Too late, I decided to start jotting down my favourite lines from Steve Hely’s How I Became a Famous Novelist. I was already nearly finished reading the book, but here ars a few:

“She was clearly worried about getting every detail right. That’s a stupid and time-consuming way to write.” (p. 221)

“Supertramp would come in from the main bar on the jukebox, and somebody would mention they had this tape in junior high, and I’d liven up a little, thinking maybe we could hang out and talk about Supertramp. But within two redirections everybody would be talking about Alice Munro.” (p. 225)

“It was hurting my face to look interested.” (p. 226)

As you can see, that’s a sampling from just a few pages. The book rarely lets up; it’s pretty much funny from start to finish, with great lines on every page.

A former writer for The Late Show with David Letterman and current writer at The Office, Hely has written an inspired satire of the book industry. No one in the literary world, from writers to readers to critics (“Book reviewers are the most despicable, loathsome order of swine that ever rooted about the earth”) is safe from Hely’s eagle eye as his protagonist, Pete Tarslaw, plots vengeance against his university girlfriend Polly Pawson. His big idea: to get on the bestseller list so he can show up at her wedding as a famous author. (Fortunately, Polly announces her wedding more than a year in advance, more than enough time for a budding author to crack the code of the New York Times bestellers list and come up with one of his own!)

The result of Tarslaw’s labour is The Tornado Ashes Club, his version of the kind of cheesily sentimental fake literary novel that sometimes squeezes onto the list between the usual techno-thrillers, conspiracy potboilers and women detective novels. But Hely doesn’t just skewer the Tom Clancys and Dan Browns of the world; he also satirizes precious creative-writing-workshop types (Prairiegrass Review is the name of the university short fiction journal mentioned). The satire is almost always surgical in its precision and wickedly funny, even if Tarslaw often comes across as your typical under-achieving slovenly male (I was reminded of Fry on Futurama but with a little more on the ball.) Also, Hely comes up with the best fake book titles since P.G. Wodehouse: Mindstretch, Sageknights of Darkhorn, The Balthazar Tablet and Nick Boyle’s Shock Blade: Lynchpin strike the perfect balance between absurd and something you would see someone (not YOU, of course) actually reading on a plane.

However, I did have one small problem with How I Became a Famous Novelist. Without giving too much away, the end left me a little confused; it seems to take a lot of the sting out of what had come before. Still, the questionable decision to mute the satire when perhaps it should have been turned up is a minor glitch in a novel that starts funny and just gets funnier.

Oh, and did I mention there are some Vancouver and B.C. jokes as well?

I’m trying to keep a weekly update of movies watched. Usually they’re from either the library, the local video store (Black Dog on Commercial Drive in Vancouver) or TCM (Turner Classic Movies), since I rarely go to movie theatres any more – and after seeing Hugo (see previous review), may never go again.

Point Blank (2010, French, Blu-ray) – A dumbell, a chair, an oil-filled heater and de-fibrillator. These are just a few of things that are at hand whenever one of the good guys in this spectacularly stoopid 2010 French thriller is being menaced by a bad guy. Unfortunately for the bad guys, they benefit from no such convenience in the lazy script by director Fred Cavayé and Guillaume Lemans.

A movie that would be over within the first 20 minutes if any of the main characters had a half a brain , A bout portant (original title) comes in a Blu-ray (this was a rental) package that promises a suspenseful, breakneck thriller – which is what I was looking for. It’s just dumb.

Run, don't walk, away from the video store if you see a staff recommendation for Point Blank.

Heavenly Creatures (1994, New Zealand/Germany, Blu-ray) – Another rental, Peter Jackson’s intro to North American movie houses (and Kate Winslet’s first movie) is still a compelling character study and anatomy of a murder (based on a true story). It was obvious to those of us seeing it when Heavenly Creatures was first released that the camera loves Winslet, and that Jackson (who of course would go on to direct the Lord of the Rings trilogy and is busy as of this writing turning The Hobbit into not one but two moviehouse hogs) was a director of some talent. Indeed, watching Heavenly Creatures again 17 years later, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s obvious that Jackson could no more not exploit every possible fantasy element (clay people come to life) of a non-fantasy story than he could leave Gollum out of the Rings. Still, Heavenly Creatures is among his best work, and is beautiful to see in Blu-ray.

Kate Winslet in Heavenly Creatures (1994). The camera has spoken.

Clueless (U.S.A., 1995) – Another (like Heavenly Creatures) schoolgirl movie – a coincidence, believe me. Anyway, Amy Heckerling’s brightly coloured, pop pastiche updating of Jane Austen’s Emma for the Beverley Hills couldn’t be more different from the dark, twisted Heavenly Creatures. Like Valley Girl and the more recent Easy A, which owes a huge debt to Clueless, this is a comedy that never condescends, either to its struggling adolescents or their parents. Clueless also offers plenty of smart, fun dialogue, surprisingly real characters (particularly Alicia Silverstone’s Cher) and genuinely funny moments – such as Dan Hedaya (as Cher’s dad) barking at Brittany Murphy’s character to get out of his chair, or the scene where Cher’s friend Dionne accidentally merges onto the freeway while learning to drive. Three of us, ranging in age from 31 to 59, watched this library copy DVD on a Saturday night, and everyone was so thoroughly entertained we watched some of the extras. And that’s saying something.

Wonder how Mean Girls holds up...

They want to start the automaton. Who cares?

I feel somewhat churlish saying this, and fear that I might be labeled a curmudgeonly (and part-time, amateur) movie reviewer who is contrary for the sake of it. Especially after my review of another movie everyone seems to love, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (see previous entry). Because now here I am, trashing an even more acclaimed holiday flick. But I have to say it: Hugo, Martin Scorsese‘s much-ballyhooed venture into 3D family fun, is not a good movie.

It’s not awful, though. Hugo is beautiful to look at (well, with the exception of the face of lead actor Asa Butterfield, whose adorableness triggered some kind of primitive wanting-to-punch-his-face-in reflex in me) but empty and without a story that is in the least compelling. I should’ve taken my nephew – we saw Hugo at a Winnipeg megaplex over the holidays – to see Tintin instead; as creepy and Tilda Swinton-ish as the title character looks, at least the movie might have a pulse.

The basic problem with Hugo is that it’s boring. There’s no real story there; all the situations seem and relationships are completely contrived. This is particularly true of the relationship on which the movie hangs, that between Butterfield’s orphaned moppet and Ben Kingsley‘s shop owner. Even after Kingsley’s character and back-story are revealed, nothing we are told justifies the over-the-top hostility he shows towards Hugo in the opening scenes.

Sasha Baron Cohen as the train station agent (Hugo lives in a train station in a 1930s Paris populated by nothing but English speakers with British accents) is comic relief with nothing funny to do. The plot, such as it is, offers no real threat or conflict; Hugo is either trying to avoid detection by Cohen or find a key to the automaton his father (Jude Law) left behind. This is the kind of movie that gives us dozens of shots of an angry dog as though that will be enough to provide suspense.

Hugo has not one memorable line or scene – even when the kid is dangling from the hand of a clock in a supposed life-or-death scene, we are aware the image is cribbed from a Harold Lloyd movie (the Lloyd scene is referenced when Hugo and his friend, played by Chloe Moretz, sneak into a cinema). The movie, which has a running length of over two hours, is also too long by at least 30 minutes.

So why is this movie getting a free pass? I suspect for two reasons: one, it’s Scorsese who, in an age of Ratner and Ritchie, can do no wrong in critics’ eyes. Second, because Hugo, as mentioned, looks beautiful and is also a salute to cinema magic, which never fails to ignite critics’ nostalgia for the good old days. The cinema magic invoked specifically are the films of pioneering moviemaker Georges Mélies. In a montage towards the end, we see examples of the kind of magic that Melies was capable of over a century ago, and all of them look more magical than anything in the claptrap we’ve just seen.

Fuck this movie.

I am so sick of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

I hate to sound like a nabob of negativity, but after sacrificing 10 hours – at least six on the novel; at least two on the first (Swedish) movie version; and two hours and forty minutes (fuck you , David Fincher!) on the second – on this stupid story, I feel entitled.

Three years ago, after falling for the buzz, I read/skimmed the book, and found it utterly pedestrian except, perhaps, for the character of antisocial computer hacker Lisbeth Salander.

I watched the Swedish version of the movie because, while reading the book, I thought that while it was a pretty shitty crime novel it could make for a decent flick.

But now we have this absurd remake, a Hollywood cash-grab featuring a mostly American cast speaking English pretending to be Swedish trying to solve a boring-ass mystery that was barely interesting the first time.

I went because several family members (two of my sisters and my mother, primarily) wanted to see it and because all the critics seem to be in love with Rooney Mara as Salander.

But why is the public so enamored with this dull Swedish crime import?

Two words: anal rape.

Yes, just like when moviegoers freaked out 40 years ago over Deliverance, with its threat of (male) anal rape, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – with not just one but two scenes of the violent act – has captured, even titillated, the imaginations of middlebrow North American sensibilities.

Certainly, the plot can’t account for why this material is being picked over. There is so much wrong with Dragon Tattoo‘s story – the whole main mystery plotline, what powers the next 160 minutes, hinges on the audience not suspecting anything when, right at the very beginning, we are told that a girl is definitely dead, even though the body was never found (and anyone who has read more than one or two mysteries or watched any TV will know that no body = no death) – that there’s no way that the main plot on its own can account for the book’s insane popularity.

The only level on which it works, or offers anything new/interesting/different, is the character of Salander. And her character comes most alive in the scenes which have nothing to do with the murder mystery itself; her rape by, and subsequent revenge on, her state-appointed guardian could be in a totally different movie, so little bearing does it have on the rest of the 150 minutes.

No doubt Salander’s resourcefulness makes her an empowering role model (witness my 76-year-old mother’s vocal satisfaction, in the theatre, at seeing the character making off with a couple of billion euros). But again, all of this is set up by the sexual violence.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is, in the end, utter nonsense (and, after suffering through the story a third time, I feel completely justified in saying this). The reason that it has hit a nerve is its subtext about violence against women (the book’s original Swedish title in translation is Men Who Hate Women). However, it does so not with art and subtlety but – especially in director David Fincher’s sloppy-thirds stab at the material – by bludgeoning the viewer and reader with its “message”.

Unfortunately, Fincher’s movie also uses the very thing it pretends to protest – violence against women – to make millions and millions of dollars.

However, the idea of another pair of glasses isn’t as attractive as putting an end to the need for glasses once and for all. So today I called up yet another eye surgery centre in Vancouver, Coal Harbour Eye Centre, and made an appointment for another consultation (my third). I’m back to thinking about getting the basic lasik procedure; the healing time is faster than PRK, although it does leave your eyes permanently drier. Coal Harbour offers both procedures for the same price though, with no hidden fees (as far as I could tell – unlike Lasik MD). I also liked that Marty, their “consultant” (what the receptionist called him), said I couldn’t wear contacts for five days before the consultancy. This made me think they might do a bit of a more thorough job of measuring and testing my eyes than in previous consultancies, where I got the idea I could’ve jabbed carrots in my orbs before the tests and no one would’ve cared/noticed.

Dr. Steven might operate on my eyeballs!

The appointment is next Thursday a.m. I hope to finally come to a decision soon after… these Internet-ordered glasses suck!

That wasn’t a huge help but it’s a start. If you use an online music service or online radio let me know, I’m planning an in-depth article and guide on the various available options.

Robert De Niro in The King of Comedy (1983).

I’m a little late, but in future I’ll be trying to post each Monday (or even Sunday) about the previous week’s watched movies.

The edition is for movies watched between Dec 5 – 11.

Pulp Fiction (DVD rental; Mon) – For some reason I wanted to revisit this and, you know, it doesn’t quite hold up. It’s still thrilling in some spots – when Tarantino lets loose and just revels in the joy of moviemaking, such as in the pawnshop scene and the stoned-out milieu at Eric Stoltz‘s drug-den – he’s like a kid in a sandbox. But at other times he falls prey to his own hubris. The sequence in which he’s cast himself with Harvey Keitel is unbearable, for instance, and the diner robbery with Amanda Plummer and Tim Roth that bookends the flick is just a whole lot of scenery chewing. In fact, for all of the director/writer’s much-vaunted dialogue, much of Pulp Fiction‘s chit-chat is just hot air, though of an above-average quality. Tarantino would go on to write much better scenes, if not whole movies, than anything in Pulp Fiction.

Incendies (DVD rental; Tues) – Canada’s entry for last year’s Best Foreign Language Film category at the Academy Awards, this play-based nail-biter looks at the aftermath of war with many unusual, and finally heartbreaking, twists and turns. One of those movies you don’t want to say too much about, just grab people by the lapels and say, “Watch this.”

Carnage (press screening; Wed): Roman Polanski directs a movie based on a hit Broadway play from last year. I was riveted by the fast-paced dialogue, the jockeying for the moral upper-hand between the four New Yorkers, and particularly by Christoph Waltz‘s edge-of-calm, teeth-grinding performance, but critics have taken a seen-it-all-before stance to the story’s themes.

The King of Comedy (DVD rental) – This unjustly overlooked and at the time seemingly out-of-character movie from Martin Scorsese is a character study, really, though I remember it more as a kidnapping film – but the kidnapping doesn’t happen until halfway through. Robert De Niro is mesmerizing as the delusional comedian of the title, Rupert Pupkin, and Sandra Bernhard has a comic, slapstick-y presence that has never been better utilized; it’s like she was born 50 years too late, after the era of the great screwball comedies. Though it had been years since I’d seen it, there are moments – Pupkin waiting to see the talk show host played by Jerry Lewis at the host’s TV studio office, invading the Lewis character’s summer home – that have stayed with me all these years. Still a terrific film, and a great snapshot of the ’80s, too (members of The Clash make cameos on a street scene!).

One Magic Christmas (YouTube, Fri – Sat) – One of my girlfriend’s favourite Christmas movies growing up, One Magic Christmas (1984) piles on the tragic events in this tear-jerking twist on It’s a Wonderful Life. Mary Steenburgen, Harry Dean Stanton and a moppet-ish Sarah Polley star in this cardboard-looking, Ontario-shot Disney-Telefilm Canada co-production, but darned if it isn’t kind of affecting. Directed by Philip Borsos (the Whistler Film Festival named an award after him).

Watch One Magic Christmas on YouTube

Alicia Price is being charged in the 2011 Vancouver hockey riot.

Okay, maybe she’s not the hockey riot’s sex symbol… yet. But just you wait. We can just see the Playboy cover: Hotties of the Vancouver Hockey Riot! Likes: Hugs, the Sedin twins, smashing in windows.

We hope to bring you more pics and info on Alicia in the days and weeks to come, as the 2011 Vancouver hockey riot continues to the media story that gives and gives some more.

Watch this space for our exclusive “Free Alicia Price!” T-shirts, coming soon.

London Eye Centre homepage screengrab

A friend recommended London Eye Centre. Apparently the clinic is one of, if not the, pioneering laser eye surgery outfits in Vancouver. They’ve been cutting up corneas since 1985 and, according to one of their employees, Mike, the clinic’s surgeons have performed over 100,000 operations.

So their bona fides are certainly in place. Problem – unlike most other clinics, LEC doesn’t offer Lasik. Instead, IntraLase SBK is a non-invasive (i.e. no cutting) alternative that also happens to be twice as much as many of the prices (averaging about $1000 per eye) for Lasik I’ve come across.

London Eye Centre – two locations in the Lower Mainland, including a newer facility in North Vancouver and the original in New Westminster – also performs PRK, for about $500 less per eye (which is on parr with most other PRK prices). PRK takes longer to heal, but is also a non-invasive procedure.

When asked about the advantages of IntraLase over Lasik Mike, who works in the education department of the Centre, mentioned a few, such as:

- it doesn’t weaken the cornea, as occurs with cutting

- the laser makes a far cleaner flap, one that “locks back into place like the lid of a pumpkin” (Mike’s words)

- there is no dry-eye syndrome – the eyes produce as many tears and as much moisture as previously

- the procedure is as non-invasive as PRK and the healing is as fast as Lasik

- according to Mike, less than one per cent of patients have to come back for re-treatment. Although I do believe this procedure is still relatively new, so it might be too early to tell.

The overall feeling I got from London Eye Centre and its representative was one of cockiness. “We’re not even going to compare our prices with procedures that were out of date years ago,” Mike said at one point. Well excuse me…

Another thing that gives me pause: when I threw the question of where to go out onto Twitter, someone wrote that they’d gone to London Eye Centre and has had to have surgery four times in the last 10 years. “They say I’m a unique case. Heal too fast and get a scar tissue buildup on the cornea, creating a haze. Fed up. Back to glasses,” wrote @WeHuntBuffalo.

Still it’s in my top three… although I’m not sure what the other two might be.

I just got off the phone with Pacific Laser Eye Centre, recommended by someone on Twitter. Although I’ve found that most laser eye clinics in Vancouver post their fees on their websites, this place (located at 1401 W. Broadway) doesn’t. When asked why, the receptionist said, “We just don’t”, but that the price “ranges from $1500 – $2050.” The cost, she said, depends on the patient’s prescription.

I hadn’t heard this one before. Most clinics’ websites do post their fees, which at least gives the person considering laser eye surgery a starting point. Nor is there a breakdown of the kinds of treatments offered. And, to be totally nitpicky, I didn’t like their homepage, from the too-large font to the choice of images:

Pacific Laser Eye Centre homepage. Is it wrong to dismiss an eye surgery clinic because of its website?

Is it wrong to cross a place off my list of potential clinics because I don’t like their website? Well, maybe not, but I also don’t like that their fees aren’t posted. I also have a mistrust of anything that comes up first on Google (i.e., the Nickelback syndrome; anything that popular can’t be good), as does PLEC.

So far I’ve had two consultations. The first was with Lasik MD. Now, this is a company whose W. Georgia St. locale is more like a spa than a clinic, with a spacious waiting room with TVs and free cookies and someone whose sole purpose seems to walk around talking to potential customers, er, patients, about laser eye surgery. During this consultation, I talked to no less than four different people, including a technician and an optometrist to measure and test my eyes, and someone behind a desk to discuss pricing, what to expect and scheduling.

Although I left feeling confident that Lasik could do a decent job, the consultation also felt kind of assembly line-like. And I didn’t like the upsell; after the initial cost (around $2000) they wanted another $300 for five years of annual appointments (the money would theoretically also cover any additional work that needed to be done). Lasik MD is also a franchise, which might make you feel better or worse about doing business with them; also, I didn’t like the fact that you don’t actually meet the surgeon doing the operation until the day of the operation (unlike the other place I went to for a consultation, which I’ll get to in a sec).

As for their homepage, well:

Lasik MD homepage screenshot. Kind of Dollar Store, no?

The other consultation was with Boydvision in Burnaby. Compared to the luxury sanatorium feel of Lasik MD, Boydvision seems like a mom-and-pop operation – indeed, the daughter of one of the receptionists also works there. Although it offers no fancy waiting room and is kind of hard to locate (it has a Kingsway address but is accessible by a parallel street, Bennett), I did like the fact that the person who tested my eyes, Dr. Boyd himself, was also the person who would perform the surgery. He also explained which treatment was best for my eyes and why; a treatment that can reduce the need for reading glasses – “laser blended vision correction”, which I was interested in but which costs $500 per eye more – probably wouldn’t do me much good, he said.

I also liked the fact that Boydvision offers just one lasik procedure (some clinics offer “standard” and “wavefront” at different prices). Nor did they try to sell me a post-op package, a la Lasik MD; any work for 18 months following the operation would be on the house, and anything necessary after that would be a flat $350 (or about the cost of the package Lasik MD tried to sell me, but which might not even be necessary).

And, in the interests of fairness... the Boydvision homepage.

I probably would have gone with Boydvisionbut for the fact that the company they use for financing took one look at my finances and went, “See ya later.”

Next: I look into two more laser eye clinics in Vancouver.