Reviews

  • High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games, Rusel DeMaria & Johnny L. Wilson

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    McGraw Hill Osborne, 2002, 328 pages, C$24.99 tpb, ISBN 0-07-222428-2

    Faithful readers of these reviews may recall my teenage fascination for video games, but they may not suspect the depth of it. Simply put, from 1983 to 1993, I knew just about everything about the subject. Blessed with ample free time and a network of like-minded friends, armed with a trusty Commodore 64 (followed by the latter succession of PCs), I devoured the magazines of the time, played games obsessively, wrote about them in the high school newspaper and basically lived a decade under the influence.

    Then I discovered the Internet, went to university and, well, something had to give.

    But thanks to Rusel DeMaria and Johnny L. Wilson, I now own a time capsule of the era: High Score! packs nothing less than three decades of video games in 328 gorgeously illustrated pages. Everything from Pong to the X-Box, complete with quotes from the industry’s historical figures, descriptions of games and companies and enough screenshots to make you feel as if you’re back in front of vintage games.

    Roughly divided in three chronological sections (the 70s, 80s and 90s), High Score! is crammed with material, both textual and visual. The scope of the book is, admittedly, bigger than my own experience with the subject matter: It delves deep into the prehistory of electronic games (namely; arcades and pre-Atari 2600 consoles), and then goes on to do a very good job balancing computer games with the series of consoles that developed concurrently. (Not being a console fan, I could only nod in recognition at memories of my friend’s video games from Nintendos to Playstations)

    The first part, “the 70s”, is the most linear of the three: Given the historical perspective and relatively uncluttered gaming landscape of the time, it’s easy for the authors to present a flowing narrative. One event clearly leads to another, copycats turn into innovators and there are so few games that they can be highlighted on a yearly basis. It’s a heroic age where personalities and individual talents are crucial.

    Some of that individual heroism carries through in “The 80s”, even as the field starts to mature and define itself as an industry. Small organizations start taking on the personalities formerly held by individuals. Mentions of Epyx, Electronic Arts, Activision, SSI and others all evoke warm happy memories of seeing those logos on my plucky Commodore 64. (“Accolade Presents”… Ooh, mommy!)

    Alas, the “narrative” of High Score! also starts to break down as the industry explodes in random directions. Whereas the book’s first third is linear and absorbing, it then switches to a more free-flowing approach as it tries to cover all facets of the field. Unfortunately, this leads to uncomfortable breaks; when covering a company like Sierra, for instance, there are clear differences between the King’s Quest Sierra and the Half-Life Sierra. Shovelling the entire history of the company between pages 134-143, in “The 80s”, is a jarring choice. Among many others.

    Given my declining interest in computer games during the nineties, it’s somewhat ironic to read how, in the introduction to the third part of the book, the authors had a harder time pulling together the final threads. Electronic gaming has since gone mainstream, taking over pop culture as yet another entertainment option. Oh well. Unfortunately (and this will only grow worse as we move away from 2002), High Score! ends at a curious junction, barely mentioning the Playstation 2 / X-Box / Nintendo 64 platforms, as well as Grand Theft Auto and other newer landmarks of electronic gaming which, after all, always marches on.

    But don’t think it’s enough to diminish my admiration for the book. High Score! and myself were fated to meet at some point. Especially noteworthy is the fantastic graphic design used to lay out the book. Every page is a thing of beauty, laid out clearly to highlight the interesting material. Screen-shots are crisp, quotes are appropriate and the material is well-written. I especially loved the profiles of specific games… especially when they matched my own favourites!

    No doubt about it: For an old-school computer game geek such as myself, reading the book was like surfing from one pleasant memory to another. You can keep your high-school photo album: This is the true record of how I spent my teenage years!

  • Les Invasions Barbares [The Barbarian Invasions] (2003)

    Les Invasions Barbares [The Barbarian Invasions] (2003)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, In theaters, May 2004) To be truthful, I wasn’t expecting much of this film: I’m not one for tearjerkers, gabfests, “populist” films (this film made a bundle at the Quebec box-office) nor melodramatic sequels. But there is something for everyone in the film, and if I could easily gloss over the melodrama of the dying protagonist, it was harder not to enjoy the witty intellectual dialogue between the band of literate, hedonistic friends at the centre of the film. Les Invasions Barbares is seldom as enjoyable as when they trade back salacious puns and philosophical references. (Sadly, the otherwise-decent subtitles completely give up during one such exchange… though at least we were spared the indignities of a dubbed film!) Otherwise, well, there is plenty of philosophical content to keep anyone busy, from a flash-analysis of 9/11 to a devastating scene literally showing the relics of Quebec’s Catholic church. (What this film isn’t is “focused”: the sprawling script touches upon anything and seeming everything.) In the end, I found myself cheering for the film, regardless of origin; it’s so rare to see liberal intellectualism so warmly portrayed than it is here, it’s just a shock to realize that it actually came from, in some sense, my own culture. Go figure.

  • Feardotcom (2002)

    Feardotcom (2002)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On DVD, May 2004) There’s a good reason why critics savaged this film when it first came out: It’s just not very good. Whatever visual polish the film may possess is bludgeoned into impotence through endless dark and damp cinematography. No point for variety here; the whole film quickly becomes annoying. While Feardotcom wants to explore the dark side of the Internet, it ends up feeling silly and forced; as the bizarre deaths pile up, one gets the impression that nothing will be explained. As it turns out, this is the correct impression: the conclusion devolves into silly serial murderer stuff, complete with a throwaway line about how the ghostly energy of mumbo-jumbo can leak (or leap, or squeak) from the Internet into the real world. Don’t gag me; I’m already doing that. Stephen Dorff and Natascha McElhone do their best with the material, but it’s a hopeless situation: McElhone is miscast (she’s better in more aloof roles) and Dorff is ineffective at giving life to the lame dialogue. The film descends so firmly into dull disinterest that I switched midway through my first viewing to the director’s audio commentary. Director William Malone seems well-intentioned, but Feardotcom can’t be salvaged with good intentions.

  • The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

    The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, May 2004) It’s either growing mellowness or creeping senility, but I seem to be liking Roland’s Emmerich’s catastrophe films more and more. Hated Independence Day, was okay with Godzilla and now The Day After Tomorrow actually manages to be even a little bit good. Sure, it’s crammed with silly dialogue, familiar plotting and dumb Action Movie Moments (including characters out-running a tidal wave). But on the other hand, the destruction sequences are among the finest ever filmed. Hollywood’s destruction by mega-twisters is worth the price of the ticket by itself: Add to that the spectacle of New York getting flooded, then freezing in place and you have enough eye-candy to satisfy anyone. (For more, er, conventional eye-candy, check out the luscious Tamlyn Tomita. Wrrrw!) I wasn’t so amused by the lack of cold-sense exhibited by the characters (In sub-zero temperatures, you close doors behind you) nor the silly way the action scenes got amped-up through magically appearing axes or CGI wolves. Still, there is an undeniable power to The Day After Tomorrow, even if it’s in contemplating a chillingly plausible disaster. It’s a catastrophe film that aspires to a conscience and a brain: Considerable death and destruction isn’t fought and stopped at the last moment; science is seen as a provider of answers and safety and people find safety at a public library, be still my nerdish heart! (Plus, who survives? The gifted teens and the librarians! Wooo!) Sure, the science is intentionally unrealistic. But once you see New York under dozens of meters of snow, hardly any of that matter: The Day After Tomorrow delivers the goods. Consider the DVD pre-ordered.

  • The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Random House, 2000, 639 pages, C$22.00 tpb, ISBN 0-312-28299-0

    Now that is one amazing book.

    Deftly mixing such disparate elements as World War II, New York City, Antarctica, homosexuality, the Empire State Building, the Holocaust, movies, Picasso and -above all- comic books, it’s a novel unlike any other, straddling history, alternate reality and a little bit of traditional fantasy. More than simply a snapshot of America between 1939 and 1954, more than a rags-to-riches story of successful artists, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay also stands as one of the few works compelling to both genre and mainstream audiences.

    It was inevitable, I suppose; after years of increasing literary sophistication in the comic book field, it was about time that someone on the other side of the fence took an interest in the world comic books. Michael Chabon isn’t merely just any mainstream author, though; without even looking at his biography, his love of comics shines through the book like a lighthouse. But as he sets out to tell the astounding story of Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, it’s also obvious that he’s doing a lot more than pay homage to the wonderful Golden Age of Comics.

    1939: After many misadventures (soon described in the book’s first section), Josef Kavalier arrives in New York, seeking sanctuary as the situation in his hometown of Prague gets worse and worse for all Jews. Scarcely a few days after arrival, Joe and his cousin Samuel Klayman are able, through a fortuitous set of circumstances, to create a brand-new comic book for an ambitious publisher looking for another Superman. Soon enough, “The Escapist” is born and a new age in comic books is underway. Meanwhile, all the way over there in Europe, a war begins.

    As Chabon describes the war through the viewpoint of two comic book artists working in New York, sublimating their anger through art and doing their best to get ahead in the comics industry, it quickly becomes obvious that this is a big, big, big novel. Romantic entanglements, family tragedies, period detail and comic book scenarios all intermingle to form a single narrative. It attains a climax of sort on December 7th, 1941, but the story is far from being over; indeed, the next section titled “Radioman” may just be the best part of the book. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is an epic story about two guys and the whole world. The depth of detail that Chabon gives to the story is just astonishing; even for casual fans of the era, he manages to seamlessly insert Kavalier, Clay and their Escapist in 1940s New York, all the way to the (hiss!) Wertram era.

    But scope and verisimilitude aren’t the only virtues of this novel; more than anything, this is a book that succeeds on great characterizations and superb writing. Chabon is a playful stylist, and so the narrative is told from a modern perspective that recalls the work of an enthusiastic biographer, albeit one with the omniscience required to peek at unread letters and buried feelings. Comic book scripts are dramatized and inserted in the narrative. Some historical cameos will make comic book fans coo with glee. A touch of matter-of-fact fantasy is inserted in the best magical realism tradition. Flashbacks, flash-forwards and dastardly twists are strewn through the whole book. Packed with delicious prose from the first to the last page, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is hard to stop reading after even the first chapter.

    But as the title of the novel suggests, it’s Kavalier and Clay themselves, along with the rest of the supporting characters, who make the book such a unique reading experience. The partnership and contrast between tall, quiet, tortured Kavalier and stocky, hustling, equally-tortured Clay is credible even as outlandish events unfold in their lives. Great stuff, enhanced by sympathetic portraits of them both.

    All in all, a heck of a book. It has deservedly won a Pulizer prize, but more important, it’s a hugely enjoyable novel with wide appeal in and out the mainstream literary crowd. It’s the sort of thing to make genre fans fall in love with the straight-up fiction category and general audiences pay attention to comic books. Everyone gets ahead!

    [May 2004: As I finish my review, I see that a derivative comic book called “The Escapist” is out there, giving tangible form to the comics described in the novel. Neat!]

  • Invasion, Robin Cook

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Berkley, 1997, 338 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-425-15540-4

    Wow, that book sucked.

    I know; I know; I shouldn’t expect much from a paperback original adapted from a TV miniseries. I should expect even less from a thriller author meddling with science-fiction for the first time. And, goodness gracious, it’s not as if I had big expectations for Robin Cook after his execrable Fatal Cure. It’s not as if I hadn’t read bad reviews of the book already. But you never know. Sometimes, there are surprises.

    But then again sometimes, there are no surprises. From the opening prologue, if not the very first page, something is wrong: Cook uses scientific words and expressions in a sloppy fashion, as if he only half understood what he was describing. The sequence -the apparition and crash-landing of an extraterrestrial space-ship- wants to be exact but ends up muddled. (As if that wasn’t bad enough, we don’t even know at this point that what’s being described doesn’t even match what happens later in the book.)

    Things get worse in the first chapter, as Cook throws the book’s characters at the unsuspecting reader. They’re not introduced as much as they’re dropped on-stage, with cute names (“Beau”, “Pitt”, “Cassy”, “Nancy”, etc.) and threadbare personalities. Half of them are medical specialists or students, which will obviously be handy later on. Fortunately, it’s not required to learn anything about the characters yet: Invasion quickly settles into a quiet rip-off of INVASIONS OF THE BODY SNATCHERS and anyone even remotely familiar with tales of alien invasions can just relax and see where Cook intends to go.

    Very quickly, it becomes obvious that Cook intends to go where every other science-fiction writer has gone before. As hunky Beau is taken over by an alien parasite, his personality changes and he becomes prone to saying things like “Hmm, humans are so strange.” His girlfriend isn’t particularly bothered by the changes given how he’s suddenly really really good in bed. (One would question how the alien knows those mad lovin’ skillz, but then again one could forever question just about everything in this novel.) Still, when he goes out and buys a dog without telling the missus, enough is enough and so she decides to leave and confide in her other platonic male best friend. (Why the heck would Beau-alien so spectacularly blow his cover without first infecting his girlfriend is a plot-busting question best left to anyone with an average IQ and up.)

    It gets more or less worse from there, as alien crafts magically replicate, take over the population and create black holes whenever it’s convenient for the needs of the plot. Like most struggling SF writers, Cook conjures up all sorts of really creepy events, but never bothers to offer a unified theory of how they all interrelate. Things happen randomly and that’s that. The aliens are invading; screw any other rationale than pure evil. Whatever happens after the invasion is left blurry.

    By the time a rag-tag bunch of misfits cook up an antidote of sorts in an abandoned high-tech laboratory hidden under the desert (hey, whatever), the book reads like a parody devoid of humour or even self-awareness. Invasion has a unique moment of SF goodness when it is revealed that the aliens are building an inter-dimensional gate to link Earth with the thousands of other conquered planets. While SF fans will read this and think “Cool! Let us see more of that!”, the characters react like xenophobic rednecks and go “We must destroy the gate! Eew! Icky aliens!”. Naturally enough, it’s all solved in the last ten pages as a counter-infection is going to kill off all traces of alien invasions. (Meanwhile, SF readers are concerned about whether those “infected” humans can, in fact, be uninfected without massive casualties, but that’s something that Cook obviously doesn’t care much about.)

    Ultimately, though, a 700-words review isn’t enough to detail all the logical mistakes and deeply stupid moments in Robin Cook’s Invasion. Nor is it enough to give a sense of how tedious this book is, thanks to the lack of surprises and the flat characters. But it is just long enough to tell you to stay away from it, unless you want to see a real compendium of bad Science Fiction by an author who ought to stick to medical thrillers. And maybe not even that, judging how even that portion of Invasion fails to be any more credible. But what else did I expect?

  • Medusa’s Child, John J. Nance

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Doubleday, 1997, 388 pages, C$32.95 hc, ISBN 0-385-48343-0

    Modern publishing is a weird beast, afflicted like it is with demanding profit margins from corporate owners, rising costs, fickle audiences and the incertitudes of marketing artistic products. In face of these dangers, the industry has developed defence mechanisms, the most visible of which has been a tendency to place authors in very narrow niches. How narrow? It depends on genres: Mystery fiction tends to recycle the same characters in dozens of adventures. Fantasy goes for fat trilogies of overlong material ripped off from earlier, better writers. In the thriller field, specialization can attain rarefied levels as some authors specialize in very specific environment. Dale Brown loves B-52s, Michael DiMercurio can’t get enough of submarines and John J. Nance is the field’s foremost commercial aviation thriller writer.

    The specialization is not accidental: Writers are admonished to write about what they know best, and these three men have taken this suggestion literally: Brown used to fly on bombers, DiMercurio was a submariner and Nance not only is an “aviation consultant” for ABC, but was also (as of 1997) a professional airline pilot. He’s got eleven novels to his name, and all of them involve aviation to a degree or another.

    In Medusa’s Child, the focus is on a tiny cargo airline, Scotair, the dream-come-true achievement of protagonist Scott McKay. But as the novel begins, the dream is about to end: Dogged by debts and bad luck, Scotair is down to it’s last reserves; if anything goes wrong –it’s the end of the line for everyone involved. And things are about to go very, very wrong indeed.

    Within a few pages, the nightmare begins: A mysterious pallet is loaded aboard the leased 727 plane that Scotair is using, escorted by an even-more mysterious woman. Before long, mystery is replaced by terror as the crate is revealed to contain a nuclear bomb with enhanced EMP-generating capabilities. It’s all part of a complex revenge plan, but the threat is clear: within a few minutes, the bomb will detonate, destroying Washington and wiping electronic equipment across half of North America. Throw in a hurricane, the FBI and the American Armed Forces and you’ve got all the elements required for a crackling thriller.

    One of the best things about Medusa’s Child is how it really compresses the action into a time-frame approaching real-time reading. Save for the prologue and epilogue, everything takes place in less than nine hours, exactingly minuted through section headers. Of course, thanks to some devilishly convoluted complications, there is scarcely a break available once the timer starts ticking.

    One thing that Nance does exceedingly well, here or in the other books I’ve read from him, is dangle the possibility of a early tidy ending throughout the book. Medusa’s Child is packed with subplots which contain the very real possibility of resolution. But something always happens to cut it off at the last minute. At least two ways to defuse the threat are discussed –but are revealed too late. I especially liked the way Nance toys with his readers’ expectations: Given that this is an airborne thriller, it can only end once the plane has landed, right? “Unity of setting”, isn’t it? Well, Nance serves one almost-landing, then another false one, showing that he understands the game being played with his audience. It becomes nearly annoying, but also very thrilling as things just can’t seem to go right for the protagonists. Even when you think that it’s over, there’s one final niggling detail to fix –and it’s a good one. That final stunt is a piece of work, even for a reader who has read techno-thrillers for years.

    Granted, Nance makes up in breathless pacing what he blurs in credibility. There are a number of logical howlers here and there (to say more would be a spoiler), but they’re difficult to notice given how they’re buried under the rhythm of the story. But that’s the prerogative of thriller writer; if they succeed at making the story fly, no-one is going to complain about occasional details. Suffice to say that Medusa’s Child is excellent entertainment and that beach readers shouldn’t look any further. Good stuff, well-handled by a professional writer and aviator.

  • A Place So Foreign And 8 More, Cory Doctorow

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003, 243 pages, C$20.95 tpb, ISBN 1-56858-286-2

    Cory Doctorow landed on the Science Fiction scene with a splash in 2000, winning the Campbell award for best new writer only a few months before publishing his first book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. Audacious? Not as much as his acceptance speech, which ended with a URL. Doctorow is one of the new SF writers who has grown up along with the Internet, and his approach to fiction reflects that both in content (where he can sling the jargon like the worst IT consultants) and in presentation (don’t be surprised if just about every story of the volume has been made available on-line for free)

    A Place So Foreign And 8 More hardly collects all of Doctorow’s short-fiction output since his beginnings in 1990, but it’s a good start, and a great overview of what he’s capable of producing. On the heel of his excellent first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, it’s also a good indication that Doctorow has what it takes to have a sustained career in the SF field.

    The collection starts with a bang (even before Doctorow’s first story) with Bruce Sterling’s laudatory introduction, almost a passing of the torch from a top SF writer to another. “There are times when I suspect I’ve extrapolated Cory Doctorow” writes Sterling, and no more is required to understand where Doctorow is coming from, or where he’s going.

    Then there are the stories. Nine tales published in between 1998 and 2002, five years spanning two millenniums, a dot-com boom and bust and Doctorow’s emergence as a hot writer with a Campbell award on his (mobile) mantelpiece. Nine stories oscillating between comedy and drama, soft and hard SF, satire or nostalgia. There’s even a mini-cycle of three stories set in the same universe, with very different atmospheres. But most of all, nine markers telling you to pay attention to this particular author.

    There is a publishing tradition that makes anthology editors shuffle the content of short story collections so that the first and last stories of the book are the best ones. A Place So Foreign And 8 More is no exception, with “Craphound” occupying the pole position and “0wnz0red” closing the march. I’ll have more to say about “0wnz0red” in a moment, but “Craphound” has deservedly become Doctorow’s best-known story so far: a hypnotically readable look at the life of a professional nostalgic, the code of conducts between those “craphounds” and what happens when an alien breaks the rules. Great stuff, especially for those who like to spend too much time at rummage sales.

    It’s a bit uneven after that: I wasn’t particularly taken by the title story (something about the lack of development and plausibility of the imagined universe) and “All Day Sucker” is succinctly spoiled by its introduction, but they’re followed up by “To Market, to Market: The Re-Branding of Billy Bailey”, an excellent satiric look at the business of personality. I really didn’t go for “Return to Pleasure Island”: I’m not nearly as fascinated by Disney as Doctorow is —but then again few people are.

    The following three stories are part of a cycle in which Earth has been invaded by curiously apathetic aliens. All three stories cover very different emotional registers and the result is… curious. “Shadow of the Mothaship” seems too long and unfocused, but I must say that “Home Again, Home Again” gets better every time I read it. “The Super Man and the Bugout”, though, is immediately likable: What if Superman had stayed in Canada?

    But the real jewel of the collection is “0wnz0red”, a simple SF tale of personal rapture wrapped in diamond-hard geek-speak. I’m a geek, so it was almost like reading something in my own language. Hilarious, compulsively readable and meanly effective too. (Less technical readers may not find it so amusing or accessible.)

    All in all, a collection with the expected lulls and heights. But they certainly do place Doctorow as one of the brightest, most audacious new SF writers. The emphasis on computer technology also speaks volumes, I think about SF’s new direction… but that’s just one elements in an ongoing process for the entire genre. We’ll have to see more to judge, and it just so happens that Doctorow’s going to be writing a number of those new data points.

  • The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Signet, 1943 (1993 reprint), 704 pages, C$8.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-451-17512-3

    It took me nearly two years to get over Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and muster up the courage to tackle the other novel that made her famous. As it turns out, I could have waited a little bit longer: The Fountainhead is a lot less fun than her latter book, especially if you tend to look at them as fine examples of comedy writing.

    The Fountainhead, in a nutshell, is the story of Howard Roark, an architect of singular vision and talent whose modernistic sensibilities are rejected by the masses and scoffed at by the intelligentsia. Thrown out of school, kicked out of dozens of offices, unable to work with most, Roark is painted by Rand as a tragic figure of brilliance dogged by universal mediocrity. In reality, he’s closer to the kid who just doesn’t want to eat his broccoli, but I’ll let that one pass given that I could spend pages parodying The Fountainhead as an endless discussion about broccoli-eating. (“Eat your broccoli!” “I once may have wanted to eat this broccoli, mother, but I will bow to no one! And so the broccoli shall stay in my plate and not in my palate!”)

    But even despite my endless reservoirs of sarcasm when it comes to Ayn Rand, I must admit that the first quarter of The Fountainhead is fun to read. I don’t know much about architecture, so the novel could at least fulfil my hunger for an inside look at the field. I’m also a sucker for depictions or thirties-era New York, with its industrial aesthetics and bustling feel as an emerging metropolis. The structure of the novels’ first quarter also helps, as we watch Roark struggle to maintain his integrity while a friend of his moves up thanks to a minimal amount of social skills. Roark may have all the sophistication of a stubborn five-year-old, but there’s a grander-than-life quality to the character that just makes him irresistibly compelling. The Fountainhead suffers whenever he’s off-stage.

    Alas, this happens a lot in the middle half of the novel, as Rand sharpens her knives against her antagonists, none of whom are credible and fewer still are of any interest. Roark is exiled, and all we’re left with is moustache-twirling bad guys and love triangles with all the maturity of modern soap operas.

    (Generally speaking, Rand’s attempt at human and romantic drama are nothing short of hilarious when they’re not simply boring: Here, sexual aggression seems to be the dominant romantic model of her protagonists as they’re only a step away from S&M practises. While this may have been of substantial shock value in 1943, this is not the case today, and our contemporary reaction to all of this may be a big smirking shrug.)

    Things pick up somewhat toward the end of the novel, as Roark once again becomes a major character. Things finally heat up, a city-wide crisis is triggered and fans of Rand’s multi-page screeds have something to look forward to. (Regular readers are advised to skip to the summation.) Things end up more or less as you’d expect, with human spirit triumphing over the bottom-suckers and Roark imposing his will on a subservient city as his opponents are grandly punished. Or something like that.

    Compared to Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead reads a lot like a far less interesting prototype of the same ideas. The emphasis on architecture and the character of Howard Roark aside, The Fountainhead is a lot more restrained, a lot less ludicrous and rather less interesting. Atlas Shrugged is firmly set in science-fiction, whereas The Fountainhead stays anchored to reality with predictably less exciting developments. Rand’s objectivism is more clearly explained in all of its ludicrous glory in Atlas Shrugged, whereas The Fountainhead only occasionally becomes ridiculously obnoxious. Both Rand haters and Rand admirers will be best-served by Atlas Shrugged. As for The Fountainhead, well, Rand herself adapted the book into a movie; why not save yourself a few hours and see for yourself?

  • Taking Lives (2004)

    Taking Lives (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2004) Familiarity breeds contempt, they say, and that’s a large part of why this is such an unsatisfying film. Local issues first: The film supposedly takes place in Montréal, but then switches back and both between Montréal and Québec City. Whaaa? Then there’s the European-French accents of the supposedly French-Canadian actors (even though they end up speaking English to each other most of the time. What’s up with that?) and a pretty damn poor use of local landmarks. Few of this is likely to make an impression on non French-Canadian viewers, but you can bet that the film’s credibility is nil in Quebec. Still, it doesn’t take a francophone to dislike the film: the bad script will do that by itself, from a tepid development to a “twist” that is simultaneously predictable and senseless. You have probably seen enough serial killer thrillers already; this one brings nothing new to the genre (including the dumb “taking lives” premise, so full of holes that it’s a wonder one built a script around it) The last act is especially tedious, as there are few surprises left in store and the last remaining jolt is a shock moment more than a honest twist. Fans of Angelina Jolie will get to see her naked, but even that is no great novelty. This should have been a straight-to-video release.

  • The Celestine Prophecy, James Redfield

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Warner, 1993, 246 pages, C$21.95 hc, ISBN 0-446-51862-X

    Most of my reviews focus on science-fiction, thrillers and truly odd non-fiction. Henceforth, it’s a rarity (outside science-fiction conventions, of course) when I can actually discuss books with other live people. Not so with James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, which has spent some unbelievable time on bestseller lists and seems to have been read by a similarly unbelievable number of people. At the office, about a third of my colleagues seemed to have read the book; a higher proportion still knew enough about it to snicker scornfully.

    I’ll be honest enough to admit that I’m often deeply suspicious of anything that becomes too popular. Yes, I’m an elitist. But an elitist who goes to enough used book sales to be willing to give a chance to anything cheap enough. And so that’s how I ended up with a nice hardcover copy of The Celestine Prophecy (thirty-third printing!) in my to-read stack.

    From the dust jacket, it’s easy to see why the book would inspire both such sales and such scorn. Some mumbo-jumbo about ancient insights, a spiritual culture, universal truths wrapped in contemporary pseudo-scientific vocabulary and the promise of life-shattering revelations. “A book that comes along once in a lifetime to change lives forever” soberly writes the Warner Books copywriter. Whew!

    No being a big fan of new-age yadda-yadda, I was prepared for the worst. What I ended up reading in an hour or so wasn’t all that bad.

    First, let’s state the evidence: Yes, this is feel-good new-age “personal enlightement” literature. It may be masquerading as a (poor) thriller, but the nature of the “insights”, the progression of the litany and the promises of a richer, more fulfilling life are familiar enough.

    But new-age literature is actually more complicated to write than its detractors will allow, given how it has to blend pop-psychology, motivational training and a fair bit of self-hypnosis. Redfield’s stoke of genius was to transpose his dry list of nine insights in a first-person thriller framework. Besides deliberately blurring the lines between reality and fiction, The Celestine Prophecy is kind enough to allow even sceptical readers like me to be swept along (somewhat) by the narrative flow of a story with just enough guns, sex and explosions to make it interesting.

    Now, let’s be truthful and admit that as thriller fiction, The Celestine Prophecy is trash. That’s obvious from the very first few pages, as the author gives himself a “get out of jail free” card in the form of a “nothing happens by accident” First Insight. Whee! Free opportunities to use convenient coincidences over and over and over and over again! The hand of the author in manipulating his characters is obvious though the novel, as the narrator meets one useful character after another and is thrown in a series of suspiciously convenient adventures. Hilarious logical howlers abound, from stupid character names (with no regard to ethnicity) to smack-obvious foreshadowing that allow any alert reader to predict the next chapter’s big insight. The fantasy elements are poorly integrated (Woo! Love-driven auras!), but I’m not about to review The Celestine Prophecy as fantasy, because otherwise we’ll be here until morning without much to account for.

    But you know what? It’s hard for me to be too harsh at a book that cost next to nothing to buy and took barely an hour to read. Fantasy auras aside, the “insights” of the book at the type of harmless things sold far more seriously by Psychology PhDs elsewhere in the self-help section. Heck, it wouldn’t take much to link The Celestine Prophecy to the trans-humanist movement, complete with the final rapture/singularity. And that, for some reason, just warms up my geek heart. Good, bad, just throw The Celestine Prophecy in the “interesting; won’t take too much of your time; fun to argue about” pile. At least it’ll give you something to talk about at the next science-fiction convention… or even at the office.

  • The Punisher (2004)

    The Punisher (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2004) If they ever made a movie about the audience watching this film, they’d call it The Punished. While the vengeful premise initially feels like a throwback to 80s action movies, The Punisher has none of the overblown charm of its Reagan-era predecessor. Detailing the film’s inanities would take too much time, but not as much as explaining why the film feels so dull and lifeless. The biggest problem with The Punisher isn’t how divorced it is from reality, but how it doesn’t bother to offer a more compelling fantasy universe. Even by the uneven standards of movies adapted from Marvel superhero comics, this one makes no sense, from deserted streets in the middle of Tampa to an impromptu press conference announcing both resurrection and vengeance plans. Supposedly top-notch assassins stroll in and sing their appearance (in a restaurant solely populated with the hero’s three allies) while high explosives are obtained by the truckload by a supposedly dead man (and hauled in an apartment with a cheap lock). Thomas Jane growls in the right places and Laura Harring is scrumptious, but John Travolta’s can’t do better than a charmless supporting performance with the awful material he’s burdened with. The pacing is completely off; don’t be surprised if you end up demanding a lot more punishment. Worse, however, is the film’s tone: not only doesn’t it succeed in imposing an overly dramatic atmosphere to the protagonist’s action (complete with a lot of alcohol; dumb), it feels compelled to introduce wacky neighbours as comic relief. It’s hard to overstate how ineffective those attempts end up: In fact, it’s more appropriate to talk about “exasperation” than “comic relief”. There are two or three effective moments, but don’t worry: You’ve seen them in other, better movies already.

  • The Passion Of The Christ (2004)

    The Passion Of The Christ (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2004) There is something tremendously ironic about the mega-success of this film: The first successful melding of religious fervour and Fangoria-grade gore.; the fact that fundamentalist Christians flocked to an R-rated film after decades of decrying too-violent movies; the way some critics forgot all of their usual cinematographic standards in favour of ideological confessions one way or another. It’s almost too easy to forget that there’s an actual film in the middles of the flying fur, and that it’s a flawed film at that. Oh, technically there’s few one can say about it: It’s competently directed, contains a few really nice shots, features very impressive makeup, convincingly recreates a period and is even daring in its stylistic choices. But the pacing of the film is a bit off, the story depends too much on what viewers already know (or can remember) from Sunday School and the gratuitous inclusion of a Satan-of-sorts often makes no sense. This is definitely a throwback to hellfire-and-brimstone old-school Catholicism where Jesus ain’t your buddy given how he suffered for your sins. Considering the film as a B-grade horror film is enlightening, given how the film often (more specifically during it first half-hour) goes for cheap scares in the best tradition of the genre. Alas, the gore isn’t terribly gross (well, there’s a lot of blood, but then again my standard in this area have been forever altered by Dead Alive) and Monica Bellucci doesn’t even show anything under the neck (is that a first?); that’s a waste of a perfectly good R rating right there. All in all, an interesting film but hardly an essential one; see it because everyone else has.

  • Underworld, Don DeLillo

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Scribner, 1997, 827 pages, C$34.95 hc, ISBN 0-684-84269-6

    Reading around the web for critical commentary about Don DeLillo’s Underworld, I find teachers, students, readers, fans and commentators all anxious to fit the novel in their own vision of late-twentieth-century America. I see numerous allusion to Underworld as a Great American Novel. I see everyone extracting meaning from the book as others press orange pulp for juice. So why not do the same? Why not assign great meaning to the book? Why not make it fit in my own theories about life, universe and everything?

    Why not, indeed, use Underworld as a prism by which to study the differences between literature and genre fiction, if indeed there is one? Underworld is usually discussed in hushed tones implying that it is the very achievement of literature, the pure concentrate of fine writing. Isn’t it possible, then, to see it as a quintessential manifestation of modern fiction? To oppose it against an entire corpus of so-called “lesser” genre fiction? If we bounce off particles of science-fiction, fantasy, thrillers or mysteries off of Underworld at ludicrously high velocities, what flashes of insight can we get?

    Our first order of business is to determine what Underworld is about, if indeed it is about anything. Certainly, even a careful reading of the text can leave anyone unsure: it’s about baseball, crime, waste, the cold war, the atom bomb, modern art, serial killing, religion, miracles, the Cuba Crisis, Lenny Bruce, Edgar J. Hoover, Vietnam, New York, affairs, marriages and so on… It themes are too restrictive, maybe a given period is the answer: Doesn’t Underworld span nearly half a decade, from 1951 to (roughly) 1997? If it’s not about something, is it about the entirely of the American experience from then to now?

    What it certainly isn’t about is a plot. While there are recurring threads here and there in those 862 pages, it’s not as if there is a single coherent drive to the narrative thrust. And that’s where we get the first hint of illumination regarding genre fiction: Regardless of style, characters or atmosphere, genre fiction is first and foremost a story being told, from point A to (roughly) point B. Underworld is a sprawling bag of knots: fascinating, difficult (and rewarding) to unravel, but certainly not a thread spooling from one axis to another.

    That, in itself may be a clue to the meaning of Underworld. For this novel is unstuck in chronology: Save for its prologue and epilogue, classically set as far apart as the chronology will allow, the novel runs backward, section by section. 1992, 1980s, 1974, 1960s, 1951… As we regress in time, some character’s formative experiences are explained and revealed. Like peeling an onion. Like uncovering a present. Like taking apart a bomb. Some sections jumble up the chronology even within themselves, presenting further challenges. Reading Underworld as quickly as possible is not just a good idea; it may be just about the only way to keep up with the vast amount of discontinuous information thrown at the reader. Most things interconnect, but it’s all too easy to miss those nodes of meaning.

    But ultimately, regardless of the complex structure of the novel, the way most things mesh with another, the rewarding feeling of accomplishment whenever one notices thematic resonance between very different areas of the novel, the question arises: Was it worth reading? Was it worth slogging though? Did it ultimately mean anything? Those are questions seldom, yet always asked of genre fiction, because the answers are more obvious: A good story is worth reading without questions, and doesn’t have to mean anything if it’s sufficiently entertaining. But as Underworld overwhelms with Americana and stylistic experiments, as it slows down to nearly a halt in Part 6, as it once again rehashes nuclear oblivion, the thought springs unbidden: Why bother? Why not wait for PBS’s “The Cold War” special series? What is so unique about Underworld?

    For the genre readers, it’s even worse, for they know that the same points, the same anxieties, have been covered elsewhere in genre fiction, with more entertainment value and often more depth. Nuclear Holocaust? Been there, saw the mutants. Serial killers? Read that, caught the culprit. American underworld? Bought the T-Shirt, got the Philip K. Dick novel. And once again, genre readers are reminded why they seldom bother with the mainstream stuff: why suffer through 862 pages of meta-referential fine writing when you can get more in a 350-pages novel of compulsively readable entertainment? Aside from being able to title-drop, that is?

  • Man On Fire (2004)

    Man On Fire (2004)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, April 2004) Almost-successful revenge drama starring Denzel Washington in another very solid performance. Unlike some other revenge films, there is some real emotional content as the relationship between victim and avenger is established. It takes too much time (nearly an hour!), but at least it’s there, buried under the stylistic embellishments of directory Tony Scott. Anyone who has followed the brother Scotts’ careers knows that they’re prone to unexplainable excess, and Man On Fire attains an exasperating paroxysm of self-indulgent style. For no reason at all, the camera will jerk, speed up, slow down, cut to impressionistic passages or go wild with grain and outrageous colours. It works in some specific instances, but otherwise mauls the intent of some scenes and inserts another layer of interpretation between the viewer and the story. The only truly successful experiment is the unprecedented use of subtitles as emotional counterpoint to the action: Even English phrases are written on-screen as reflections on the action and illustrations of rage. (Overall, though, Scott’s “Deal with the Devil” short film on the bmwfilms.com site serves as a stylistic preview of Man On Fire) There’s no denying that this is a very long film. When it starts to heat up, it does the “revenge fantasy” shtick better than The Punisher (and, ironically, in a style considerably closer to comic books that the comic book adaption itself) But it’s just too long; even the elegiac conclusion could have been chopped away without much loss. Not bad, but annoying. Not good, but involving. Tony Scott is working only a tiny trip away from total madness, through.