Reviews

  • The Village (2004)

    The Village (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2004) The most striking trend about M. Night Shyamalan’s films since The Sixth Sense is how, movie after movie, director Shyamalan has improved even as writer Shyamalan has lost touch. In terms of how to direct a suspense film, The Village is almost as exemplary as Signs in how to position a camera to show, but more importantly not to show some things. His use of colour is skillful, providing a visual segue into the theme of social manipulation that lies at the heart of the film. Director Shyamalan also retains his touch when comes the time to coax great performances out of his actors. This time, it’s Bryce Dallas Howard who manages to outshine everyone else as a spunky blind tomboy. Visually, the film is magnificent, and the tortured rhythm of the historical dialogue gets to be hypnotic after a while (it wouldn’t be pleasant to speak like that all the time, but wouldn’t you wish that everyone else did, sometimes?) A lot of good stuff, really. But then there’s the script, with the expected Big Shyamalan Twist. My advice: Spoil yourself rotten before seeing the film. Ask your friends to tell you the surprise. Read the script. This way, you won’t be driven to a film-burning rage by the way the last few minutes unfold –and retroactively screw up all the film up to that point. Don’t worry: spoilers will enhance your experience, removing the suspense of the twist while leaving you free to admire all that’s good and successful about The Village. Otherwise, you may be left with just Shyamalan to blame.

  • Suspect Zero (2004)

    Suspect Zero (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2004) I see it all the time, yet I still hate it all the time: A boffo premise trashed by over-development, partially redeemed by just about enough directing/acting skill to make us long for the film that wasn’t. Zack Penn’s original 1997 screenplay was reportedly a barn-stormer of a script, a take on the serial-killer genre with plenty of things to say. I’m not sure what happened to it in the meantime, but the 2004 filmed version of the story is a hodge-podge of supernatural crap without much in terms of a sustained storyline. The structure is off, revelations are made too late, coincidence abounds, silly shortcuts are taken and, worse, some bits (the fifty-foot shark) don’t make sense without prior knowledge of the script. It gets, in other words, profoundly silly, and that’s exactly the wrong tone in a serial-killer picture. The matter-of-fact acceptance of “remote viewing” hurts most of all, but the rest of the picture isn’t all that special either: the energy has been sucked out of the script, resulting in, yes, a dull film. There is an interesting patina of good directing here and there (though it too-often falls into the “dark is scary” mode), along with a good performance by Ben Kingsley (his ear-rie shadow is spooky). It’s enough to rescue the film from a total catastrophe, but not enough to make it any good. Hey, Universal, how about re-making that first draft?

  • Siu Lam Juk Kau [Shaolin Soccer] (2001)

    Siu Lam Juk Kau [Shaolin Soccer] (2001)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2004) It took years for this film to come to North America and be released in theatres, but it was worth the wait: This soccer/kung-fu sports comedy is just about what you’d expect from the premise (a bunch of misfits use shaolin skills to become a top-notch soccer team) and the execution is just as energetic as you’d except from a Hong Kong action film. Crammed with an astonishing amount of special effects, Shaolin Soccer is, by far, the funniest football/soccer film you’ll see: It’s a wonder why it wasn’t judged sufficiently commercial by Miramax, especially after the rather good translation/re-editing job they did on the film. (The film itself is subtitled -hurrah!- but the text snippets on-screen have been translated.) Writer/Director Stephen Chow is an enormously likable lead, but the entire cast gets the chance to score some points in the comedy department. As far as the sport scenes themselves are concerned, well, you will have to see them for yourself: The cartoonish nature of the stunts (including flaming footballs, shock waves and shattered concrete) is perfectly balanced with more simple gags and the result is a film that practically begs to be shown to the entire family. Good, great stuff.

  • Les rivières pourpres 2 – Les anges de l’apocalypse [The Crimson Rivers 2: Angels Of The Apocalypse] (2004)

    Les rivières pourpres 2 – Les anges de l’apocalypse [The Crimson Rivers 2: Angels Of The Apocalypse] (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, In theaters, August 2004) There’s no use pretending that this is a classic for the ages, but this darkish thriller not only feels better than the original film, it represents a small step up for Luc Besson’s screenplays. Oh, it’s still rife with silly stuff, coincidences and frustrating developments, but at least it’s not as broadly silly as some of his more recent material such as Taxi 3 and Yamakasi. Even his dumb ideas have a certain panache: It’s hard not to smile at a film mixing apocalyptic imagery, monk ninjas and Nazi revivalists. (Whew!) Sure, the characters are wafer-thin and the conclusion is lame… but when the entire film is so drenched in atmosphere, there’s reason enough to be interested. Olivier Dahan does a fine job at the helm, showing what he’s capable of in a series of spooky scenes that borrow much from other films but still manage to create an appropriate atmosphere. (Ooh, crucifixes) Jean Reno is as good as usual in his reprise of “Commissaire Neimans” while newcomer Benoît Magimel is a good-enough replacement for Vincent Cassel’s character in the original. It all adds up to a pleasant-enough film, perhaps a bit tired about the 1999 wave of “Christian apocalypse” horror films (Bless The Child, Stigmata, End Of Days, etc.) but nonetheless not too shabby.

  • God’s Children, Harold Coyle

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Forge, 2000, 316 pages, C$35.95 hc, ISBN 0-312-86296-2

    I’m glad I’ve read this book. As a big fan of Coyle’s early work, I was dismayed to see that his return to contemporary-era military fiction after his “Civil War” trilogy had been marred by two clunkers, Dead Hand and Against All Enemies, two terrible novels that made me wonder if Coyle had lost his touch. The bad news are that God’s Children still isn’t up to the dizzying standards set by his earlier novels. The good news is that it’s a heck of a lot better than the two other books.

    In some ways, it’s even more of a surprise considering the subject matter. While everyone can agree that peacekeeping missions are important and dangerous, they’re not exactly an exciting subject for a techno-thriller. Coyle has, in the past, specialized in engagements taking place on a much larger scale, from World War Three (Team Yankee) to a second American Revolution (Against All Enemies). Here, our protagonists are simply thrown in the mud and the snow of Eastern Europe, on a peacekeeping mission where neither side wants protection and everyone wonders why Americans are intruding in the affairs of another state.

    Plot-wise, Coyle keeps a tight focus on a small cast of American soldiers at the exclusion of everything else: As their patrol is cut off from the rest of the world, no cuts to the White House or reassuring media reports come to break our isolation. It’s a repeat of stylistic choices made in Team Yankee (which followed an armoured team in the far-away context of John Hackett’s The Thirld World War) and it’s the single best element of the book. For it informs everything else and places the reader right alongside the soldiers forced to fight their way back to the base. It’s interesting to see that a simple plot (“get back home in one piece”) trumps such extravaganza as a Siberian meteor strike (Dead Hand) or war in Mexico (Trial by Fire) in sustained interest.

    Part of the novel’s continued attraction is based on, once again, a very simple conflict between seasoned protagonist Nathan Dixon (son of Scott Dixon, protagonist of numerous Coyle novels) and Gerald Reider, an officer fresh out of West Point. When a regular patrol turns into something far more dangerous, Reider find his theoretical knowledge useless and his platoon taken over by Dixon. As tensions mount between the two men and enemy forces get closer, repercussions of their personal animosity become more and more significant. Simple plot dynamics, but boy do they work.

    What also works well, but sometimes turns into straight-up lecturing, is Coyle’s description of what it’s like to be a soldier. At times, God’s Children, seems written to be taught at West Point. At others, it truly puts readers into a soldier’s mind. While Coyle is not a master stylist (Try this sentence: “Laced with the smells of mold and mildew common to wooden structures built by men to be used by men when enjoying manly pursuits was the pungent odor of urine.” [P.208]) but he’s certainly earnest and in military fiction, sincerity counts for far more than technique.

    Still, good technique can make you avoid simple blunders such as the abrupt ending of the book or the lack of definition for some of the secondary characters. Technique could have streamlined some exposition, cut some of the most conspicuous lecturing and wrapped some of those loose threads. Fortunately, God’s Children is good enough and interesting enough to compensate for those flaws. Make no mistake: It’s still military fiction, impenetrable to laymen and reprehensible to anti-militarists. But for anyone who has been looking for gripping tales of modern warfare, it’s not a bad choice at all. In fact, it’s making me curious about Coyle’s latest books, which is certainly something I couldn’t say after Dead Hand or Against All Enemies. Time will tell which of those three books is the aberration.

    (Fans of Coyle’s Dixonverse should note that even though Against All Enemies was published after God’s Children, it was written earlier and so explains why and how Nathan Dixon came to replace Scott Dixon as the series’ protagonist. Not an essential read, but it may explain some of the references in God’s Children.)

  • Open Water (2003)

    Open Water (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2004) There is definitely something to be said about the purity of this film’s premise: What if you found yourself stuck in the middle of the ocean in a scuba suit? There’s an innate terror there as the situation is so far removed from the daily reality of us land-lubbers. For more fun, add in some jellyfishes, wounds, dehydration, exposure and the usual sharks. Visually, the director cleverly lets the camera hang only a touch above the stranded divers’ heads as they bob up and down in the ever-changing ocean landscape. Yup, some good stuff here –and I’m not even talking about Blanchard Ryan’s completely gratuitous nude scene. But what could have been a one-note premise turns out to be exactly that and even at a mere 72 minutes, this film still feels overlong. Granted, the pedestrian screenplay doesn’t do much to heighten our involvement: The two leads are basically yuppie scum, and while their everyman quality gives a this-could-be-you quality to their plight, it doesn’t go beyond that. Visually, it’s both a shame and a achievement to see that the film was shot in muddy digital video. Sure, it means that a film that otherwise wouldn’t have existed was shown on thousands of cinema screens across America. On the other hand, well, it looks like digital video on a two-storey silver screen: There is no arguing that this is a bottom-basement budget film. So; a mixed bag? Well, yes, but I suspect that the clincher will be the cheap ending, which makes the whole thing feel quite irrelevant. Eh: I call it low-budget film syndrome.

  • Gothika (2003)

    Gothika (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, August 2004) Hey, that wasn’t terrible. Oh, it’s no great art: crazy people, an insane asylum, a murder or two, possession by vengeful ghosts, yadda-yadda. The best thing about this film is Mathieu Kassovitz’s direction, trashy in a B-genre fashion with enough CGI stuff to keep things interesting. Otherwise, well, it moves relatively quickly and seldom wastes any time in setting up its scares. As long as you enjoy Halle Berry in a shower; what else do you need? Well, a plot maybe, and one that doesn’t solely bring back memories of What Lies Beneath. But then again it’s “just” a horror movie, and a decidedly non-scary one at that despite the desperate spring-loaded cats at regular intervals. The audio commentary on the DVD shows both director and cinematographer struggling to make this something more significant than an average horror film, only to hear Kassovitz cave in at the end and ruefully recognize that this is, after all, just a silly genre film. (Oh, don’t get me started on the last scene…) Still, not bad. Could have been worse.

  • Ghosts Of The Abyss (2003)

    Ghosts Of The Abyss (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, August 2004) Yes, James Cameron still hasn’t directed any feature-length fiction film since 1997’s Titanic. But if this is the kind of stuff he’s doing on his “holidays”, well, it’s just as good. In this documentary, we follow Cameron and his crew (including stalwart actor Bill Paxton) as they revisit the wreck of the Titanic in late 2001. Paxton makes a useful everyday character as he’s (justifiably) impressed by the whole proceeding: his doofus act as they take him to the wreck is a useful proxy for everyone in the audience. The technology used for this round of exploration is quite impressive, bringing movie-making savvy to underwater exploration, along with a full underwater lighting rig, 3D cameras (whose footage is sadly converted to 2D on the DVD) and remote-controlled ROVs. The exploration of the Titanic itself is cleverly augmented by CGI, overlays of live-action footage and interviews with experts. Hard-SF fans will squeal in glee at the appearance of Charles Pellegrino, author of several books on the Titanic, archaeology and other nifty stuff. It’s engrossing material, but becomes even more so when the tale evolves into a techno-thriller mode as one of the robots has to be rescued after technical difficulties. Fascinating stuff, though some knowledge and passion for the subject of the film is almost essential. Well worth tracking down.

  • Nothing Lasts Forever, Sidney Sheldon

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 1994, 384 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-446-35473-2

    There’s something to be said for trash, as long as it keeps me amused and out of trouble.

    I know, on some intellectual level, that Sidney Sheldon is a best-selling writer. That his name is (was?) mentioned alongside Tom Clancy, Danielle Steele or Stephen King as this model of a wildly successful multi-millionaire author. But in a classic illustration of how large the fiction publishing universe has grown, it’s entirely possible for even a voracious genre reader such as myself to go practically ten years without reading a single novel of his, nor have much of an idea of what he usually writes. The last book of his that I’ve read, The Doomsday Conspiracy, was by a significant margin the single worst attempt at Science Fiction by a non-genre writer until Robin Cook’s Invasion.

    I’m not a big reader of medical thrillers, but I believe that Nothing Lasts Forever does for them what The Doomsday Conspiracy did for SF: Barge into the genre with no affection and no refinement to develop a trite story featuring bad characters and entirely expected developments. But whereas The Doomsday Conspiracy‘s naive lack of sophistication seriously annoyed me, Nothing Lasts Forever ends up being… almost charming. I’m sure that my devotion to SF has something to do with my reaction (“How dare you make fun of my favourite genre?!”), but after this book, I suspect that there’s another element at play.

    Let’s briefly review the basics of the plot: Three new doctors, all women (and yes, discrimination still plays an important part in this 1990 novel), learning the ropes at one of San Francisco’s biggest hospitals. But, as the first page baldly states, “one of them almost gets an entire hospital closed down, the second one kills a patient for a million dollars and the third one is murdered.” And there we go. In a curiously sophisticated nod to storytelling structure, the first chapter of the book is a fast-forward murder trial that, of course, presents a cynical version of events that will be completely overturned by the latter “true” flashback narrative.

    If you’re used to daytime soap operas, Nothing Lasts Forever (a title that even sounds like a soap opera) will be instantly familiar. The shallow characterization. The casual evil inflicted by the tale’s villains. The twists and turns of fate (best described as “honking coincidences”). The way the story is pared down to its essentials in a series of short scenes. At the very least, no one wastes his time here, as the story races from beginning to end.

    And that’s just as well, because the plot jumps from one unlikely situation to another. Gainful murder is committed because that’s the first thing that comes to the mind of the villain. An incompetent doctor naturally turns to Kama Sutra-enhanced seduction as a palliative for her lack of knowledge. (Worse; her daily couplings always works in ensuring the cooperation of her superiors and colleagues. Surely she can’t be that good, right?) Reading pages of this novel at random is an exercise in preposterous plotting.

    But guess what? It’s so unsubtle, so unapologetic that it’s hard to resist. To quote the novel about the doctor with a specialization in Kama Sutra career-advancement, “There was a helplessness about her that they were unable to resist. They were all under the impression that it was they who were seducing her, and they felt guilty about taking advantage of her innocence.” [P.115] Bang on: This is such a fun novel, in its own skanky way, that’s it’s difficult to be harsh; it would be like spanking a mewling kitten.

    If this review sound awfully condescending, consider this hypothetical scenario: What if an unbelievably crafty writer learned after years of trying that general audiences don’t like to be challenged? What if he took secret delight in producing trash and actually agreed with his most severe reviews while lighting cigars with hundred-dollar bills? What if he consciously dumbed down his stories so they’d appeal to everyone, including self-styled hipsters reading for ironic value? Hmmm… Twisted? Unbelievable? Even more so than this particular novel?

  • Collateral (2004)

    Collateral (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2004) Michael Mann films are rightfully regarded as minor film-making events, and even this admittedly average effort shows why: In this case, an average script is delivered by above-average talent, making it seem a great deal fresher than it is. Just take a look at the first few minutes, as Mann’s camera suggests Los Angeles as a vast uncaring monster, thinly linked by endless roads on which it’s easy for a man to be reduced to the simple role of a carrier. Hey, I know this is reading too much in a film, but that’s exactly the beauty of Mann’s direction: Make things appear deeper than they are. Because frankly, once you start picking at the details of this kidnapping/assassination thriller, it falls apart quickly: Jamie Foxx may play a sympathetic cab driver taken hostage, but the moron repeatedly manages to miss even the most obvious ways to get out, call the police and get away. The point isn’t that he should have done so (otherwise; short movie!) but that the screenwriter should have worked a little harder polishing the script. Otherwise, you end up with the kind of amazing coincidence that is likely to make any audience shake their head. (Come on: Don’t tell me you didn’t know, ten minutes in, who the fifth target was going to be.) Silly script, with a sub-par third act that crumples into a whimper of a conclusion. But -aha- boy does it look good and profound with Mann at the helm. (Tom Cruise also helps, with an icy look that does much to bring some much-needed oomph to the story) Wow, philosophical discussions in a taxi cab! It almost makes Collateral feel like it’s supposed to be a fable about estrangement and not a run-of-the-mill thriller. But don’t take a second look: You may be disappointed.

  • Avalon (2001)

    Avalon (2001)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, August 2004) “From Mamoru Oshii, the director of Ghost In The Shell” sounds like a pretty good sales pitch… until you realize that this means a live-action film that emulates all the most annoying characteristics of bad anime: Soporific pacing; re-use of the same shots; a threadbare plot barely deserving of being called a “story”; characters mostly defined by their cool nickname; inexpressive acting; obvious twists stolen from slush fiction; and so on and so forth. If this film had been paced like the usual American films, it might have lasted a good fifteen or twenty minutes. As it is, we’re forced to slog through 90 minutes of sepia-tinted melancholy to get to where we know it’s going to end. Beyond the weirdly stylized (and yet curiously dull) first sequence, don’t expect much in terms of action: This is one anime film where long static shots are meant to induce roughly the same catatonia that affects the lead character. Some interesting cinematography, but is it all worth it? So many clichés and overused elements, yet still all wasted. It all ends, as you would expect it, with the usual metaphysical ending that truly doesn’t mean much and concludes even less. Real or not? A better question: Do I care or not? Welcome to Avalon.

  • AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004)

    AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, August 2004) Admit it: what did you expect with a title like that? The good news is that the film delivers more or less what’s promised by the title: A B-grade movie that doesn’t try too hard in trying to please the fan-boys. Some winks and nods are cute (Lance Henrickson’s role, for instance), but as the movie progresses, it becomes more and more obvious that Alien vs Predator is, faithfully enough, fan fiction brought to the screen. And fairly dumb fan-fiction at that: On paper, it’s scarcely distinguishable from the tons of truly wretched fan-fiction to be found everywhere on the Internet: flat characters; clichés repeated with gravitas (“The enemy of my enemy is my friend”, “I’d rather have it and not need it than…”), scenes and beats stolen from the previous films in the franchise; as well as numerous errors of physics, continuity and logic. What’s worse is that the direction is scarcely better than average: While there are one or two good shots (I’m thinking of the “Pyramid Swarm” or the ironic “bullet-time face-hugger”), Paul Anderson (Resident Evil, Event Horizon) has done much better in the past. Worse; he’s the one who wrote the script, and you only need to read one or two interviews with the guy to understand that whatever talents he has are solely in the area of Special Effects-heavy direction. Oh well; dumb as it is, Alien vs Predator at least has the decency to move at a good clip and seldom wastes any time. As a result, it feels a lot more satisfactory than it really deserves. And that’s what I mean when I talk about a decent B-grade movie.

  • The Cheese Monkeys, Chip Kidd

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Scribner, 2001, 275 pages, C$38.00 hc, ISBN 0-7432-1492-7

    Yes, I will confess: I’m just a sucker for design. Despite having no discernible talent for it (hey, just look at this web site), I’m quite willing to spend hours reading about graphic design, going “ooh” when I see good examples. Now, design freaks do learn to remember some names, and one of those names is Chip Kidd. He designs book covers, and with over eight hundred titles to his credit, it’s likely that you have seen his work at some point. In fact, it’s a virtual certainty given how his design for the first hardcover edition of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park became the basis for the movie’s logo. Hey, when Spielberg himself likes your stuff, how can you say no?

    But Kidd leaped from designing books to writing books with The Cheese Monkeys, his 2001 novel about life in a graphic design course during the 1950s. Tone: Humorous. Autobiographical content: Presumably high. Overall impact: Mixed.

    Narrated by some nameless student, The Cheese Monkeys is that old standby of literature, the coming-of-age story, mixed with an influential-teacher plot and wacky-college-hijinks vignettes. The interesting twist is that our narrator is about to get a crash-course in graphic design that’s halfway between boot camp and a sadistic psychological experiment.

    The Cheese Monkey changes dramatically the moment it introduces the character of Winter Sorbeck, enfant terrible and teacher extraordinaire. And I don’t say this in the usual hyperbolic sense: In one of the book’s clever design touches, the font of the text changes as soon as he comes on-stage. For our featureless narrator, Sorbeck is a revelation, a prickly mentor and maybe even something more. Through Sorbeck, we ignorant readers will learn more than a bit about graphic design, or as the novel puts it, art that makes you do something. It’s quite revealing, and even more so for all the design freaks in the audience.

    Naturally, you can’t be as accomplished a designer as Chip Kidd and not take the opportunity of a first novel to play tricks with book design. And so that’s how The Cheese Monkeys enjoys dozens of little touches, from the nonstandard book jacket to slogans embedded in the edges of the page to unusually-placed acknowledgements to content crammed in the book’s endpapers. The dust jacket wryly proclaims “Design by Some Guy” while the opening scrawl states “Copyright (C) 2001 by Charles Kidd. Yes. Charles.” Fun stuff, quite enough to make this a good buy for collectors.

    From a strict literary perspective, it’s not a bad book. The writing is generally clean, crisp and amusing. The narrator is purposefully left blank, but one can’t say the same of the other characters in the novel. (Perhaps too much, in fact: It’s difficult to figure why the book is supposedly in the 1950s when some of the characters and events seem so contemporary.) While the book takes a long time to heat up -obviously leading up to Sorbeck’s introduction-, the last half is crammed with memorable scenes as the sadistic teacher tries to whittle down his class.

    Unfortunately, Kidd reaches too far into surrealism for his last scene, and the book doesn’t grind to a halt as much as it collides with the back cover. What does it mean? What has happened to some of the characters, and what’s next for them? This is one of those annoying books which lets you decide. Some call this sophistication; I call it a lack of confidence. (Yes, I “get” the meaning of the last page. But really, wasn’t there a better way to do it?)

    But this frustrating caveat aside, there’s plenty to like here, and not just for design geeks: There’s a number of truly hilarious scenes, starting with the “Colonel Percy” dousing scene. The reflexions on graphic design are brought forth with conviction, with an impact that won’t be wasted on anyone who has even thought seriously about this stuff. It’s an interesting book, a short book, and now that it’s generously available in remainder stacks, what are you waiting for?

    June 2005: A frustrated reader wrote in to ask, in part,

    Hey – so you “get” the last page of “The Cheese Monkeys”? I sure don’t and I’m cranky about it. Been puzzling for two days. Clues? Hints? Blatant explanations for the retarded?

    Here’s what I sent back… (WARNING! EXTREME SPOILERS!)

    As far as understanding the ending of Chip Kidd’s The Cheese Monkeys, I find myself in the awkward position of re-reading my review and thinking “What the heck did I mean back then?” Was I over-optimistic or deluded?

    Re-reading the last few pages brought back a few memories, but nothing definite. The key, of course, is that I believe that the ending doesn’t make sense in a conventional way. Elements of it are superficially suggestive of a wrapping-up of loose threads, but my belief is that Kidd found himself unable or unwilling to deliver a true conclusion and so jumped the rails to give something that, if you squint real hard, can actually look like a conclusion. (I read over 200 books per year, and that type of stuff is more common that you’d think.)

    The presence of the fish actually brings back to mind a bad joke…

    Q: How many surrealists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
    A: Fish.

    …hey, I said it was bad. But if this was a term paper, I’d actually use it to try to make the point that the ending isn’t meant to be conventionally fatisfying.

    This being said, a number of small expanations suggested themselves to me while browsing through the ending once more. Maybe one of those is what I had in mind when I wrote the review two years ago:

    1. The meaning of the last page (“…I want you to design a moment in time…” “…you will take something you have made and use it to claim a moment for yourself -yours and truly yours- in front of the class…”) is that it explains (pick one) the entire book, the last section or the last chapter (called “The Final Exam”). In this explanation, the last page suggests that the last chapter is not part of the narrative, but represents kind of a grandstanding attempt by Kidd to re-use elements of his narrative (“something you have made”) and make an impression on (“claim a moment for yourself”, or maybe just “piss off”) the reading audience (“the class”). If I was trying to deconstruct the novel in a post-modernist interpetation, I believe that this theory could be made to work.

    2. The “Fear and Loathing in Design Class” rests on the theory that “…we were somewhere around Bauhaus when the drugs began to take hold…” and that the narrator’s barriers of sanity start to erode roughly a hundred pages before the end and that by the end of the book, he’s blasted out of his mind by the pressure and exhaustion and what he perceived is half-informed by reality, half-shaped by wide-awake nightmares. In here, the last chapter is the kind of nightmare you’d make while drowsing fifteen minutes before the last exam, and the last page a reminder that it’s not over yet. If you want to be twisted, re-read the last page as if it was narrated by Keanu Reeves at the end of the first MATRIX movie (“…I’m not here to tell you how it ends, but to tell you how it begins…”) and then play Rage Against the Machine’s “Wake Up”.

    3. …and so we come to the allegorical interpretation, probably the one intended by Kidd, but my least favourite one given that it has an effect undistinguishable from saying “I give up! It’s too complicated!”: Himillsy as a feminist symbol (a fish in a bowl, unable to get out), fading away (as per the graying-out of her dialogue) as the novel ends and the narrator conveniently graduates and allows her memory to disappear. (But not being unaffected by the experience: the font never changes back to Apollo typeface)

    4. Then there’s the “Sixth Fish” theory that Himillsy was always a fish and that only the narrator saw her as a real person. (I’M KIDDING!)

    Well, that’s already far too much thinking about a book that’s probably intended as being a zen-like unanswerable object of contemplation. (Internal evidence of this: The hardcover edition dust jacket’s blurb: “Oh, wouldn’t you meatbags like to know”)

    Hopefully, you’ll be able to pick a half-satisfying theory from the ones above and let go of the novel. Please! Let it go! Read another one!

  • Ilium, Dan Simmons

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    EOS, 2003, 576 pages, C$39.95 hc, ISBN 0-380-97893-8

    Anyone who’s been paying attention to Dan Simmons’ career know that the man can write anything in any genre, from horror (Carrion Comfort) to thriller (Darwin’s Blade). But even with impressive credentials in other genres, Simmons started out as a science-fiction writer, and it’s still in SF that he produced his most impressive work, from dozen of excellent short stories to the massively successful Hyperion quartet. So any new SF work from him is a major event: Expectation for Ilium ran high as soon as the book was announced.

    At first glance, it appears that Simmons has delivered the goods with Ilium, the first part of a duology to be concluded in Olympos. (In a rare feat of honesty, the American EOS hardcover edition says as much both in the liner jacket and on the back cover. Hurrah for honesty!) An adventure tale set in a far-flung future packed with nanotech, quantum tunnelling, moravecs and other exotic technology, Ilium alternates between three plot threads: The story of a Greek scholar resurrected to report on the real-life recreation of the Iliad, the travels of two robots going from the Jovian system to a mysterious terraformed Mars and the adventures of a small group of humans on a very different future Earth.

    The first thing of note in Ilium is Simmons’ considerable literary ambition in telling a story which almost-literally takes place during the Iliad, featuring robots likely to quote from Shakespeare and Proust, and minor characters named “Caliban” for relevant reasons. The amount of research involved in writing this book must have been staggering; as a relatively ignorant reader (who had to rely on memories of TROY and visions of Brad Pitt as Achilles) it’s easy to be snowed under the weight of paragraphs packed with references to the Iliad, from character names to interpretations of Homer’s intentions to the complete back-story of even unseen characters. (Heck, this novel even has Greek gods as major characters.) Other literary allusions are just as likely to fly high above any non-scholarly heads, though the presence of such allusions is unlikely to be missed. In short, it’s easy to see classics-loving non-SF readers go nuts for Ilium‘s depth, even as it may not be totally successful in other areas.

    Things like pacing or plotting, for instance. Yes, it’s a long book, and one which doesn’t start to cook until well after the halfway point. There’s a ton of exposition (it’s difficult to do otherwise when quoting from Homer), a lot of scene-setting and plenty of description. For Ilium is first and foremost and adventure tale in which plenty of words are spent describing how characters go from point A to point B. There is a complicated plot, oh yes, but for the longest time it’s hard to see the difference between movement and progress.

    All of this is complicated by the fact that Ilium is, after all, the first half of a bigger novel. The three hundred pages of setup are for the 1100-pages entirety of the duology, not just for a single book. Some things don’t make a lot of sense; we can only hope that they will once the second half comes out. Similarly, the sense of pointless exasperation sure to strike any reader during the last few pages has to be tempered by the knowledge that the answers so preciously withheld should be coming up in early 2005. (Few of the book’s lines are so ominous as Zeus’s “We’re not?” [P.522]) Frustrating; it’s not for nothing if I usually wait until all the books of a series are out before digging in.

    Stylistically, it’s a Dan Simmons novel, so you can bet that there’s plenty of good quotes throughout the entire thing. I was particularly taken by the mixture of Greek mythology and easy swearing from scholic Hockenberry’s narration. (As a proud 20th-century representative, he’s our champion in this post-humanistic tale). The squabbling gods are a lot of fun to read about, though the “post-human” plot line is more often that not an exercise in impatient finger-thumping.

    All in all, a solid book but (at this point) not an essential one. I have a feeling that the sequel will deliver on more than enough intriguing suggestions, but a more definitive assessment will have to wait until Olympos.

  • Web Bloopers, Jeff Johnson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Morgan Kaufmann, 2003, 329 pages, C$75.00 tpb, ISBN 1-55860-840-0

    As someone with more than a passing interest in web design (I know enough about what I don’t know enough to avoid calling myself a “web designer”), any book that wants to tell me what I shouldn’t do will be met with a mixture of eagerness and wariness: Yay for the hints and tricks, but really, who are you to tell me what to do?

    For Web Bloopers, usability expert Jeff Johnson scoured the web for examples of bad design and collected the worst examples. Government sites, educational sites, even commercial sites are all implacably dissected for lousy usability features in sixty “common web design mistakes”, themselves split in three parts (“Content and functionality”, “User Interface” and “Presentation”) and eight chapters. Aside from the mandatory screen-shots, Johnson describes and dissects the bloopers in detail, then presents solutions to avoid them. Most of the examples are illustrations of things to avoid, but some others are highlighted as best practises worth emulating.

    Like most technical books destined to a professional audience, this one doesn’t come cheaply at nearly 75 Canadian dollars. But the flip-side is that few expenses have been spared to give the book a generous design. There are enough illustrations in here to satisfy even the most demanding readers. (Though the accompanying text often tends to run ahead of the illustrating material) The layout is free enough to accommodate illustrations, annotations, cartoons, footnotes and very generous amounts of text.

    Perhaps too much text, in fact. Johnson has a tendency to repeat material and describe things in too much detail. His straightforward writing style works well when comes the time to present straight-up information, but it’s a fair thing to say that no-one will read this book for the style alone. Furthermore, the solutions he offers to solve the mistakes he describes are often implicit in the description of the problem. A lot of them simply boil down to “don’t do this”, which is a bit useless after an entire page of “this is not right because…”

    Now don’t get the wrong impression: “Too much detail” is a very minor sin in the litany of problems a technical book can suffer from. While Web Bloopers doesn’t have the same density of information-per-square-inch as Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think!, not everyone can be Steve Krug. (Nor can everyone get Steve Krug to pen the foreword to their book, as Johnson has been able to do here.) If you assume that the book will more frequently be read by non-technical web managers rather than actual webmasters, the repetition almost becomes essential.

    As someone with a fair bit of web design experience, it was almost inevitable that I would have objections to some of Johnson’s “bloopers”. Non-standard link colours (#53), for instance, aren’t always a mistake; well-used, they can be a boon to the site’s design. (But a cursory recognition of this is included ) Redundant navigation schemes (#16) can, once again, be immensely helpful when properly used. Johnson’s perspective may be influenced by his experience in application GUI design; the web is evolving its own usability standards, and those often run at odds with the “usual” common wisdom. Then you have to consider the target audience of Web Bloopers, more likely corporate web managers than independent web designers willing to push the envelope and purposefully break rules.

    But a few disagreements here and there shouldn’t be interpreted as a dislike of the whole book: By and large, Johnston succeeds in presenting an invaluable collection of web design mistakes to avoid. The web would be a much better place if the principles of the book could be drilled into the heads of those wacky webmasters poisoning the experience for all of us. Yours truly included.