Reviews

  • Made In Jamaica (2006)

    Made In Jamaica (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, February 2009) More of an extended multi-artist music video anthology with added contextual material than a true documentary, Made In Jamaica refuse to provide narration or explanation, relying solely on captured footage and interviews. Alas, the filmmakers rarely question what their interview subjects tell them, and the result is a quick introduction to reggae-dancehall that quickly becomes a frustrating superficial look at a multi-faceted issue. While it touches upon most of the aspects of the modern Jamaican reggae culture (the poverty, the aggression, the misogyny, the roots/dancehall split), it says little on some of its most damning aspects and almost nothing at all about its regressive take on heteronormativity. There are about half a dozen junctions where the film ventures into something interesting, then shies away from it. For instance, a pretty good moment when the film contrasts Elephant Man’s rote statements about promoting peace with concert footage where he sings about killing other people, is as close as the film gets to questioning its subjects. Another example of the film’s occasional gems is Lady Saw’s frank admission that she became a rude girl for purely commercial reasons, buried in a too-short look at the genre’s troubling male-dominated culture. For a dancehall fan such as myself, one of the film’s big ironies was that the musical performances I enjoyed the most (Third World’s “96 degrees in the Shade”, Gregory Isaac’s “No Woman No Cry” and a wild cross-cultural take on “I Shot the Sheriff”) were firmly on the roots divide, and the smartest interview subjects were also the roots people. I have long suspected that I would like reggae-dancehall a lot less if I understood the lyrics, and Made In Jamaica went a long way in confirming this suspicion. Good but hardly transcendent, this is a gateway documentary that often works better as an extended video musical anthology: Some of the sights are spectacular, and it is a treat to actually see some familiar names signing.

  • The International (2009)

    The International (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, February 2009) Such is the randomness of filmmaking: Five month’s worth can make all the difference between banks-as-invincible-entities and banks-as-bailout-beggars. Which is unfortunate, because a thriller based on the idea of a bank going rogue and severely punishing anyone looking into it isn’t necessarily bad (heck, it even happened with BCCI, which shares a suspicious number of letters with this film’s IBBC), and The International is as it bests when it realistically grapples with how to expose international money-for-weapons schemes. Clive Owen is irreproachable as the rumpled hero in the middle of it all, but one can’t say the same thing about a film that doesn’t quite know what to make of itself. Rumors of extensive re-shoots may explain the abrupt and inconsequential action sequences, including a spectacular-but-nonsensical shootout at the Guggenheim museum. At least the rest of the film offers a few real-life visual thrills as it hops between Europe and New York, delivering a procedural thriller whose flaws don’t quite match its strengths. A few ideas are wasted, and the conclusion is a bit of a downer. It all makes up for a middle-of-the-road thriller, promising but ultimately too scattered to be efficient. It may be respectable for what it tries to achieve, but sadly it doesn’t seem determined to get there.

  • Final Destination 3 (2006)

    Final Destination 3 (2006)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, February 2009) You would think that a teen horror series’ third installment would have sucked all of the thematic enjoyment of the premise, leaving little but a string of cheap kills and generic characters. And you would be right, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that Final Destination 3 is a complete waste of time. Despite the overly familiar nihilism of the premise (which was charming in the first film, but meaningless by the third one), the set-pieces of the film are conceived with a certain degree of ingenious cleverness, and the direction isn’t completely incompetent. There is a bit of nudity to redeem the over-the-top gore, and the writers have a better-than-average understanding of the cat-and-mouse game between the audience and the movie that the series has set up for itself. (The film is strong in Rube-Goldbergian machineries of death, and they generally work more surprisingly than anyone would expect) Don’t go into this film expecting more than a standard teen horror gore-fest and you’ll be fine. This isn’t anywhere near the original, but it sustains at least a bit of attention. The 2-discs DVD edition has a pretty nice array of features, from a cute animation short on everyday dangers to a self-aware discussion of “Dead Teenager Movies” to an excellent making-of documentary that is far too good and entertaining for the kind of film this is: it’s actually liable to make you fonder of the film than you’d think.

  • Rolling Thunder, John Varley

    Rolling Thunder, John Varley

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ace, 2008, 344 pages, C$24.95 hc, ISBN 978-0-441-01563-4

    Varley fans who complained about Red Thunder and Red Lightning aren’t likely to feel much better after reading Rolling Thunder, the newest installment in a series that seems intent on showing how ordinary the author has become. It’s not a terrible novel, but it’s intensely familiar, leads to a conclusion that seems pasted from Varley’s previous work, and it survives only thanks to Varley’s usual gift for compelling narration.

    A generation removed from Red Lightning, Rolling Thunder‘s narrator is one Patricia Kelly Elizabeth Podkayne Strickland-Garcia-Redmond, daughter of the previous book’s Ray. As the novel begins, she’s stuck on Earth, serving her time in the Martian Navy by acting as an immigration officer. It’s been a few years since the Martian Revolution of the previous volume, and Earth hasn’t quite adjusted to the change. The situation around the world is worse than ever, in part thanks to the disaster descriped in the previous novel, but Mars isn’t ready to let everyone immigrate en masse.

    When Podkayne’s great-grandmother is suddenly scheduled for bubble stasis for medical reasons, it’s a mandatory ride home and family reunion for her, then a reassignment to the entertainment division of the Mars Navy where she becomes a jazz singer. (Don’t worry: she justifies why the music she sings is all made out of classic numbers. As usual with writers of Varley’s generation, the future doesn’t belong to pop music —or anything made after the sixties.) A tour to Jupiter’s Moons doesn’t go as planned, though, and the consequences are dire both for Podkayne and for the human race.

    Like its predecessors, Rolling Thunder is grossly chopped into two relatively independent sections, separated by time. A disaster leaves Podkayne unchanged, but affects everyone else’s perception of her, with dangerous results for the young woman. It all leads to a conclusion that seems to borrow equally from The Ophiuchi Hotline and Steel Beach.

    Also like its predecessors, the saving grace of Rolling Thunder isn’t to be found in its overarching plot, but in its moments or line-by-line narration. The homages to Heinlein are just as blatant as in the previous books, but the clear-voiced narration holds up things better than you’d expect, with lengthy yet appealing digressions on how things are done at that time. This being said, I wonder if Heinlein could have pulled off the dark ending of this novel, in which the characters basically run far far away in order to avoid the apocalypse threatening the rest of humanity.

    As a science-fiction novel, it’s a minor work. It’s even more disappointing coming from Varley, although none of the three books in its series have been particularly impressive. With a bit of effort, this could have been a novella: the plot density is laughable, especially when the bulk of the novel seems to be Podkayne telling us about her day-to-day life.

    If readers have made it thus far in the series, they might as well keep going: It’s an amiable entry in the series and the fact that it’s slight and negligible doesn’t make it less than entertaining. What’s more, it’s a stepping stone to what Varley says is the fourth and final tome in the series, Dark Lightning, to be written and published in a few more years. Not that we’re in any hurry.

    It’s a sign of the novel’s minor impact that it’s not particularly interesting to dissect or even comment: If Varley’s your thing, this will do while you await for his next novel. But there’s no denying that Varley’s best works seem more and more distant.

  • Defiance (2008)

    Defiance (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, February 2009) In time, no single aspect of World War 2 won’t be turned into a movie, and this little-know story of resistance in the Polish backwoods is often more interesting than you’d expect. When small-time bandits turn their survival skills to the protection of Jewish refugees, the film becomes an amalgam of war drama, small-scale action and survival Robinsonade. Daniel Craig is effective in the lead role, lending his increasing Bondish gravitas to a film that sorely needs it. Elsewhere, the heavy hand of Hollywood movie-making can be seen rewriting history for maximum thrills (such as a tank battle with a nick-of-time rescue) and buffing up small characters into exposition mouthpieces. Defiance seldom shies away from underscoring whatever mood the film wants audiences to feel, and the result often ends up feeling forced. The interplay between the various groups involved in the story (Nazis, sympathizers, Polish-Jewish elders, Russian resistance, etc.) merely hints at the complexity of the true story. But even discounting the manipulation, Defiance still manages to feel like solid entertainment with a dash of history: Edward Zwick is comfortable with historical dramas, and the result is not too unpleasant once you stop identifying with the horrid conditions in which the characters spend most of the film. There are worse films out there, even in the limited “footnotes of WW2” sub-genre.

  • The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (2008)

    The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button (2008)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, February 2009) Every crop of Oscars contenders includes overlong weepy dramas, and The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button is 2008’s entry in the sweepstakes. Based around the fantastical premise of a man aging backwards, the film feels free to explore issues about youth, aging, living and dying. With intentions like those, you won’t be surprised to find out that the end of the story is solid weeping time, the film sparing no effort in lining up every single piece of symbolism it has accumulated during its considerable length. From the first few moments, it’s obvious that this film goes from scope and length rather than any single conception of narrative efficiency: The scenes drag on with unrelenting digressions, bit players, slow accents and separate set-pieces. This is a life epic told as watered-down fable (Fans of Big Fish will find something familiar in Benjamin Button‘s off-beat sweep through the twentieth century), a mode that will charm certain viewers and leave others riffing on the melodramatic weight of the film’s every moments. For some, the irony will be that the film comes from director David Fincher almost ten years after the hyper-aggressive Fight Club: the technical polish of the film is just as considerable, but the narrative style is almost half as dense. There’s something admirable in the way the film so obviously reaches for tears in its final thirty seconds, even when the manipulation is all perfectly obvious. Acting-wise, there’s little to say except for Brad Pitt’s measured performance through the ages, and the able supporting work from a diverse cast. Don’t be surprised that the film plays better at home, with ample leisure time, than in the cramped seats of a movie theater.

  • Coraline (2009)

    Coraline (2009)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, February 2009) There are two big reasons why this film is worth seeing, but the most obvious one is the visual polish of the piece, which blends flawless stop-motion animation with computer-generated enhancements and, if you’re lucky or rich, can even be experienced in showy 3D. Yes, the 3D thing is a gimmick: There are a number of shots in the film that make little sense in 2D, although director Henry Selick is smart enough to avoid the old unsubtle poke-the-audience-in-the-eye shtick. 3D aside, though, Coraline is a gorgeous piece of visual imagination, with enough spectacular design to keep you coming back to the film even on a 2D screen. That, in large part, is due to the second big reason why you should see Coraline: The quality of Neil Gaiman’s oddball imagination, which (despite a few changes from the original novella) powers the unusual fantastic elements of the story. It’s familiar without quite being like anything else seen before, and this originality is what separates it from so many run-of-the-mill juvenile fantasies. It’s not an unimpeachable film (dig a bit, and plenty of vexing thematic problems arise), but it’s different, confident and competent. Too bad that the technology won’t allow 3D projection on small screen for a few years: Unlike many other examples of the genre so far, Coraline earns some extra credits with another dimension, even while it’s perfectly good in 2D. But don’t wait or fret: just see it.

  • Hell’s Angels, Hunter S. Thompson

    Hell’s Angels, Hunter S. Thompson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ballantine, 1967 (1996 reprint), 273 pages, C$17.00 tpb, ISBN 978-0-345-41008-5

    Let’s face it: most books have a useful life measured in years, if not months. Once they’ve been removed from bookstore shelves, put out-of-print and remaindered, books quickly fade away from public attention. Non-fiction withers away even less gracefully than fiction: The world outside the book evolves, leaving the subject behind as a historical curiosity.

    Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels is part of a tiny minority of enduring non-fiction titles. Still in print forty years after publication, it’s still being purchased and read today. Two reasons explain why: First, it’s a book by Hunter S. Thompson, a writer whose legend burns just as brightly today than in 1967. Second, it’s a crackling good read about a fascinating subject that remains of interest today.

    For if the hippies of San Francisco’s mid-sixties have faded away, the Hell’s Angels that flourished at the same time are still very much active today. Their outlaw legend has shifted somewhat: People (especially in French Canada) now tend to associate their illicit activities with organized drug-running and biker wars rather than the anarchic hooliganism of their early years. But the mystique endures just as it did in 1965, the year when Thompson wrote his first article on the San Francisco-area Hell’s Angels and ended up up riding with them for another year while researching his book-length narrative. (The ride ended when, as Thompson describes in the gut-punch last chapter, he himself was “stomped” and beaten by the Angels.)

    One of the reasons why Hell’s Angels remains so readable today has to do with Thompson himself: Though he calls the Angels stupid and ignorant, there’s no doubt that he has considerable sympathy for the outlaws and the way they can get away with what they do. Thompson himself wasn’t an entirely straight arrow at the time, and fans will recognize typical Thompson stories as he describes how he “somehow” ended up firing a shotgun outside his apartment at night. Thompson, in fact, spends more time decrying mainstream treatment of biker gangs (calling the contemporary media coverage woefully ignorant, sensationalist and patronizing) than he does condemning the Angels.

    By living with the gang for a year, Thompson also manages to understand and describe them better than anyone else at the time: His exploration of the psycho-sexual dynamics of the Angels is brutally frank (even today) and completely engrossing. The portrait he draws up is that of a familiar type: men who can’t find a place in mainstream society, hanging together in a mutual support group. When Hunter ends his book with dire predictions that motorcycle gangs are part of the way American is going to become in the future, history proves him right.

    But socio-political analysis aside, the best moments of this great book end up being the first-hand descriptions of a Hell’s Angels run on a small California community, as both Angels and local authorities are practically begging for a confrontation. It ends up being a non-story, with Thompson stuck in the middle, but it’s also a segment that would mark a turning point for him: Hell’s Angels may not be completely gonzo journalist, but it’s certainly a prototype of articles in which the process of getting the story becomes the story.

    In-between, you get passages describing the pure thrill of pushing a motorcycle so close to the edge that you can’t see beyond the next turn in the road. You get a sense of San Francisco during the sixties. You get Hunter S. Thompson as a young man trying out his full powers as a writer. But more than that, you get a crackling good read, even forty years after publication. This is a book that has endured for good reasons: It’s a minor classic in its own way, and it’s well worth picking up.

    [June 2009: I wouldn’t go so far as to call Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test an essential companion to Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, but it does offer another look at mid-sixties San Francisco and in discussing Ken Kesey’s psychedelic lifestyle, often overlaps with Thompson’s motorcycle gang. (In fact, Thompson is acknowledged as having provided audio tapes to Wolfe.) But modern readers will trip over the most annoying thing about The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which is Wolfe’s stream-of-altered-consciousness prose style: Impressionistic at beast, unreadable at worst. If it does a fine job at portraying a particular mindset, it also graphically shows why the hippies went away since then. Still, patient readers will find a few nuggets of interest in the depiction of the times, as well as random factoids and references. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is referenced casually, as is Clarke’s (unattributed) Childhood’s End. Plus there’s the fascinating etymological tidbit that “bummer” (as in: “a bad trip”) was adopted by the hippies from the Hell’s Angels slang for, yes, “a bad trip” –you can figure out what part of the anatomy hurts after a bad motorcycle ride. Ultimately, though, much of Wolfe’s book is simply too difficult to read to be truly rewarding. Of historical interest.]

  • The Rum Diary, Hunter S. Thompson

    The Rum Diary, Hunter S. Thompson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Simon & Schuster, 1998, 204 pages, C$15.50 tpb, ISBN 978-0-684-85647-6

    Published in 1998, in the waning dusk of Hunter S. Thompson’s career, The Rum Diary is nonetheless a formative work for the American writer/journalist: The first draft of the novel was completed in the early 1960s, as Thompson himself bounced around New York, Puerto Rico and Big Sur. Finally published (and somewhat re-written) in the late nineties, The Rum Diary offers a curious bookend to Thompson’s career. Conceived early but finished late, it offers a parallax view into the writer’s head.

    The plot, unsurprisingly, concerns the adventures of an American journalist, Paul Kemp, as he makes his way from New York to San Juan as a small newspaper staffer. There are, as you may expect, a number of complications: Kemp is fascinated by a Caucasian women who flew in on the same plane as he did, and then there’s the free-flowing atmosphere of San Juan during the late fifties, a barely modernized land where rum flows as freely as water.

    Let’s be blunt for a moment: If it wasn’t for the fact that this novel was written by Hunter S. Thompson, there wouldn’t be many reasons to read it. The prose is fine, but hardly transcendent and nowhere as explosive as latter-day Thompson. The plotting is generally aimless. The characters aren’t worth caring about. The Rum Diary trades on the reputation of its author as a hard-drinking rabble-rouser: Could this novel be autobiographical? Can it offer clues regarding the rest of Thompson’s work? Does it contain a Rosebud! moment when we suddenly understand the rest of Thompson’s life?

    Well, no. In most aspects, it’s a fairly ordinary, aimless novel of a young man trying to survive after drinking too much in a quasi-foreign land. Puerto Rico may be American territory, but Kemp’s life in San Juan is one of an expatriate, congregating with the other English-speaking Caucasians and looking at the native population with a heavy dose of, well, fear and loathing. If the novel has one thing that can stand separate from the reputation of its author, it’s the description of San Juan as a place: Thompson clearly establishes the atmosphere of the time, the peculiarities of an environment so far away from everything else, and the bonds that form before fellow cast-offs. Still, Thompson isn’t particularly kind to Puerto Ricans, and occasional racial slurs make it through the novel. (Raw excerpts of The Rum Diary, before re-writes, can be found in Thompson’s Songs of the Doomed collection: in them, he’s even less kind.)

    But it’s far more interesting to compare Kemp and Thompson, or rather Thompson before the legend and Thompson after. The Rum Diary only has a little of the madness to be found in works like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Kemp can be moody and contemplative, whereas latter-day Thompson was belligerent and manic. (Their drugs of choice at the time may have something to do with it.) It’s tempting to go back to Kemp and see there the potential not just for latter-day Thompson, but what would have happened if the younger Thompson had been taken seriously as a writer of fiction, if he had avoided the drugs of late-sixties San Francisco, if he had found himself just as Kemp narrowly seems to find himself at the end of The Rum Diary. But that’s asking a lot of a novel that is, after all, just one that describes a not-so-young-man living it up in an exotic land. Yet that may be the only thing worth asking about a novel where drunken episodes substitute for plotting.

    It goes without saying that The Rum Diary‘s first audience should be those who have considerable knowledge and sympathy for Thompson before even cracking open the first page. This is a filler in the grand tapestry of Thompson’s work, and it may even best be read at the end of his bibliography rather than at the beginning; until the first San-Juan-era version of the manuscript is made available, who’s to say how much of what we’re reading from from Thompson-the-novice and what’s from Thompson-the-veteran? His biography, Gonzo, makes it clear that publishing the novel was not a grab at literary respectability as much as it was a way to make money: a more solvent Thompson wouldn’t have allowed the publication of the novel. Doesn’t that perfectly place The Rum Diary in Thompson’s oeuvre?

  • The Shell Game, Steve Alten

    The Shell Game, Steve Alten

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Sweetwater Books, 2008, 512 pages, C$33.00 hc, ISBN 978-1-59955-094-7

    (Read in translation as La Conspiration de l’Or Noir, City, 507 pages, ISBN 978-2-35288-186-5)

    Fiction writer are prone to various work-related illnesses, but one of the most debilitating one is believing in their own genre tropes. There’s a reason why Science Fiction writers are a bunch of hard-core skeptics who are never invited to speak to UFO conferences: The moment they start believing in Little Green Men, their credibility is toast, and their fiction is next. The equivalent for thriller writers is to start believing in their own conspiracies, and it’s just as damaging: Ask anyone about Payne Harrison’s Forbidden Summit (a UFO-conspiracy novel that seemingly destroyed his fiction career) and you’ll see what happens to those who put footnotes saying It’s all true!

    Alas, the Bush years have fueled all sorts of paranoid reflexes even in the most reasonable citizens, which may explain a recent influx of deeply grim novels in which stalwart heroes are stuck between bloodthirsty terrorists and a government ready to do even worse things on behalf of national security. Nelson DeMille’s Wild Fire is only the best-known of this new breed of novels where the government is just as dangerous as terrorists, and I don’t see this trend going away despite the inauguration of a new administration. We’ll get quite a few novels like Steve Alten’s The Shell Game until the wave crests.

    I won’t try to pretend that Alten’s career so far has been irreproachable: For every strong thriller like his debut Meg (about an 18-wheeler-sized shark) or Goliath (about a top-secret submarine that turns sentient), there’s been a succession of insipid Meg sequels that did little to enhance his track record. The Shell Game is a departure for him in many ways. For one thing, it’s published by a boutique publishing house best known for conservative-leaning religious-themed non-fiction and not Alten’s usual top-tier publishers. The reason for that change quickly becomes apparent from the plot summary: In 2012, a man tracking down the murder of his wife discovers a plot by US government operative to detonate a nuclear explosive in a major American city, in order to justify the invasion of Iran.

    The parallels with DeMille’s Wild Fire exist, but DeMille doesn’t sink nearly as deep in conspiracy-land as Alten does. Nor does DeMille risk tying his story with real-world figures. Here, though, characters have worked with Karl Rove, have defeated Hilary Clinton for the democratic presidential nomination, are named “McKuin” rather than “McCain”, and cite reams of supporting documentation whenever they meet.

    And oh boy do they cite. Pages of citations. With figures, references and reminders of historical events that should be perfectly obvious to the two people having the conversation. The first half of The Shell Game is a dull recitation of a thesis on peak oil and the ways the oil industry has a stranglehold on American society. And if you’re still not satisfied by the in-text infodumps, then you’ll feast on the citations between chapters, the plainly didactic confessions of a Republican operative that are interleaved between segments, not to mention the foreword in which Alten explains that a good chunk of the novel is based on actual verifiable facts, and the afterword which provides citations for some of the novel’s concepts.

    Desperate much for validation, ya think? No, it’s not enough for Alten to re-cast, much like DeMille did, the untenable “9/11 was an inside job” ideas into a future plot involving nuclear weapons. He also drags in a bunch of other conspiracy theories, from false vaccines that are actually injections of nanochip trackers to the involvement of the Saudi Arabian government in white slavery to yet another mention of the Promis super-snooper software. But when you start looking at the Alten’s sources at the back of the book, you quickly fall into a maze of unspecified “numerous sources”, untraceable “confidential sources” and a handful of books like Crossing the Rubicon that aren’t exactly unimpeachable. This novel isn’t just steeped in conspiracy theories, it’s so deep in them that they drown the actual story. By the time the actual plot unfolds, late in the novel’s second half, it’s too little too late: An explosive twist happens too late in the story to allow for reasonable dramatic development.

    The irony is that from a strictly ideological perspective, I’m probably not that far away from Alten himself: As a French-Canadian, I’m somewhere beyond the left edge of American mainstream politics, and I too have ground my teeth into dust during the eight years of the Bush administration. But as much as I enjoy the storytelling potential of conspiracy theories, I don’t make the mistake of using them as reasonable explanations for what’s going on in the world.

    What’s really sad about The Shell Game‘s paranoid reliance on a oil barrel full of conspiracies and dubious sourcing is that it obscures the real strengths of the novel: Alten’s understanding of the ways oil intersects with American politics is fairly sophisticated, as is his explanation of Saudi Arabia’s influence on the US government (white slavery sponsorship excluded). There’s also something intriguing about the triangular nature of the plotting at work here, as the heroes find themselves stuck between warring terrorists and a government willing to sacrifice a lot of pawns. It’s easy to dismiss the paranoia, but it’s a valid sentiment that, especially in its milder form, was shared by a lot of average Americans during Bush’s second mandate. Still, The Shell Game does itself no favors by burying itself in sources: in begging for validation, it shoots itself in the foot, whereas a wilder approach leaving more space for fiction wouldn’t have invited so much scrutiny. (No one asks Matthew Reilly for sources, for instance.) From a storytelling viewpoint, a less discursive novel also would have avoided the interminable infodumping that kills The Shell Game early on.

    In interviews promoting The Shell Game, Alten confesses that his novel has a didactic intent, but stops short of professing any belief in the 9/11 conspiracy theories. If there’s any hope left for Alten’s next few novels, it’s that thin edge of skepticism. The last thing we need is another author who starts believing his own fiction.

    [Also: Francophones should be wary of reading The Shell Game in translation: While La Conspiration de l’Or Noir (which back-translates in “The Black Gold Conspiracy”) is published by first-tier French publishing house City and probably enjoys better distribution in French-Canada than its English-language original, it is also riddled with numerous mistakes that further damage its credibility. Clinton’s famous “The economy, stupid” is translated as “L’économie, c’est idiot” [P. 133: “The economy, it’s stupid”] while an awkward sentence early i
    n Chapter 36 makes it look as if the U.S. Bank Tower is the tallest building in North America. Worse yet: the translation introduces small errors of fact, in which a democratic candidate is called a “sénateur républicain” [Chapter 26] and the chemical attack on Halabja is described as having occurred in 1998 rather than 1988. [Chapter 20] Reader beware…]

  • Goddess for Hire, Sonia Singh

    Goddess for Hire, Sonia Singh

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon Trade, 2004, 305 pages, C$21.95 tpb, ISBN 0-06-059036-X

    Don’t tell anyone (especially not you, Google), but I’m not above reading some romantic fiction from time to time. That’s right: In between my hard Science Fiction and my tough technothrillers, I can find a place for contemporary women’s fiction. Here’s the even bigger secret I want you to keep: Most of the time, romance is a lot more fun to read that the pretentious twaddle that traditionally passes for leading-edge SF. Romance authors, bless their comic sensibilities, usually have a pretty good of what they’re writing, and who they’re writing for.

    And even when it’s not completely successful, competent romance is almost impossible to hate.

    Take, for instance, Sonia Singh’s debut Goddess for Hire. Not content to appropriate the tone of contemporary young urban female romance for use in an Indo-American family context, it also brings in elements of superhero fantasy by giving magical superpowers and a sword to the narrator, transforming her into a modern reincarnation of Hindu goddess Kali. That’s a lot of baggage to cram in a 300-page book, even when you don’t discuss the tall dark handsome love interest, the death threats against the new goddess or the less-than-helpful guru with an insatiable thirst for Coca-Cola.

    The strains that the fantasy elements place on the structure of a light-hearted romance are obvious early on: Since this is a nice novel, our narrator can’t indulge too much in the whole “goddess of death” personae, and ends up using her sword for strictly non-lethal purposes. (Somehow, I don’t think swords were ever considered primarily non-lethal, but then I don’t live in California.) Never mind that contemporary superhero fiction quickly leads to questions about vigilante justice, unavoidable violence in dealing with hardened criminals or the price that heroes have to pay: These questions are all neatly, almost blatantly side-stepped in the pursuit of a comic novel. And don’t expect sparks from the romantic side of the story either: the Love Interest is telegraphed early on and is achieved relatively easy as the plot’s multiple narrative strands fight unsatisfactorily to a standstill.

    If “chick-lit” is supposed to be about young urban female professionals, Goddess for Hire‘s narrator only seems to be a professional in the art of not working. At first and even second glance, Maya Mehra isn’t much of a character: Thirty-something, jobless, shopaholic, superficial and under-achieving (“of all the ninety-seven adult members of the Mehra clan spread throughout the United States, ninety-six are doctors, the sole exception being your truly.” [P.4]), she doesn’t seem like much of a catch or a heroine until she gets in touch with her inner goddess –and even after she does, don’t expect much inner development as she enjoys the attention and does practically nothing to earn whatever comes her way. (This is one of the few novels where I would have liked to sit down with the male romantic interest and ask “Seriously, what do you see in her?”) Frankly, a story about the rest of Maya’s family may have been more fun to read.

    But comedy can redeem a number of flaws, even when they concern the teller of the tale: Singh’s narration is just hip and sassy enough to make the novel work well despite everything, and her use of Indian-American elements isn’t just icing on a conventional novel: Maya’s problems and opportunities stem from her particular heritage, and add a lot to what could have otherwise been a bland (and far less likable) novel despite what seems to be quite a bit of stereotyping. It’s a fast and fun read, which is all I ask from comic romances. It’s just when the novel begs to be considered as something else that the strains appear. But for those who are willing to be indulgent, this is a breeze. It’s not hard to imagine the target audience for this book, and how it aims for quite a bit of wish-fulfillment in reaching that audience. On some level, you have to admire that kind of dedication. Much like its heroine, you may not completely respect Goddess for Hire the day after, but it’s utterly charming throughout. Which is still a lot more than I can say about the other stuff I read.

    [February 2009: As much as I wanted to love Sonia Singh’s Bollywood Confidential, her follow-up novel left me unsatisfied. As the story of an California-born Indian actress going to Bombay/Mumbai in the hope of a star-making turn in a Bollywood film, it’s already a bit more culturally interesting than the L.A.-based Goddess for Hire. Unfortunately, the look at India or the Bollywood industry is shallow, and the ordinary romance of the plot does little to redeem matters. Characterization doesn’t go much beyond stereotyping, and the painfully obvious plotting doesn’t add much. The worst moment of the novel, sadly enough, comes near the end with a completely unbelievable speech that diminishes the heroine. (The choice of writing the story in third-person POV also takes away the sassy narration that made Goddess for Hire such an endearing read despite its other problems.) This being said, there are a few better moments here and there as the heroine discovers the many facets of Mumbai, and Singh does show us a few promising hooks on which a far more interesting story could have been hung. But the end result is barely worth more than a shrug. Too bad; I really hoped for more.]

  • The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto, Ed. Nate Garrelts

    The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto, Ed. Nate Garrelts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    McFarland, 2006, 256 pages, US$35.00 tpb, ISBN 978-0-7864-2822-9

    Yes, it’s true: I dearly love the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series of videogames. I have been playing them on PC since the demo of the first game, and they’re the only series that can get me to show up in stores on their release date. But I love them for more than the automobile mayhem and the top-notch storytelling: They’re among the most brilliant virtual experiences on the civilian market, and I have come to look forward to new GTAs as fondly as real-world trips to other cities. And that’s without counting the subversive satirical content, the ways the series meshes gameplay with storytelling, or the ramifications of the series free-form playing over the realism/gameplay balance.

    It turns out that I’m hardly the only person to enjoy seriously thinking about GTA. I didn’t know about The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto before getting in by mail as a Christmas gift, but it quickly shot up to the top of my pile of books to read: A collection of 14 critical essays about the series and its relationship with contemporary society, it’s a book that could have been written just for me.

    The first thing one notices about Nate Garrelts’ anthology from a quick flip through the book is how important the Hot Coffee controversy of early 2005 has turned out to be in defining GTA as a serious subject for study. The public furor over a relatively tame sex mini-game hidden in the source code of the application turned out to mark an important turning point in the evolution of video games, argue several of the authors: By clearly forcing outsiders to see GTA: San Andreas as an adult gaming experience rather than get another game “for the kids”, the Hot Coffee episode signaled a belated turning point in gaming. It also brought a lot of academic attention to the significance of the series, partly leading to this essay collection.

    But don’t let your eyes glaze over the prospect of academics writing about video games: One of the greatest strength of this collection is how nearly every essay seems to have been written by a gamer-turned academic, with obvious benefits for the accessibility of the content. Despite a few hermetic pieces toward the end of the book, each essay here can be read without too much knowledge of academic jargon (although, as is usually the case, some sympathy for the way pop culture is formally dissected can be useful in shaping one’s approach to the essays.) If you’re expecting a denunciation of the series, you’re also up for a surprise: all the essays here have a strong sympathy toward GTA, even when pointing out the failings of the series so far.

    In fact, some of the most interesting material concerns the links between GTA and the rest of society at large. GTA: San Andreas (GTA:SA) was particularly interesting in that, for the first time, an audience predominantly composed of young white suburban men could live vicariously as a black ghetto hero trying to fight against a corrupt system. This, suggest some authors, may not have been coincidental to the controversy surrounding the game. Other good moments come when authors dissect GTA:SA’s politics as it briefly tackles US foreign policy (the same “Mike Torrino” moments are cited in two successive essays) or the racial ramifications of the game’s storyline, through both easy stereotyping and more textured characterization. Other installments consider GTA’s satirical radio stations, and how they become a way to criticize American society. (Though few essays highlight the fact that GTA comes from an overseas developer.) Several essays suggest new and exciting directions in which future GTA installments could evolve.

    On the other hand, there are a few disappointments. One of my least favorite aspects of the series has been the misogyny of its universe, and there’s preciously little commentary on this issue here. Meanwhile, the last few essays seem to be wasting time talking about “the semiotic self” and “narrative agency”, dragging the reader kicking and screaming in dull analytical pastures.

    Still, there’s usually something interesting to be learned even when the essays get deep in academic references. One of my favorite essays in the book, “The subversive Carnival of GTA:SA”, stretches the “game-as-carnival” metaphor until it snaps, but not before presenting an intriguing look at how games are played. Two other essays about urban aesthetics and experiencing place managed to articulate a number of things I felt after playing GTA heavily, then visiting the cities in which they were based.

    I’m still amazed that despite a few years of GTA fandom, I still hadn’t learned about this book until recently. But that may be more a problem with my information sources (let’s just say that gaming blogs aren’t big on serious critical analysis) than with the book itself: The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto is a perfect choice for every GTA gamer with more than half a brain to bear on the issues raised by the games. As gaming become a bigger part of culture (keeping in mind that Grand Theft Auto IV‘s first week of release saw sales bigger than the opening weekend for The Dark Knight) and comments that culture more aggressively, there will be more and more of a place for critical analyses and serious thought about those games. GTA may be the first gaming series to earn that kind of attention, but there will be many more in the future.

    [January 2009: Published in 2006, The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto can obviously only comment on the series up to and including Graft Theft Auto: San Andreas, completely missing out on 2008’s GTAIV. But one of the best compliments one can pay to Nate Garrelts’ anthology is that its points are reinforced rather than undermined by GTAIV: The series has evolved but not changed dramatically in this latest installment, although Rockstar’s obvious pursuit of “realism” can be seen as a conscious reaction to embrace the “mature gaming” reputation earned in the wake of the “Hot Coffee” episode. In other ways, it’s sad to see that GTAIV has not managed to push the series in other and more subversive directions: There’s still a strong disconnect between the game’s liberal politics and its misogyny, and the lack of scope sabotages some of the social gains made during GTA:SA. On the other hand, GTAIV’s relentless realism introduces new questions about the balance between realism and gameplay that could be pursued if ever McFarland pursues a sequel to this critical anthology.]

  • Absolute Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

    Absolute Watchmen, Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    DC Comics, 1987 (2005 revision), 464 pages, C$86.00 hc, ISBN 978-1-4012-0713-7

    If all goes well, 2009 is going to be the year of Watchmen. Twenty-two years after its groundbreaking 12-issues 1986-1987 run, this graphic novel classic is finally coming to the big screen, and everyone who has thus far managed to avoid it soon won’t have any excuse for picking it up.

    I won’t be among those. In the past fifteen years, I’ve read Watchmen several times, in two languages and three different editions. It was one of the first graphic novels I ever owned, and it’s still one of the best. With the movie coming out and the holiday sales around me, I decided to be the ultimate fanboy, and finally get myself a copy of the ultimate, no-expense-spared, re-colored Absolute Watchmen, even if it would prove to be one of my costliest purchases of the year. What can I say; at some point, it’s good to admit being a fan.

    It’s even better when considering what one gets from the Absolute Watchmen package: Not only the graphic novel itself, but a handsome full-page slip-cased hardcover edition, along with notes regarding the making and impact of the series, glimpses at the script and miscellaneous bonus artwork. As an extra hefty bonus, the entire series has been re-colored, keeping the old-school style but with the precision of the latest digital technology. (This re-colored version has been kept as the source of the latest reprints of the book, even in cheap paperback editions.) If you’re a real fan with some money to spare, this Absolute Edition is likely to remain the definitive edition of the book for a while longer.

    As for the graphic novel itself, well, it’s still just as good as it ever was. A blend of increasingly-alternate history (now that the story’s 1985 seems farther away than ever before, Watchmen is slowly gaining a patina of historical fiction), superhero-fiction, literary sensibilities, action and crackling dialogue, Watchmen marks the turning point of an era in graphic storytelling. It’s the end of the old-school superhero tradition and the “nine-panel grid” era and the beginning of the graphic novels movement and ambitious new thematic vistas for superheroes. The skill in constructing the series, issue by issue, page by page, is still inspiring after all those years. The references, allusions, symbolism, character moments and background complexities of it all remain the standard by which other comparable work is judged. It may not be perfect, but it’s close.

    No, the movie won’t be as good: Reading the comics, it’s striking how what the most impressive thing about Watchmen is how fully it exploits the peculiarities of its format, from the nine-panel grid to the type of transition and interleaving that are only possible with comics. Despite the film-makers’ best intentions, I doubt that they’ll do half as well.

    But no matter: Regardless of how the movie turns out, Watchmen-the-book is going to stay on the shelves, ready for another generation of readers. As for me, I’ve found my favorite edition of the story, and that’s the one that’s going to stay in my library until I get an itch to re-read the story again. Most probably moments after seeing the movie’s end credits.

    [January 2009: Watchmen already selling like hotcakes, the biggest literary movie tie-in product is a companion book called Watching the Watchmen, co-written by the series’ artist Dave Gibbons. The bulk of the book is a series of sketches for the series, straight from Gibbons’ archives. But the most interesting things about Watching the Watchmen are scattered in-between the sketches, as Gibbons writes about the process of creating Watchmen, and its impact. It’s interesting, but hardly earth-shattering: For anyone who’s less than a convinced fan of the series, there’s nothing truly essential about this companion book, especially if you have already read the back pages of Absolute Watchmen. It may be a cool gift, or an extravagant indulgence, but otherwise I’d recommend investing in a copy of the definitive absolute edition.]

  • Where The Buffalo Roam (1980)

    Where The Buffalo Roam (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, January 2009) There are many ways of portraying the legend of gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, and I suppose that making him the anarchic spirit in the middle of an episodic comedy is just as good as another. But what have looked like a great idea nearly thirty years ago doesn’t seem quite so successful today: Where The Buffalo Roam doesn’t have the right pacing for a comedy, and seems to place far too much confidence in the viewers’ knowledge of Thompson’s antics to fully establish itself on its own merits. Thompson (played by Bill Murray, sometimes unrecognizable under the Thompson mystique) becomes as side-character in his own movie, most often playing a Tasmanian devil wreaking havoc on the uptight men and women of the narrative. But even that becomes a problem when the film tries to get some sympathy from the viewer, setting up a conflict between two friends that seem incapable of living in the rest of the world. Those with a good knowledge of Thompson’s checkered history will recognize a number of episodes from his best years, although the heroic amount of mind-altering substances consumed on-screen distracts from the fact that Thompson could be a truly kick-ass writer if he set his mind to it. Today, the film becomes a footnote for fans of either Murray or Thompson, but its interest remains limited to a curio, not a particularly enjoyable film.

    (Second viewing, on DVD, September 2009) Months and a few dozen books by/about Thompson later, the movie hasn’t improved at all: It’s a disjointed, unfunny, unfaithful mess. The dramatic arc between Thompson and “Lazlo” never makes sense (since to do so, Thompson would have to become the responsible one), and Thompson’s character never earns any sympathy through his actions: Where The Buffalo Roam thinks it’s enough just to say “you squares don’t get it, man”. On the other hand, Thompson fans will have a moderate amount of fun spotting the references to his history or bibliography, telling when separate incidents are conflated, or when particular quirks of the writer are used for a few seconds. This being said, it’s a meager return for a rather poor film: There’s no doubt that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas remains the best Thompson film yet.

  • Total Recall (1990)

    Total Recall (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (Third viewing, On DVD, January 2009) I hadn’t seen this film in a while, and so was pleasantly surprised to find that it had appreciated in the meantime. Oh, sure, it’s easy to bash the film’s lousy physics, too-gory violence and often-convenient plotting. But there’s a lot to admire in the twists and turns of the generally strong plot, with the multiple layers of questions regarding the events’ reality. (I recall being quietly horrified, in the early nineties, upon learning of the “it was all a dream” interpretation. Now it’s one of my favorite things about the entire film.) SF-wise, it may still be pretty basic stuff, but it’s better than most of what we’ve seen on the big screen for the past few years. Even the special effects generally hold up to scrutiny, which is remarkable for one of the last big analog effects movie before digital compositing and CGI animation. Schwarzenegger is great in the lead role, Rachel Ticotin is cute and even Sharon Stone is remarkable in a pre-Basic Instinct turn that suggests a different career path for her. The DVD “special edition” has an entertaining 2001 commentary track with director Verhoeven and Schwarzenegger, plus a smattering of documentary features that are starting to show their ages, DVD-wise.