Reviews

  • Super Size Me (2004)

    Super Size Me (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2004) So McDonald’s says that its products are perfectly healthy and those obese people suing them are just not making the right choices. Well, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock decided to take the fast-food chain to its word and, for thirty days, live on a diet exclusively composed of products bought at McDonalds. Three square meals a day, eating just what’s on the menu at Mickey-Ds. Naturally, he had to film the experience and measure his progress. Two days later, he’s throwing up; by the middle of the month, doctors are aghast at his blood tests and demanding that he stops. Yes, Super Size Me is a stunt, but it’s also more than the chronicles of a mad experiment: it’s a journey through the seedy intestines of fast-food culture circa 2004. Packed with fun segments and shocking facts, this is a compulsively watchable documentary. Despite the muddy video and the uneven sound, Spurlock’s film is a little gem of advocacy backed up by a sympathetic star/test subject. I wasn’t fond of the home-grown rock-and-roll snippets, but otherwise the film is a solid documentary. Rent the DVD, call some friends and have a vegan party.

  • Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow (2004)

    Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2004) Every two or three years, sci-fi geeks get a little present from Hollywood. Dark City, Equilibrium and now, Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow. They have to be quick, though: The films usually crash and burn with nary a trace, proof that what turns on geeks like myself is just not what amuses mundanes. Oh, it’s not like this is a perfect film, even for pre-sold audiences: Shot in a virtual environment, it has all the stiffness of old studio films. Interaction between characters and stage are reduced to a strict minimum, and there’s an aura of artificiality clogging the naturalism of the direction. The self-consciously pulpish story may not be to everyone’s taste, but even the best intentions can’t compensate for lengthy stretches of banal dialogue. This being said, nothing will stop me from loving this film unconditionally; it’s simply a beautiful piece of nostalgic golden-era SF, filled with big images and classic themes, wonderful machines and crazy ideas. I’m not usually a big fan of Gwyneth Paltrow, but it just takes long flowing locks of blonde hair and a sassy attitude to show me the error of my ways. Yes, this is a box-office flop and an incomprehensible curiosity to mass audience. But I’ll be buying the DVD as soon as it comes out; thank you Hollywood, and I’ll wait until the next happy accident.

    (Streaming, May 2025) Twenty years later, Sky Captain And The World Of Tomorrow remains sui generis — writer-director Kerry Conran never managed to parlay the buzz around his achievement into a Hollywood career (although he says he’s working on things), and blockbuster effects-driven movies rarely swung as hard for the fences as this early example of all-digital filmmaking.  But the film remains a success on at least three fronts — it’s still hugely fun to watch, it’s has become a bit of a cult movie for retro-SF fans, and the innovations pioneered here can still be heard echoing in more recent films and TV shows (think StageCraft’s The Volume) where nearly everything is animated except for the actors. And it works!  Despite some stiffness (intentional), occasionally dodgy effects (inevitable) and uneven dialogue (unfortunate), it’s a wonderfully imaginative film on a visual level, and it lives by the ethos of showing something cool every few minutes.  Jude Law makes for a perfectly cocky hero, and Gwyneth Paltrow has seldom looked better.  If you listen to the commentary tracks, make sure to listen to producer Jon Avnet’s one before the one with writer-director Conran: Avnet’s track is a complete and often very honest account of the six years he spend on this unlikely project, and it’s tinged with affection for the film.  In contrast, the disappointing Conran track is sparse, often trivial (“this was the first scene we shot… we built a set of this”) and barely hints at the passion project that this film was.  It’s not enough to make anyone watch the film another time, but the Avnet one will.

  • Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)

    Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2004) It’s not that this film is entirely unpleasant: It’s just that whatever is interesting about this film comes in thirty-seconds snippets, sandwiched between vast stretches of silliness and boredom. Yes, there’s plenty of added value-for-money for us Canadian in seeing a very explicit Toronto double as a “Raccoon City” overwhelmed by flesh-eating zombies. It’s interesting to see another take on the urban desolation theme. Roughly three of the last five minutes are top-notch. Milla Jovonovich isn’t completely wasted as super-powered heroine “Alice”. Here and there, dumb shoot-em-ups still manage to bring back memories of the rock-and-roll first film. But by and large, Resident Evil: Apocalypse struggles from one set-piece to another, barely managing to distinguish itself in the increasingly crowded zombie sub-genre. The dark-on-black cinematography annoys, the cheap production values hurt and so does the painfully inept script: The characters are so unimaginably stupid that it’s hard to actually cheer for any of them. Worst of all, though, is the dawning insight that Paul Anderson’s much-derided direction is what propelled the original Resident Evil from stupid video-game movie to enjoyable stupid video-game movie. Here, well, it’s not all good. Not all good at all.

  • Airforce One is Haunted, Robert Serling

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    St. Martin’s, 1985, 332 pages, C$4.95 mmpb, ISBN 0-312-90029-5

    One of the pleasures of being a free-range reviewer (Wild! Untamed! Answerable to no one!) is that I can have the luxury to look at older oddball books. I have no stack of advance copies, no editor asking for reviews in a certain format, no corporate interests to defend. So when such a bizarre book as Robert Serling’s Airforce One is Haunted makes its way to me, it’s hard to resist the temptation to give it a fair shake and see what falls out.

    Keep in mind that there is an interesting context surrounding this book and this author. You can note, for instance, that Robert Serling was a prolific aviation writer. Born in 1918, he was also the brother of “the” Rod Serling best known as the writer behind the original “Twilight Zone”. He achieved some notoriety with the novel The President’s Plane is Missing, which was later filmed for TV. His last novel was Something’s Alive on the Titanic (1990), third in a trilogy of rather obvious titles.

    [April 2006: The web proved surprisingly useless in verifying Serling’s more recent whereabouts, but an anonymous correspondent wrote in to correct my initial impression and say “Author Robert J. Serling is alive and well and currently resides in Arizona.” Thanks!]

    A direct sequel to The President’s Place is Missing (which I haven’t read, but must have been a challenge to follow-up given that it was published and set nearly twenty years earlier), this novel mixes romance, political thrills, history and the supernatural to give form to something that’s not boring, but could certainly use some tightening up. Bolted together from too many dissimilar parts, this novel has the unfortunate distinction of being more interesting than successful.

    It begins, audaciously enough, with the President of the United States seeking psychological help. As Jeremy Haines explains to beautiful (and single) psychologist Jessica Sarazin, his last few trips on Air Force One have been plagued by visions. Not just visions, actually, but lengthy conversations with the ghost of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. After being devastated by the events of the previous novel, the President is finding great inspiration from these chats. New policy programs spring forth, stunning pundits from either sides of the political divide. But despite these clear and successful results, he can’t help but wonder; is he insane or subject to a paranormal manifestation? With Sarazin’s close help (which soon gets even closer), he sets out to investigate.

    But this isn’t a time for even ghostly rumours to spring up. Going through the penultimate year of his second mandate, Haines is facing difficulties both foreign and domestic: The Communists are baring their teeth (this is a Cold War novel, after all) while, at home, a depression is trashing the economy. Haines’s enemies are just waiting for a slip-up. Worse; now that the SDI program nears completion, some elements of his cabinet are seeing an occasion to solve the Soviet problem once and for all.

    So there we go: psychiatric romance, haunted Air Force One and thrilling political fiction all blended together. Is it any wonder if some lumps don’t smoothly go together? Political fiction is so intricately based on reality-as-we-know-it that throwing a ghost in the proceeding isn’t just inappropriate: it’s completely useless. I don’t mind the romance and the portrait of FDR is sympathetic enough, but trying to mesh a ghost with the political affairs of nation is more likely to make one wish for one or the other. It certainly doesn’t help that Serling tries to have it both ways, both as a psychological hallucination (FDR as the conscience of Haines) and as a real ghost. Shrug.

    Certainly, this may explain why this book has completely sunk away from public perception. It’s certainly not dull, thanks to Serling’s efficient writing style, but it’s definitely the product of a bygone time and suffers as such. You can read it, enjoy the policy arguments (there are a number of clever ideas, though I’m not sure how practical, say, a national lottery would truly be) but close the book and it will vanish, a lot like a ghost of barely-adequate fiction…

  • Paparazzi (2004)

    Paparazzi (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2004) Normally, it’s easy to emphasize with movie heroes looking out for their families. But when confronted with such a hypocritical piece of work like Paparazzi, it’s even harder to care. A revenge fantasy made for those dozens (dozens, I tell you!) actors rich enough to be hounded by celebrity photographers, Paparazzi makes its first mistake when it introduces a hero with serious attitude problems. Most of us could deal with paparazzis with a touch of tact; here, our protagonist starts pounding. Ahem. Then our antagonists are just as quickly sketched as lewd and amoral caricatures of pure evil, prone to hissy fits where they vow “I’ll destroy you!”. Uh-huh. (The script is so detached from reality that it features a woman jumping into bed right after witnessing her one-night-stand leaving the scene of a terrible accident he just caused. Whaaat?) The rest of the picture is a revenge fantasy where our sympathies naturally migrate toward the photographers rather than the rich-and-famous-actor. The awful coincidences, dumb contrivances and limp plotting do nothing to make us care and more. By the time the protagonist’s self-styled therapy session has given him the tools required to face his celebrity (“I’ve killed a bunch of your colleagues; how’s it going, champ? Take another picture of me, willya?”), normal audiences are left to face the fact that this is what passes for entertainment these days.

  • Control Room (2004)

    Control Room (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2004) This fascinating documentary takes us on the ground at the US Military media “control room” in Quatar throughout the American invasion of Iraq. While the focus is kept on the staff of the Al-Jazeera news network, this is really an examination of how war affects journalism, and how truth is carefully molded by forces escaping individual control. As a documentary, it’s low-touch: All is raw footage and beyond some text at the very beginning of the film, there is no feeling of a narration telling us what is happening. Don’t think that this makes for a loose film, though: Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Control Room is how it defines and watches its own characters coping with the ordeal. Samir Khader, a wizened news producer who tells the truth in-between cigarettes, including how he’d gladly trade the Arabic nightmare for the American dream. Hassan Ibrahim, a teddy bear philosopher whose quiet brainy rage is no match for the events he’s covering. Lt. Josh Rushing, a mouthpiece for the US Army who nevertheless shows, at times, a rough understanding of what is going on. Donald Rumsfeld, appearing only through television monitors, every single time uttering a statement that applies more to himself than to the enemies he thinks he’s damning. And the staff at Al-Jazeera, professionals and journalists just like others, until they themselves become targets. Throughout the film, one stark realization emerges for non-partisan viewers looking at it from a late-2004 perspective: In a match between American and Arab media, the Arab media seems to have a clearer picture of what truly happened. As American media breathlessly accuse Saddam of torturing prisoners and lying to the press, it’s hard not to feel the force of history selecting the ultimate truth-sayer.

  • Cellular (2004)

    Cellular (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, September 2004) Thrillers don’t have to be good if they’re clever, and Cellular demonstrates this better than most other films. Bad dialogue? A lousy lead actress? Contrivances, coincidences and leaps of logic? Here’s the surprise: you just won’t care if the film is energetic and suspenseful enough. After a wobbly first fifteen minutes (Kim Basinger is still pretty hot, but her idea of “terrified” is closer to our vision of “mildly annoyed”), the premise is clearly established: A faint phone connection as the only thing linking a kidnapped woman to her accidental would-be rescuer. After that, watch out, because the film takes off and doesn’t land until the end. A succession of clever set-pieces keeps the action flowing, and director David R. Ellis’ nervy direction excels at delivering a limpid story. There’s suspense, there’s action, there’s wish-fulfilment and there’s plenty of humour. Lead Chris Evans does exceedingly well as an ordinary guy thrown into an extraordinary situation. Jason Stratham is wasted as the bad guy, but Rick Hoffman turns in a great character performance as an ultra-obnoxious lawyer. Los Angeles itself takes a starring role as the playground on which all the craziness occurs. The ending is a bit conventional, but no matter; by that point, it’s easy to be completely taken by Cellular, one of 2004’s purest and most compelling thrillers. Let this be a lesson to would-be filmmakers; be funny, be fast and be clever, damnit!

  • The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Volume II, Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    American’s Best Comics, 2003, 224 pages, C$22.95 hc, ISBN 1-4012-0118-0

    After the critical and popular success of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volume I (the comic book, not the movie), the expected sequel took its time to appear, and in doing so raised expectations to an unattainable level. Now that Volume II is on bookshelves in a trade paperback format, everyone can be disappointed for less money than the hardcover edition.

    As suggested on the last page of the prequel, this sequel deals with a Martian invasion of England. Once again, our Extraordinary Gentlemen are sent to investigate. What they find seems to be safely contained within an impact crater, but as we may expect from those type of stories, things don’t remain under control for too long: it doesn’t take two issues for the English countryside to be set ablaze. But if you think that the Martians are the only problem, you’ll be sorely mistaken: Tensions between members of the League, simmering since the Volume I, are finally allowed to boil over. Terrible things happen. More literary references are made. Two (maybe three) graphic sex scenes occur. The Martians are vanquished. The book ends.

    If the violence in Volume I made you uneasy, Volume II is much worse. It’s not simply a matter of thousands of people dying through the Martian invasions (some of them in a gruesome fashion; being burnt alive is not a pretty death, even in comic form), but also of very personal violence between the protagonists of the tale. Issue 5 alone will make more than one reader queasy. The violence is not without consequences; Moore alters the series so significantly that whatever League composes the rumoured Volume III won’t look anything like this one. (Don’t lose hope, though: the appended prose “New Traveller’s Almanac” describes more than a few further adventures for the surviving characters), The least we can say is that the go-for-broke dramatic intensity of this adventure is a refreshing change from comic book series designed to last decades in static patterns.

    What is unfortunate, however, is that the League’s actions in this adventure seem far more passive and limited than in the prequel. Most of Issue 1 is spent on Mars, in a prologue that seems as drawn-out as superfluous. For the longest time, The League simply looks at what’s happening with scarcely any progress. Then, as it splinters in interpersonal conflicts, the big heroics come when two members of the League are used as glorified messengers. The same lack of explicit action also plagued Volume I, but to a lesser extent given how it was counter-balanced by the formation of the League. Here, half the characters are wasted. Plot-wise, Volume 2 is just a disappointment.

    Naturally, the simple fact that this is a sequel works against its impact. We’re already familiar with the imagined world of Moore’s pastiche. We already know how The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a mash-up of Victorian-era heroes. We already think that this is a piece of genius. We already played with fascinating elements from the period. While H.G.Wells’ The War of the Worlds and The Island of Dr. Moreau are not trifles, they can’t compete with the heady spin of the first volume’s constant invention. Oh well.

    For fans of the first book, the sequel is still worth a look if only to bring the story to a natural conclusion. Moore’s writing definitely has its moments —though the motivation in one villain deciding to turn against the league seems highly suspect. Even if I’m still not a big fan of Kevin O’Neill’s deliberately stylized work, it features a dynamism and a gorgeous use of colour that’s pleasant to see. The playfulness of the concept is still strong enough that anyone with even the slightest interest in Victorian literature will get another kick out of this. But please: no movie sequel.

  • Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes, Peter Watts

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Tesseracts, 2000, 167 pages, C$11.95 tpb, ISBN 1-895836-76-X

    [Disclaimer: I’ve met Peter Watts, heard him speak at panels, moderated a panel on which he was a participant, even sat next to him at a convention to live-translate a few panels. I think that he’s a heck of a nice guy. Plus he gets points for being a Canadian author. Adjust review below accordingly.]

    While Peter Watts’ first short-story anthology is titled Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes (a nod at Dilbert’s monkeys-on-typewriters comic strip), here are a few other titles that may be appropriate:

    Nine Stories, Ninety Minutes: At a slim 167 pages and nine stories, this collection is a bit frustrating. There are no introductions (either to the book as a whole or to the individual stories, though a Publishing History at the back of the book thankfully details each story’s previous appearances) which is a bit disappointing given Watts’ generous propensity toward self-commentary. (See his web site at www.rifters.com for ample illustration.) But the silver lining to this sparse content is that you can read the book in a single sitting: The writing is crisp and clear enough to make you reach for “just another story” on technical grounds alone. Whether you will want to absorb all of this material at once leads us to our second suggestion…

    Do You Have Ten Minutes, You Monkey?: I have long maintained that a good story collection gives a better peek in the mind of an author than even a string of novels. Watts seems intent on demonstrating this thesis: The nine stories assembled in this collection offer a disciplined unity of theme and attitude: It’s almost a thematic anthology. Stemming from Watts’ background as a marine biologist, all of his stories reflect deep cynicism (even misanthropy) regarding so-called “human nature”. In tale after tale, characters (often narrators, almost always professional investigators) have to face the fact that biology trumps psychology, that “being nice” is a luxury we can only afford because it’s now counterproductive to kill each other. Take ten minutes to read any of those stories, and you will experience a Total Perspective Vortex that will remind you of your real (insignificant) place in an uncaring universe. No, this is not a collection of stories to read to your children. Which leads us to another title…

    Six Billion Monkeys, Twice as Many Bullets: Boy, is this a superficially depressing collection. Not that this is any news to fans of Watts’ fiction (which usually starts as “gloomy” and gets worse), but story after story of humankind killing itself, being wiped out or meeting aliens just as bad is enough to make anyone rethink the wisdom of bringing this book to the beach. But you know what? Lurking behind the facade, there’s a terrific sense of irony to be found here. Watts takes pleasure in perverting the usual ethos of science-fiction though ways that are in fact quite funny once you just step back from the story. Sentient Killer Clouds? Heh. Also consider this excerpt:

    [A nutritionist is working on ways to teach killer whales to stop eating fish and convert to vegetarianism.] She’s already had some spectacular successes with her own cats. Not only is a vegan diet vastly more efficient than conventional pet foods – the cats eat only a fraction of what they used to – but the felines have so much more energy now that they’re always out on the prowl. You hardly ever see them at home any more. [P.79]

    Now that’s funny. And indeed, there’s a lot of dark humour here and there, not the least of which is the delight of finding such an uncompromising stance on the false kingdom of man’s mastery over (its own) nature. The universe will get us all in the end, that is if we don’t kill ourselves first.

    One Great Book by One Author You Should Read: Published by the Canadian small-press publisher Tesseracts, this collection is well-worth tracking down. It’s a smoother introduction to Peter Watts’ fiction than his novels, and it has the advantage of being both short and powerful. There’s plenty of good material here and if some of the stories are repetitive (“Home”, especially, doesn’t add much to “A Niche”), some of it is as good as anything you’ll read elsewhere. I found that even the familiar stories (I had read “A Niche” and “Bethlehem” elsewhere) were better the second time around. If nothing else, this should confirm Watts’ status as one of the many good Canadian hard-SF writers. Why don’t you grab Robert Charles Wilson’s collection The Perseids for an eerily appropriate companion volume?

  • The General’s Daughter, Nelson DeMille

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 1992, 464 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-36480-0

    I don’t remember much from the 1999 film THE GENERAL’S DAUTHER, and it’s just as well: If my memories are correct, the film adaptation of Nelson DeMille’s 1992 novel is quite different from the novel, presenting a different culprit, extra action scenes, an exploitative rape scene and a suicide that doesn’t happen in the novel. It’s no surprise if my expectations going in this book were low.

    But not that low. If you take a look at DeMille’s entire oeuvre (and I’m still working my way though it myself), you will find success after success —and this despite an overall propensity toward books that are two hundred pages too long. From his fantastic 1978 debut (By The Rivers of Babylon, well worth reading even today), he has delivered the goods as a professional writer should. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he has also developed a distinctive style depending on witty first-person narration and technical details that are as delicious as they’re cleverly integrated in the flow of the action. The General’s Daughter is no exception, and even represents a minor masterpiece of the genre.

    It stars Paul Brenner, a military undercover investigator. As a member of the Criminal Investigation Division (CID), it’s his job to catch the no-gooders in the army’s half-million-people pay roster. On a summer night as he’s stationed in Fort Hadley, Georgia, he’s summoned from another case to investigate a fresh murder on the base. But the victim is not just another soldier. Captain Ann Campbell is a top-ranked military officer, a West Point graduate, a recruitment-poster girl and, most importantly, the commanding general’s daughter. Finding her murderer becomes essential, but as the clock ticks against Brenner (until the FBI takes over the investigation), more and more suspects start coming out of the woodwork.

    As he’ll soon discover, this murder ends up being a gateway to the discovery of a massive corruption scandal implicating most of the senior cadre at Fort Hadley. No one really want Brenner to get to the end of this affair, because most have an interest in silencing everything. If you have read other novels by DeMille, you know how convoluted his plots can become and this one is even more complex than most. So it’s somewhat heartening to find out that “complex” doesn’t mean “complicated” when there’s such a comfortable storyteller at the helm. Brenner’s narration is impeccable, a mix of cynical humor and false tough-guy impassivity against the horror of murder. The biggest difference between novel and movie may just be the first-person narration, considerably more affecting than just an objective description of events. In the context of DeMille’s body of work, one has to note that The General’s Daughter‘s Brenner acts as a precursor to Plum Island‘s John Coffey, sharing much of the background, quips and sarcastic attitude of the latter character.

    The rest of the book is just as good: Great dialogue between Brenner and the other characters. Excellent procedural material, with enough details to keep nerds such as myself interested in the mechanical aspects of an investigation. The writing is skillful, even drawing considerable sympathy from a difficult scene that, in the film, seemed gratuitous and self-indulgent. I was particularly impressed by the way Brenner desperately tries to maintain a still upper lip in the face of terrible revelations; this is not quite a reliable narrator, because he doesn’t want to explore what he thinks. Similar deceptions abound when dealing with his personal life. All good stuff.

    There’s also plenty of good material in what DeMille has to say about the tensions between the military frame of mind and the baser demands of civilian life, to say nothing about the type of gross criminal activity that Brenner has to face every day on his job. On the other hand, some may feel that the novel, as a whole, is a touch misogynist. I’m not so sure, but it definitely exploits the tension generated by womens’ increasingly important role in the US armed forces.

    All in all, a good and solid book by one of the better thriller writers out there. It’s not very different from DeMille’s other books, and yet it’s original (and well-developed) enough to keep our interest throughout. Superior procedural murder mystery; above-average summer beach reading.

  • Young Wives, Olivia Goldsmith

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Harper Collins, 2000, 512 pages, C$37.95 hc, ISBN 0-06-107553-2

    Even trashy authors have their days off.

    I haven’t been shy, in the past, in expressing my satisfaction with Olivia Goldsmith’s oeuvre. From her debut with the revenge fantasy The First Wives’ Club to her latter send-ups of entire industries, Goldsmith has always aimed for the lowest common denominator, but with such calculated shrewdness that it was difficult to be overly critical of her cheerfully moralistic bent, or receptive to accusations of slight misandry.

    After Young Wives, I’m not so sure.

    The first strike against this novel is its similarity to The First Wives’ Club. Once again, we have a trio of women betrayed by their husbands, teaming up to take revenge. While the specifics are different (among other things, these wives are not ridiculously rich), they’re close enough that another writer would have been tarred with accusations of “rip-off!” had they tried the same thing. But, hey, if you can’t steal from yourself, who can you steal from?

    But the next strike against Young Wives is the banality of its premise. Books like Fashionably Late and The Bestseller skewered industries such as (respectively) fashion and publishing, while The First Wives’s Club had an implicit element of originality in its depiction of “First Wives” commonalities, Young Wives has none of that. One wife is cheated upon by her upwardly mobile husband; another struggles to support her children despite a lazy partner; a third discovers that her husband is implicated in shady activities. Ordinary stories, all, without much in terms of unifying force. Rather than focus her satiric pen against something concrete, Goldsmith scatters herself in multiple directions.

    This, perhaps inevitably, leads to the third major problem with the novel, which is its lopsided pacing, which begins at a snail’s pace and then only picks up very late in the novel. The disproportionate length of “Ring One” (303 pages) versus “Ring Two” (40) is emblematic of the problems. Heck; one wife doesn’t even get discover that her husband is a dirty scoundrel until halfway through the novel. While it is true that tepid pacing has always been a problem with Goldsmith’s novels, this one is worse than other given the lack of focus: At least books like The Bestseller could fill up the first third with details about the publishing industry.

    These three strikes duly noted, a lot of stuff about Young Wives suddenly become harder to gloss over. The misandry, obviously: In addition to the trite and explicit epigrams (“Men are mostly dogs and marital diplomacy is all about saying ‘nice doggie’ until you find a damn rock” [P.305]), the constant barrage of failed marriages in this book is somewhat disheartening. (All of these failures, alas, are the men’s fault) I’m a cynic, damn it, but some things are too depressing. Constant “dogs are better than men because…” jokes and the harsh revenges don’t help the atmosphere, and neither do the caricatures taking place of characterizations when comes the time to define the male antagonists. I’m a bit surprised about this, really, because I’ve never had such a problem with Goldsmith’s other books: This one just rubbed me the wrong way.

    There are other problems here and there: The funding of a lazy husband’s lavish divorce lawyer is never explained. Some expressions are repeated too many times. Contrivances abound, from abrupt wife-beating to a custody trial that simply rings false. Goldsmith never convinces in describing characters that are black and/or poor. Ironically enough, this book concludes on an unlawful act, leaving an unpleasant taste that makes me want to take back everything nasty I’ve said about Goldsmith’s moralistic universes.

    In short, this has to be my least favourite of Goldsmith’s novel so far. Now it remains to be seen whether this is a fluke, or if the other novels I haven’t read from her are as disappointing. Oh, please let this be a fluke, a day off, a “message” novel that went awry…

  • The Demon in the Freezer, Richard Preston

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Ballantine, 2002, 292 pages, C$11.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-345-46663-2

    It’s not required to have read the first two volumes of what Richard Preston calls his “Dark Biology” trilogy (The Hot Zone and The Cobra Event) in order to appreciate The Demon in the Freezer, but it does help. While this book isn’t, strictly speaking, a sequel to The Hot Zone, it does exist in a very similar context and features a number of the same scientists as characters.

    In The Hot Zone, Preston studied Ebola, an exotic disease that may, someday, cause a widespread epidemic. In The Demon in the Freezer, he takes a look at another disease, one that has already killed more humans than anyone can count: smallpox.

    In many ways, it’s an even more interesting subject than Ebola. I’m part of the first generation that never had to worry about smallpox: Thanks to worldwide efforts by the health community, the disease was eliminated in 1975, the year I was born: Doctors vaccinated entire populations, setting up “firebreaks” the once-rampant disease couldn’t infect. Safely contained, smallpox burned itself out and disappeared from Earth in one of the most significant public health victories in humankind’s history.

    Officially, existing stocks of the disease were consolidated in two places: Atlanta’s CDC and Vector, a research facility on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Officially, all agreed to keep copies of the virus “just in case”, maybe for developing better medicines. Officially, that’s where the trail end.

    Unofficially, this is a much spookier story. Evidence exists that, the lax state of Russian security being what it was in the 1990s, copies of the virus have been made, replicated and tested… maybe even sold to other countries, or stolen by agents of these countries. Given the extremely contagious nature of smallpox, the most paranoid virologists have long dreaded an engineered strain of a disease with smallpox’s transmission characteristics coupled with the devastating effects of, say, Ebola.

    Now public research is making progress in areas that are related to such a nightmare. A mousepox virus that just tears through existing vaccines. A successful attempt to make monkeys sick with human smallpox. Genetic engineering always progresses forward, and Preston faithfully report on it: “I spent days with Chen during the time he engineered the mouse supervirus. ‘It’s not difficult to make this virus,’ he said to me one day. “You could learn how to do it.’” [P.267]

    The supreme irony being that the virus is still out there, waiting to be re-used. This demon still awaits in the freezer. In the book’s perfect concluding paragraph, Preston notes that “the virus’s last strategy for survival was to bewitch its host and become a source of power.” [P.283] In this post-2001 age of anthrax letters and hyper-terrorism (all covered in here), who’s to say what’s next?

    Granted, I’d advise a bit of scepticism. In The Hot Zone, Preston makes a lot about “the coming plague”, a claim later disputed by books such as Ed Regis’ Virus Ground Zero. (Preston even takes a break to defend his argument in this book). Similarly, his inferences may be a touch too alarmist: While the back cover trumpets “Iraq (…is) almost certainly hiding illegal stocks of the deadly virus”, later events have shown this assertion to be, er, false. (On the other hand, Preston’s narrative is less categorical, and even includes an interesting scene in which White House officials almost pressure Peter Jahrling in saying that the Anthrax letter could have been produced in Iraq [P.225]. Hmmm…)

    Nevertheless, it’s good (and entertaining) to be swept along by Preston’s prose. With his novel The Cobra Event, he confirmed his talent for writing a compelling narrative and many of the tools he used then are repeated here: Smooth transitions from exclusive interviews to historical narrative, powerful anecdotes and a careful arrangement of material. I find it regrettable the the paperback edition of the book doesn’t include an index (a general flaw of non-fiction books that bothers me more and more with time), but you’d be hard-pressed to find a more reader-friendly pop-science book on the subject. It’s splendidly entertaining, more than a little scary and unbelievably gripping. With The Demon in the Freezer, Preston scores a solid third hit in a row; I wonder what’s next on his publishing schedule.

  • Ying Xiong [Hero] (2002)

    Ying Xiong [Hero] (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2004) Wow! After seeing the film, it’s hard to understand why Miramax held on to it for so long: While it may not be the most profound martial arts film ever shot, it certainly ranks up there as one of the most beautiful, along with a pleasing patina of sophistication when it comes to plotting. At first, it appears as if Jet Li plays a stoic warrior asked to tell the emperor the story of how he managed to kill three ferocious would-be assassins. But that’s not the real story, and that’s what we slowly discover as the film progresses. It’s not a complicated plot, but the structure is unusual enough to keep us interested. Of course, the fights are the core of the film’s appeal. Mercifully well-edited, they flow seamlessly and end slightly before we grow tired of them. But what puts this film over and above its comparable brethren is the flawless cinematography, which paints every fight scene with a very different colour palette. Digital effects are sagaciously used to heighten the sense of unreality that make this film so unique. In the end, Hero achieves an unusual distinction: that of being a martial art film of interest even to people without much interest in martial films.

  • Wicker Park (2004)

    Wicker Park (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2004) There is something interesting in how this romantic drama has all the trappings of a thriller without, in fact, being much of one. The somber pacing, the Hitchcock-inspired shots, the constant intimations that a psycho is on the loose may all contribute in making a vaguely creepy trailer, but they’re misleading in a way that becomes increasingly obvious as the film progresses. Oh, there’s much to applaud in the way the scenario is assembled, with flashbacks and dramatic ironies that make the viewer work in putting the story together. But once the story is put together, there just isn’t much left in terms of tension; just a dull love story that has no way of ending in a satisfying fashion. Acting-wise, John Hartnett once again proves that he is incapable to express any emotion beyond befuddlement. Matthew Lillard also once again proves an ability to triumph over lifeless material, mostly by acting in a different (but vastly more interesting) movie than the rest of the cast and crew. Otherwise, well, it’s not that Wicker Park is bad or all that dull, but that it falsely presents itself… and would have been vastly more entertaining had it been made as a comedy rather than a tepid drama with thriller aspirations.

  • The Atrocity Archives, Charles Stross

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Golden Gryphon, 2004, 273 pages, C$37.95 hc, ISBN 1-930846-25-8

    Stop the presses! It’s only August, but unless I hit another brain-burner before December (and Charles Stross’ own Iron Sunrise may very well do the trick), I’ve found my Book of the Year.

    Oh, the chances are that you won’t like it. It’s been a pet theory of mine that what is great to one cannot be great to all: Given that the great stuff appeals to unique facets of a personality, such quirky likes and dislike won’t be shared by all, ergo stuff that reaches you won’t necessarily affect everyone.

    And -whoah- does The Atrocity Archives push most of my buttons: Computer Science, Office Work, Lovercraft Mythos, Spy Thrillers, Tech Jokes, Historical Trivia are all thrown in a particle accelerator and the result of this experiment is a book that just about grabbed me by the ears and demanded to be admired. It wasn’t much of a fight: Scarily enough, Stross thinks a lot like I do, or at least like I would if I were a lot smarter.

    Consider the premise: Today’s world is a fragile reality. Right underneath the surface, evil creatures are just waiting to emerge, and the way to bridge the gap is through higher mathematics. Or, in practice, advanced computing. The only reasons why we haven’t yet been crisped and ketchuped by tentacled creatures is that there are shadow agencies working to keep the unmentionable, well, unmentioned.

    We find our narrator in the middle of all this. Bob Howard is a computer wizard working in the bowels of the British “Laundry”, wizard being no mere metaphor in this context. As the novel begins, he’s drafted in a complex operation involving three secret services and a lovely red-haired philosopher who has unknowingly discovered a very dangerous piece of knowledge. Before soon, Howard finds himself neck-deep in very dark matters best left to professionals. Without spoiling anything, let’s just say that Nazis are involved. The short title novel (“The Atrocity Archive” is 70,000 words long) is followed by “The Concrete Jungle”, another spooky novelette combining Total Surveillance paranoia with a -literal- Medusa effect in the middle of an ultra-dirty bureaucratic war. (A passing reference to “something” set for 2007 is one of the most frightening things in the book.) An afterword describing links between thrillers and horror caps the rest of the book. Whew!

    But plot summaries usually fail to do justice to Stross’ fiction, and The Atrocity Archives is a perfect example of this. Scarcely a paragraph goes by that doesn’t include throwaway references to layers of imagined back-story integrating mounds of arcane knowledge. Sentences have to be unpacked for maximum meaning. Stross doesn’t write as much as he encodes entire novels in lossy compression schemes leaving just enough hints to make us wonder at the rest. He effortlessly discards more stuff in a chapter than most lousy writers manage to pack in trilogies. Even though the book clocks in at less than 300 pages, there is plenty for your money in here: You will end up reading the book as slowly as possible to get every reference. And, if you really get into it, you won’t want to stop before you’re through.

    Of course, your mileage may vary. Unless you can get references to “maze of twisty little passages”, “Old Ones”, “the Wannsee Conference”, “NSA Echelon”, “the Church-Turing hypothesis”, “are belong to us” and so forth, it’s a safe bet that you won’t get maximum enjoyment out of the novel. If, on the other hand, cryptic expressions such as “BOFH becomes Bond” are enough to make your eyebrows shoot up, Golden Gryphon is the small-press publisher you should patronize.

    The Atrocity Archives isn’t just good: it’s “oh goodness my mind is blown”, “this is turning me in a drooling fanboy”, “I’ve been waiting to read this book half my life” good. It’s the kind of book fit to be lent, or gift-bought in massive quantities. Scary reactions: As a reviewer, isn’t it my job to be professionally jaded by now?

    Aw, stuff it: Book Of The Year. If it’s not, I can’t wait for the better book.