Reviews

  • Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

    Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 1998) Now, can anyone explain to me why it’s supposed to be such a great movie? Glacial cinematography, coma-inducing pacing, painfully obvious plotting, ugly heroine, laughable scenes (the would-be horror showcase scene of the movie sent me in uncontrollable giggles the moment the words “Satan is the father! Hail Satan!” were pronounced) and a conclusion without any real payoff makes this ridiculous movie a relic of the past. It would have been far better as a half-hour “Twilight Zone”, although I doubt Rod Serling would have allowed such silliness on his show. It’s a measure of the movie’s lack of effect that I found myself thinking that real-life witches are unfairly discriminated against by Rosemary’s Baby.

  • Dust, Charles Pellegrino

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Avon, 1998, 387 pages, C$19.95 hc, ISBN 0-380-97308-1

    There is a fascination about contemplating the unthinkable. Survivalists, civil safety officials, prophets and science-fiction writers all depend in large part on this fascination. Somehow, imagining that everything we hold dear -including our lives- could be snatched away at any time makes us appreciate what we have even more.

    Yet, destroying the world is easy, at least for the fertile imaginations of the latter twentieth century. From the oh-so-very-sixties retro nuclear apocalypse, we’ve moved on to plagues (King’s The Stand), celestial objects impact (Niven and Pournelle’s Lucifer’s Hammer), Black Holes (Bear’s The Forge of God), Alien Invasions (Again, The Forge of God) and the like. J.G.Ballard has even written four books dealing with end-of-the-world scenarios. At this point, it would seem unlikely to find a new and exciting way to end the world, but that’s exactly what Charles Pellegrino does with Dust.

    This time, the novel start with a deadly whimper as hundreds are eaten alive by swarming clouds of mites. But, as Pellegrino makes it very clear, this is only a symptom of a deeper problem; the disappearance of insects.

    Sounds like a doubleplusgood thing to you? Not quite. Pellegrino neatly dissects Gaia’s ecosystem with his clear and incisive imagination. Even early on, the novel makes no secret of the fact that this is The End. As in; no more human race. We’re going the way of the dinosaur. Ecological collapse isn’t quite as frightening as the resulting social, politic and economic descent in anarchy.

    But why are the insects disappearing? That’s one surprise best left between Dust‘s covers. As he had done with the concept of relativistic bombs in his previous solo novel Flying to Valhalla, Pellegrino pulls straight existential horror out of simple facts and reasonable extrapolations. “A novel even scarier than Jaws” blurbs Arthur C. Clarke. This is no inflated hype.

    Dust is so stuffed with surprising factoids, ideas and concepts that the twenty-five pages scientific afterword is more than welcome. Pellegrino loves to have ideas and play with them; we should be grateful that he also loves to share them.

    As a novel, most will agree that Dust isn’t quite up for the Pulitzer. Characters are annoyingly similar to one another and rarely given the chance to distinguish themselves, the action is sometime jerkily shown (when it isn’t simply told rather than shown), the dialogue -while seemingly authentic for scientists- is a bit stiff, the plotting has imperfections, etc… But given the density of Dust‘s narrative -it packs the end of the world in less than 400 pages- and the excellence of everything else, it really doesn’t matter. Readers of hard-SF, techno-thrillers and other high-fact-density fiction will find here exactly what they wish for: a good, scary, unflinching and eminently plausible end-of-the-world novel.

    As luck has it, Avon book is offering this full-size hardcover novel at a bargain price (16$ US, 20$ Can.) Rush to your bookstore and order it if they don’t have it; it’s worth every penny. It’s frightening, thrilling, thought-provoking, ironic, brilliant and stunningly entertaining.

    Dust offers a shocking contrast with the usual Hollywood-produced disaster story. Everything is convincingly explained, well-developed and brought to its logical conclusion. There is no last-minute reprieve, but if Dust is implacable, it is not entirely without optimism. Somehow, this is a happier, more satisfying ending than “Boom went the asteroid and they all lived happily ever after.”

    (Keep your eyes open for the lovely mention of Fahrenheit 451.)

  • Risky Business (1983)

    Risky Business (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 1998) One co-worker is fond of saying that Risky Business is one of the most subversive comedies of the eighties. He’s right: Not only is the premise (guy starts a whorehouse at home while his parents are gone on vacation) pretty amoral, but the movie makes no attempt whatsoever at any kind of message or fairness. Bordering on soft-porn at time, it’s definitely a memorable film. Unfortunately, that doesn’t quite mean it’s good: Overlong at times, suffering heavily from an infernal Tangerine Dreams early-eighties electro-synth soundtrack (and a Genesis song that was so singularly awful that it managed to make me fast-forward through a nude scene), not really witty in term of dialogues and muddily shot, it’s not quite as good at could have been. On the other hand, Tom Cruise is suitably sympathetic, Rebecca de Mornay is breathtaking and the unabashedly perverted tone is decidedly worthwhile.

  • Q [The Winged Serpent] (1982)

    Q [The Winged Serpent] (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 1998) It’s always a good time for a movie in which a monster takes over New York, and this one is quirkier than most. Titled Q because nobody (including me) can spell Quetzalcoatl, this is a low-budget horror film that has a few surprises but few rewards. The basic story (loser criminal discovering monster nest; police tracking down monster’s nefarious deeds) is better that average for the “monster”-type of movie, but it’s also unfortunately quite silly and burdened with laughable effects. Not a lot of suspense either, and not enough of that monster.

  • Pleasantville (1998)

    Pleasantville (1998)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In theaters, October 1998) Hot on the heels of Gattaca, Dark City and The Truman Show, here’s yet another quirky, imaginative film that truly gives hope for Hollywood’s future. What if those 50s sitcom were real, and you could live in them? What if you could change this universe? Pleasantville takes this rather simple premise and runs with it, delivering a scattershot of social commentary that is, more often that not, on target. Superb acting barely takes precedence over a wonderful use of digital effects to show the changing nature of Pleasantville. Without seeming like it, this is actually one of the most pernicious movies in recent memory; one -er- “flaming” visual pun is so obscene that I’m too ashamed to describe it here. I had problems with several elements the conclusion (Writer/Director Gary Ross wrote himself in a corner) until I rationalized them as Pleasantville‘s way of highlight one of its central thesis; uncertainty must be accepted. (I also have issues with the way that few of the other idealized values of Pleasantville are thought desirable.) Thought-provoking, uplifting and simply very well-done, Pleasantville vaults to the top of this year’s crop. Do not miss it.

  • On Deadly Ground (1994)

    On Deadly Ground (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 1998) What happens when idiots get money, power and guilt? This. Starring, produced and directed by Steven Seagal himself, On Deadly Ground is an inferior action picture wrapped (smothered might be a better word) in insipid environmentalist drivel, outright glorification of primitive lifestyles -with assorted mysticism- and belief in the urban legends of “Big Business suppressing clean technology”. This is the most hypocritical movie in ages, where Seagal beats up people to make them understand, destroys an oil rig to save the environment and doesn’t even kiss the girl. On Deadly Ground has little of the campy fun so pleasant in cheap action movies: here, we sense that Seagal is earnest and the result is more pitiful than fun. There are only one or two good action scenes. Don’t (or rather, do) miss the final five minutes, which may be the single most incompetent attempt yet to include a message in a movie.

  • You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, Julia Phillips

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Signet, 1991, 628 pages, C$7.99 mmpb, ISBN 0-451-17072-5

    Sex! Power! Drugs! Money! More money! More power! More sex!

    Nope, I’m not talking about Washington. The New Babylon, as most suspect, is Hollywood. Tinseltown is what happens when you funnel millions (assuming that every American spends 25$ a year to see movies on screen or video, that’s six billion dollars, folks.) and you place it in the hands of people without talent, brains or restraint. I’ve never had too much of a high opinion of Hollywood (that’s what happens when you identify more closely with the writers and CGI animators than anyone else) and it sank even more with You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again.

    Lunch is the autobiography of Julia Philips, a movie producer. Her filmography is semi-impressive: In the seventies, she produced The Sting, Taxi Driver and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Other than that, not much. No wonder that most moviegoers haven’t really heard of her.

    But outside a simple filmography, Phillips spent most of her time in Hollywood (and most of this book’s hefty 600+ pages) doing drugs. Lunch is a confessional where she describes her ascent, descent and recovery. It’s less glorious or fascinating than it sounds.

    Lunch, in a few words, teaches important lessons: When reading an autobiography by someone you don’t know, it is essential that:

    A> The narrator is likeable. Not the case here, since Phillips is most definitely someone I wouldn’t like to meet (and this is reciprocal; “Scorsese, Dreyfuss, Milius, Spielberg, Schraeder, etc. A rogues’ gallery of nerds. There is not a single guy here I would have dated in high school or college.” [P.131] I happen to be a nerd; G’bye, Julia!). Her constant, and unrepenting, abuse of drugs, alcohol and sex doesn’t help. You’ll excuse me if I don’t find attractive folks accepting Oscars while on a coke high. What also grates is that while she says she stopped doing coke, by the end of the book she’s still heavily in the so-called “softer” drugs… Redemption? Really?

    B> If you can’t be likeable, be interesting. Here too, Philips fails: Lunch is six hundred pages of minutia, of boring and unlikeable anecdotes, of flings with people we couldn’t care less about. Some will say that this only adds texture to the narrative; I say that this would have been a crackerjax 200-pages autobiography. As such, most of the time we’re wading in irrelevancies. I didn’t skim, but I really wanted to.

    C> The narrative should attach itself to known markers. Here, Philips is most interesting when she talks about the making of CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, Steven Spielberg, Arthur C. Clarke or known actors. Since we’ve already established that we’re not interested in her life (see A> and B>), she might as well talk about others. Sadly, this doesn’t really happen as often as we wish it would. (In the middle of a chainsaw autobiography, however, it’s fun to see who remains unscathered. Speilberg comes out okay.)

    but finally…

    D> Be coherent. And Phillips isn’t. As said before, the book is overlong. But it’s also full of digressions that aren’t related to the tale, of sermonizing little philosophical speeches and of self-congratulatory monologues. Problem is, most of them don’t make as much sense as she thinks it does (I did mention she was still doing soft drugs, hmmm?) and the remainder is just embarrassingly juvenile. It also doesn’t help that Phillips consider herself as exceptionally intelligent. I was reminded of a line in John Brunner’s The Sheep Looks up: “If [she’s] so intelligent, then why isn’t she so smart?”

    The result is a bloated failure. Fortunately, a complete index will help out the impatient reader anxious to get to all the good parts. Read the sections about CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, about Spielberg, Beatty, Clarke, Gere, Rice, Truffault and (Don) Simpson, but don’t give Phillips the karmic satisfaction of dumping all her anxious neuroses on you.

  • The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

    The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 1998) A delight during its first hour, where we see the unwitting ascension of a slightly-naïve young man. The visual style is wonderful, the performances (by Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Paul Newman, Bruce Campbell…) are excellent and the story draws you into the movie. The second half is more conventional and loses steam, though it still keeps your interest. The final ending, though, is a cheat. Overall; good entertainment.

  • Gridlock (1996)

    Gridlock (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 1998) It’s a well-known fact that high-profile film project often inspire cheap b-series movies. Jurassic Park spawned Carnosaur and Twister spun off Tornado (with Bruce Campbell) but here, Gridlock is a low-budget TV-movie exploitation of Die Hard 3: With A Vengeance. To wit: Robbers cause mayhem in New York to cover the fact that they’re robbing the Federal Reserve Bank. But instead of Following Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson through New York, we get to see David Hasselhoff as a police officer trying to rescue his fiancée -played by supermodel Kathy Ireland- from the evil robber terrorists. Hasselhoff is actually credible and Ireland is pretty to look at. The remainder of the movie is an exercise on how to film a standard action flick without the big budget, a competent action director or a big budget: While the preposterous story is adequate by the standards of the genre, the final result falls short of even the most average actionners. (Favorite stupid detail: They steal gold and paper money and erase the numbers of both in the main computer. Why not just grab the gold and melt it afterward? Duuuh…)

  • Down Periscope (1996)

    Down Periscope (1996)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 1998) This isn’t very good considering the logical plotholes, run-of-the-mill plotting, average dialogue and sophomoric humor. On the other hand, it lets itself be watched quite easily. Few comedies deal with submarines and it’s probably a measure of my fascination with subs that I enjoyed this even despite counting off the stupid mistakes. (Though we get the feeling that the mistakes are intentional and from someone who has at least an adequate grasp of the field.) Lauren Holly, despite being completely useless, is a visual delight constantly renewed (it’s amazing to see the lengths at which movie producers will go to show cleavage in any movie). It’s also kind of cool to see a Village People song used as package for the end credit outtakes, along with bodacious babes in bikinis in the background. A guilty pleasure.

  • Disclosure (1994)

    Disclosure (1994)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 1998) Michael Crichton’s reactionary novel about female sexual harassment in a high-tech firm was a pernicious page-turner. Written according to Crichton’s usual stellar standards of plotting, accessibility and superficial issue examination, it seemed like a natural candidate for translation on the big screen. Disclosure is exactly what it purports to be; an average thriller with enough anti-feminist elements to make it attractive to the general public. Some moments are ludicrous (the Virtual Reality sequence, the elevator dream), but the remainder is okay. Demi Moore is hot. Some changes from the book.

  • The Dreams our Stuff is Made Of, Thomas M. Disch

    ByChristian Sauvé Book Review

    Free Press, 1998, 256 pages, C$35.00 hc, ISBN 0-684-82405-1

    Don’t bother reading The Dreams our Stuff is Made Of if you don’t really know your Science-Fiction. I mean it.

    Good, serious, knowledgeable critical studies of Science-Fiction aren’t exactly common. (recently, only David Hartwell’s revised edition of Age of Wonders and the John Clute collection of reviews Look at the Evidence come to mind) So it wasn’t a surprise if Dreams‘s reputation preceded its arrival in my reading stack. For a book as opinionated as Dreams, it’s a wonder the whole work wasn’t spoiled well beforehand.

    Thomas M. Disch isn’t exactly a superstar of SF nowadays, but he has published a variety of deeply impressive stories since the sixties, as well as several “classic” novels like Camp Concentration and 334. He has also published widely out of the SF genre, including a volume of poetry criticism. Part unfamiliar figure, part seasoned veteran, Disch is uniquely positioned to comment on the genre with a view that’s both sympathetic and iconoclastic.

    Books like Dreams are written to slaughter sacred cows. And SF has more than a herd of those. Disch spends pages explaining why Heinlein was racist and sexist, then turns around and mows down Ursula K. LeGuin. As if that wasn’t enough, he moves on to easier targets like new-age wackoes, UFO true believers and scientologists only to drive the point home by stating than for better of for worse, these weirdoes were created and are sustained by SF. Many will blush.

    Other highlights include an intriguing treatise on why Edgar Allan Poe is the true father of SF, not Mary Shelley, Wells or Verne. While the argumentation isn’t flawless, it’s interesting. Also worth reading is the effect of SF on the cold war, the argument that dreams entail responsibility and Disch’s views on televised SF, Star Trek in particular.

    And yet, despite these juicy bits, The Dreams our Stuff is Made of seems curiously tame, almost as if Disch pulls his punches. Call me a bloody ungrateful bastard, but I wanted more. I wanted Disch to spend more time on the Fringe/SF connection, the disappearing place of SF in a society more and more influenced by SF, the effect of contemporary fantasy on SF and the effect of SF on politics. But then again, I also wanted him to name the writers whose output was affected by drugs instead of getting away with such hints as “read between the lines of those senior writers who once seemed so wonderful and who now, so noticeably, are not. The reason, when it isn’t booze, is probably pot.” [P. 114]

    The other major flaw of Dreams is more serious. While Disch tries to paint a picture of a whole genre, his examples of written SF are from before 1985, at the shocking exceptions of Greg Egan’s Quarantine, Whitley Streiber’s alien contact “non-fiction” and The Forstein/Gingrinch “collaboration” 1945. He does talk at length, however about INDEPENDENCE DAY while mentioning THE FIFTH ELEMENT, CONTACT and THE LOST WORLD… Is Disch trying to say that written SF isn’t as relevant to the genre? Even though he’s essentially saying this, it might lead some readers to suspect that there’s almost fifteen years of SF that Disch is deliberately ignoring.

    Finally, the book doesn’t really prove its own proposition (“How SF conquered the world”), instead presenting a series of thoughts about the genre. It might be more appropriate to call this an essay collection.

    Oh; Page 10: Wasn’t Del Rey books named after Judy-Lynn Del Rey?

    Perhaps the most shocking thing about Dreams is the way I wasn’t shocked by Disch’s argumentation. As mentioned, this is a bit of a disappointment. But it might also be a measure of Disch’s ambiguous success, with a book of criticism that’s recapitulative but not definitive, rough but not heretical, less impressive than expected but still commendable.

  • Death Warrant (1990)

    Death Warrant (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 1998) This scores high on the giggle-meter if only for the setup, where Jean-Claude Van Damme is revealed to be a policeman from Quebec (!) put in a California prison so that he won’t be recognized (!!) while investigating the deaths of several prisoners. (!!!) From stereotypical lecherous hackers to the final showdown between van Damme and The Guy Who Killed His Partner -including the non-resolution of the mystery,- this is bad enough to make you throw a party every time it plays on TV. Better yet; rent it with Sudden Death and bill your experience as Sudden Death Warrant: A Van Damme Retrospective.

  • Darkman (1990)

    Darkman (1990)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 1998) While this film will never be considered a great movie by any rational criteria, it must be said that it’s considerably enjoyable. One of the purest comic-book movies ever, Darkman blends howlingly funny melodrama with the over-the-top direction of Sam Raimi (Army Of Darkness) and the result is silly but exciting. It’s a shock to see Serious Actor Liam Neeson in the title role. A good late-night movie.

  • Chinatown (1974)

    Chinatown (1974)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 1998) Even though I’ve used Syd Field’s Screenplay to write a script and generally worship everything the guy says, I don’t agree with his enthusiastic praise of Chinatown. Problem is; it’s just not interesting enough. Three P.I. tricks, incest, unhappy ending and a cut nose. Nope; saw better elsewhere. Nicholson is okay, but the other players fade in the background. It certainly holds up better than most of the other movies of the time (it can be re-watched today without many problems), it’s probably one of the best movies of the seventies, but so far it’s not a favorite of mine.

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, July 2021) I’m sorry, everyone! One of the reasons why I amend my movie reviews as I re-watch them is to capture the evolution of my reactions across the years. That goes doubles for films I revisit after decades, hoping that the years have given me a better perspective on the result. If you’re reading this, you probably read my amazingly stupid first take on Chinatown in the preceding paragraph, written as a young twentysomething college student. I was young and ignorant, but that’s no excuse. Now that I’m approaching the film with a far better understanding of life and Hollywood history, let me change my mind – Chinatown deserves the classic status that has been bestowed upon it. It is markedly better-written than most movies, better executed and far more hard-hitting in its thematic intentions. As the intersection of crime thriller, Los Angeles history, character study, genre deconstruction and paean to classic films, it’s got quite a lot on its mind, and presents it effectively. I remembered broad strokes of the film and the implacable conclusion, but much of the pleasure of a second viewing is in appreciating its execution: Much has been written on the collaborative push-and-pull that resulted in the final result, and it’s a fascinating case study in how it takes plenty of skilled people to produce something like it. Jack Nicholson is excellent as the private detective manipulated in creating problems for everyone, while Jack Huston turns in a veteran’s performance as a monstrous antagonist. The period recreation is convincing despite being limited by the means available at the time – although critics have a point when they suggest that the film isn’t about being set in a specific year as much as it’s a blend of historical elements spanning decades. The narrative engine of the film is strong enough to keep even spoiled viewers invested in where it’s all going, especially as it starts tweaking clichés along the way. Yes, I’m glad that I revisited Chinatown, if only because I can update my assessment to a far more satisfactory one.