how it’s neater than messy reality.  The Buick becomes an irrational part of the characters’ lives, to be locked somewhere in a shed and occasionally confronted as it takes out another piece away from their orderly reality, or spits out something that has no right to exist.  It’s not a scary novel as much as it’s a quietly terrifying one as the characters come to terms with something that will never be explained.  In that regard as well, it’s a precursor to the dirty trick that King would spring on readers with The Colorado Kid, presenting them with a tantalizing mystery that the author refuses to solve.

    Yet From a Buick 8 is somewhat friendlier to genre readers than The Colorado Kid in that it does feature a decent amount of chills and thrills even before the conclusion, and that it does offer enough of an explanation and a conclusion to mollify most readers.  The central mystery itself remains, but most of the smaller details are tied together in a final vision, and the epilogue offers a surprisingly reassuring way out of the strangeness.

    It amounts to a strange and uncanny novel that works in ways that horror novels usually don’t.  It’s a pleasure to read thanks to the narration and the accumulation of details about the life of state troopers, but it does eventually leads somewhere with its steady freak show of small-scale terror.  The framing device works in large part because the conclusion jumps out of the frame and starts messing with the people telling the story.  Writers will recognize the risks taken by King here, but readers should feel blessed to be in the hands of such a good storyteller.  From a Buick 8 is not your average horror novel, and it’s all the better for it.

  • Avatar (2009)

    Avatar (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, December 2009) Expectations ran high for Avatar, James Cameron’s first fiction film since 1997’s blockbusting Oscar-winning Titanic.  Promises of revolutionary 3D technology and one of the biggest budgets of all times did nothing to calm down fans and foes.  Fortunately, the film lives up to most of the hype.  If it isn’t quite a revolution in the film business, it is still an unprecedented and astonishing piece of work on many levels.  First and most impressive would be the world-building shown in the film: up until now a pleasure left to written-SF fans, Cameron manages to produce a completely new environment in a film with no media tie-ins: Much of the stuff on-screen actually holds together at a glance, which is more than most other “Science Fiction” films manage to do.  The immersion into the world is helped along by innumerable small details that reinforce the tactile reality of the world, and by a fully mature use of 3D cinematography: Cameron simply moves his camera through 3D-space and tickles our sense of place rather than repeatedly poke us in the eyes.  The production design of the entire film is a source of wonder, and so is the confident way in which Cameron directs the action: After years of shaky-cam confusion, here’s a film that does it right, maintaining our sense of space while delivering the action and explosions.  Every single dollar spent on the film is on-screen, and the result is as good as blockbuster entertainment can aspire to be.  Visually, it’s irreproachable.  Which makes the relatively simplistic nature of the story a bit harder to tolerate: Gleefully adopting the overused “contemporary stand-in learns all about the noble savage” plot template, Avatar usually feels obvious and unsurprising –especially when the characters start talking.  (Where to start?  The human caricatures?  The new-age pablum spoken by the Na’Vi?  The way our hero become The Leader rather than An Advisor?)  It’s not an entirely bad script (structurally, it’s competent to a level that would leave less screenwriters crying) and it does manage to make the most of what it’s given as premise, but it is a tired and sometimes-exasperating plot template.  But story is less important here than spectacle, and so there’s more to see here than a single viewing can appreciate, which is just as well, because Avatar looks destined to do brisk business and earn a solid place in genre film history.  There’s a lot more to say about the film and how it works, but the conclusion seems unavoidable: Avatar is one of the best SF films of the decade, a remarkable visual achievement and a movie experience so comforting in its professionalism that it raises the bar for everyone else.

  • The Brethern, John Grisham

    The Brethern, John Grisham

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Dell, 2002, 368 pages, C$45.00 hc, ISBN 0-385-49746-6

    Since I’m already on record as being a big fan of Grisham’s post-Runaway Jury career largely because of Grisham’s experimentation with new ways of telling the same stories, I might as well take apart The Brethren and explain why it doesn’t work as well as it should even if it does playfully experiment.

    Like many Grisham novels, it largely takes place in the south-eastern United States.  This time, we’re off to Florida, to a minimal-security federal prison in which three incarcerated judges (the titular brethren) have decided to be proactive in their forced retirement.  We first meet them as they dispense courtyard justice to their fellow convicts, but it doesn’t take a long time until we’re shown their real game: an extortion scam in which they entrap rich men through personal ads placed in newspapers of interest to the gay community, then threaten them with exposure once the pen-pal relationship deepens.

    So far so good, but there’s another more surprising side to the novel as well: While the judges are conducting business from prison, a young federal congressmen is tapped by the CIA to become a presidential candidate on the single issue of national security.  They provide him with funding, and the assurance that national security will be a hot topic in the coming months.  The candidate simply has to go through the motions, and pretty soon he’s seen as the favourite come election time.

    There’s a snag, though: As you may expect, the judges have snagged the congressman in their scheme, and the attempts of the CIA to protect their handpicked candidate ironically make matters even worse.  Pretty soon, the CIA is trying to exert leverage on the incarcerated judges, but it’s not clear who’s got the advantage…

    As the above plot summary may suggest, the book’s biggest problem is that there are no obvious characters to cheer for.  Sure, the congressman is being exploited for minor personal foibles; but he’s solidly at the mercy of his CIA puppet-masters.  The CIA characters are far too powerful to be interesting, while the Brethren are just con artists with fancy résumés and their pet lawyer is too corrupt to be pitied even when bad things happen to him.  This accumulation of unlikable characters doesn’t make the novel uninteresting, but it certainly lessens the readers’ involvement in taking sides and hoping that it wins at the end.  Which such unpleasant forces at play, it feels like a demonstration of clever plotting more than an actually story to enjoy.

    So it’s relatively good news to find out that, despite an uninvolving plot, The Brethren remains as readable as anything else Grisham has done.  There are some amusing plot turns as the CIA’s own incompetence (and acts-of-God such as a plane nearly crash-landing) ends up making a fairly simple situation even worse.  It’s not as much of a page-turner, but it sustains a definite narrative momentum, and readers won’t have any trouble following the twisted conclusion as unlikely characters are rewarded for their brinkmanship.  Ironically, this may be one of Grisham’s happiest ending yet… at least for the characters in the story.

    For those following the evolution of Grisham’s career, there are a few points of interest in The Brethren.  For the first time, Grisham tackles political process issues: much of the novel is dedicated to a demonstration of how massive campaign contributions can alter the course of a presidential candidacy, how the CIA deals with the political apparatus (or rather how it would like to deal with it) and how a political campaign goes.  This novel spends a lot of time in Washington, and that in turn sets the stage for later more overtly thriller-oriented novels like The Broker.  Meanwhile, the emphasis on money once again reflects one of Grisham’s perennial themes.

    For those who criticize Grisham for “the same old plot” over and over again, The Brethern seems custom-designed to earn the author a bit of leeway, prefiguring the even more dramatic departures from formula that would follow this novel.  It may not rank as one of his finest efforts, but it manages to be interesting, which is already not so bad.

  • Sherlock Holmes (2009)

    Sherlock Holmes (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theatres, December 2009) It had to happen sooner or later: a retelling of Sherlock Holmes (suspiciously absent from the big screen since 1985’s Young Sherlock Holmes) in the mode of the action thriller.  No, it’s not even trying to be an adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories: This Sherlock Holmes knows how to fight, has abandoned deerstalker hat restraint for debonair nonchalance and enjoys the company of a hot ex-girlfriend.  Pre-made for slash fiction writers, explosion connoisseurs and steampunk enthusiasts, Sherlock Holmes has little to say about its character, and a lot about modern blockbuster filmmaking.  It generally works, despite Scooby-doo plotting and inconsistent use of dramatic devices.  At least we’re spared an origin story, as the story picks up well into Holmes’ career.  Robert Downey Jr. seems to be channelling Tony Stark with an irresistibly arrogant portrait of a super-genius (it works because he’s charmingly roguish rather than super-nerdy) while Jude Law does his job as the level-headed foil.  Rachel McAdams, for some reason, always look better in historical movies (must be costumes), while Mark Strong turns in another performance as the bad guy.  Director Guy Richie reigns in some of his usual tricks but manages to deliver a satisfying action film.  Only the sound seems a bit soft (the mumbling doesn’t help): viewers without an ear for soft English accents may want to wait for DVD subtitles or sit closer to the screen.  The CGI-enhanced portrait of 1880s London is suitably grimy, mechanical and interesting.  Sherlock Holmes may be a travesty of the original stories and a by-the-number mainstream thriller, but it’s pretty good as such.  Bring on the sequel, and let’s see Holmes square off against Moriarty.

  • The Game, Neil Strauss

    The Game, Neil Strauss

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper, 2005, 452 pages, $C46.50 tp, ISBN 978-0-06-055473-6

    I seldom think twice about buying books I want to read, but even after loving Neil Strauss’ Emergency, I admit that I hesitated a bit before getting his best-known work The Game.

    Sure, it’s an expensive book.  But the way it looks did more to drive me away than its cover price.  Dressed in imitation leather, clad in gilded rounded edges, sporting a red cloth bookmark and cover silhouettes of exotic dancers, The Game affirms its personality before you even crack open its golden-edged pages.  If it was a person, The Game would be your mysterious and seldom acknowledged uncle from San Francisco who picks you up on your 18th birthday, slaps you heartily on the shoulder, stuffs a lit cigar in your mouth and says “Let’s go to the strip club, son.  Tonight, I’m gonna teach you how to be a man.”

    This, as it turns out, is pretty much what The Game wants to teach you anyway.  Billed as an exploration of a secret society of pick-up artists, it’s an autobiographical memoir of Neil Strauss’ years in the seduction underground.  Learning from the masters, Strauss sheds his geeky writer’s persona to become Style and eventually becomes a master of seduction.  It’s a lively story filled with hilarious anecdotes, a compelling narrative, sharp characters, celebrity cameos and growing doubts about the power of picking up women at will.  He even cracks the threesome code.

    Let’s not try to pretend otherwise: The sole reason why The Game is so expensive and as over-packaged as a peacock is that it’s being sold as a summary of the rules of seduction.  Pick it up, promises everything in the book’s physical appearance, and you too will learn everything you need to know about seducing women.  It’s all about confidence and interesting patter, but members of the pickup-artist community tend to be from geeky backgrounds and so many of the hints become about routines and scripted encounters –as if you could hack the human interaction algorithm.

    Amusingly enough, it seems to be working: As Strauss details techniques and openers and steps to follow, it’s easy to deride those who attempt to boil down seduction to a flowchart… but no one will deny that the traits meant to be bolstered by the routines are those that do make you a more interesting person: A bit of fearlessness, a few useful talents, some verbal wit and a lot of self-confidence.  The Game is geared toward singles bar pick-ups and I’m definitely not a player, but I can recognize that when I’m at my most charming (whether it’s one-on-one or giving speeches to an entire room), I end up independently running through many of the techniques that Strauss outlines.

    But I’ll let other AFCs (Average Frustrated Chumps, in The Game’s highly specialized jargon) take advantage of the book’s didactical aims, because the real reason to read the book isn’t the bag of tricks as much as Strauss’ storytelling and the unbelievable adventures in which he finds himself.  His path from geek-writer to a model for an entire community is richly told, compulsively readable and frequently hilarious.  The community attracts its share of characters and since much of the action takes place in Los Angeles, celebrities sometimes pop up in the narrative: Tom Cruise ends up teaching Strauss a few lessons in natural pick-up ability, while Courtney Love has an extended role as a mad dervish.  Meanwhile, Strauss finds out that his seduction techniques serves him well when comes the time to interview Britney Spears, while one of the book’s secondary characters successfully picks up Paris Hilton using Style’s scripted routines.

    Better yet, though, are Strauss’ clear-eyed epiphanies about the monster he has helped create.  After everyone comes to adopt his techniques, after anti-seduction mechanisms start being used against him, he comes to the most basic realization of all: Learning how to pick up women is supposed to be a mean to an end, and no rote repetition of bar encounters will help him in building a stable relationship.  The Game may end on a strikingly traditional note, but it does manage to sweeten what could have been an unbearably misogynistic book.  (Not that Strauss has given up on the game: A look at his web site shows that he’s still involved in teaching other how to improve their pickup skills.)

    There’s no use pointing out that The Game is very much a young man’s book or that it outlines ways of handling interpersonal relationships that may curdle into dishonesty and exploitation.  It is borderline reprehensible (especially if you stop reading before the end) and can empower twisted minds.  Which is why my recommendation for the book comes with a kilogram of salt: Try to think of it as a book of good stories, not a way of life.

  • The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

    The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, December 2009) A film by Terry Gilliam is usually quite unlike anything else, and so it is that The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is, at the very least, unique in its own way.  The title is probably the most normal aspect of a film that allows the writer/director to fully indulge in his obsessions, from skewed images to wide-angles to midgets to stylized animation.  The story may be about choices and imagination, but the result is pure visual spectacle for fans of special effects, imaginative dream worlds and cinematic fantasy.  There are more than a few visual and thematic links to previous Gilliam films from The Fisher King to The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. This being said, there are a few strong performances to admire as well: Much has been made of Heath Ledger’s final role and the way other actors (Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell) are used to complete his scenes set in imaginary worlds, but the result feels both appropriate and seamless.  Also worthwhile are Verne Troyer (given surprisingly level-headed dialogue), Tom Waits (as, appropriately, the Devil), Lily Cole (an unconventional beauty balancing out the rest of the male-dominated cast) and Christopher Plummer as the titular doctor.  Alas, the story is a bit more muddled: As with his latest Brothers Grimm, Gilliam delivers fantasy that seems to make it up as it goes along, never setting out rules or sticking to them: it makes the experience of seeing the film a bit tortuous if viewers are trying to do more than admire the pictures.  But for Gilliam fans, this won’t be much of an issue:  Overall, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a worthwhile effort, perhaps the single best Gilliam (and Gilliamesque) film in more than a decade.

  • The Godfather: Part III (1990)

    The Godfather: Part III (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, December 2009) This “Part III” has a bad reputation only when it’s compared to its two classic predecessors.  While it’s pretty good filmmaking, it’s just not up to the standards set by its prequels.  It’s not bad when considered as a straight-up epilogue, but then it runs into the vexing issue of being nearly three hours long, which really isn’t appropriate for the type of story it tries to be in the Godfather universe.  Part of the problem is that by going to Italy and spending a lot of time dealing in Vatican business, The Godfather III gets farther and farther away from the all-American core that made the success of the first two films: The issues get more abstract and diffuse, and the plot seems to over-complexify itself.  There is a noticeable lull near the middle of the film, and all of it contributes to the feeling of an overlong experience.  Acting-wise, it’s Al Pacino and Andy Garcia’s show: Sofia Coppola may be the most attractive performer in the entire trilogy, but her much-derided performance, all mushy-mouthed and indifferent, is another of the reasons why she’s become a far better director than actress.  More happily, though, the film works more often than it doesn’t, and while some elements that made the first film now feel familiar (the opening celebration/introduction scene; the final operatic barrage of violence), it’s handled with a lot of lavish skill by director Francis Ford Coppola.  Conventional wisdom is correct: Not a bad film, but a let-down compared to its lineage.

  • The Godfather: Part II (1974)

    The Godfather: Part II (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, December 2009) I may not entirely agree with assessments that this sequel is superior to the first film (which seems just a bit more focused that the follow-up), but there’s no denying that the two Godfather films feel inseparable: The first flows into the second one with fewer differences than one would expect, and the second one actually makes the first one feel even better when taken together.  Once again, a really young Al Pacino runs the show, although he’s joined (in entirely separate sequences) by an equally-young Robert de Niro.  Acting both as a prequel and sequel to the original, this “Part II” creaks at more than 200 minutes: the entire prequel alone could have been spun off in its own film.  The Godfather II itself has the feel of a vast epic, with multiple plot lines, grand lavish scenes (including another lengthy party sequence that acts as essential scene-setting), multiple locations, a bit of historical drama and a large cast of characters all headed for destruction.  Even then, there’s a lot that simply isn’t shown, and when the film ends, it feels as if it does so a few scenes too soon.  It’s the nature of the charm of the films that betrayal and violent death is always somewhere in the assumed background of the character’s action: one wrong answer and goodbye!  What may be The Godfather II’s most astonishing achievement is that it actually makes its predecessor even better, by presenting a story with even-bigger implications, digging into the characters and tying off a few grander arcs.  This is big, big-scale filmmaking by Francis Ford Coppola, and it’s a bit of a shame we don’t get such movies anymore.