THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
04/03/09 -- Vol. 27, No. 40, Whole Number 1539
El Honcho Grande: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
La Honcha Bonita: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Puzzle Solution
Faster Than Light Travel (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Hiding in Plain Sight (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
KNOWING (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
MONSTERS VS. ALIENS (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS (film review
by Mark R. Leeper)
Library Classification (letter of comment by Fred Lerner)
This Week's Reading (SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE GIANT'S HAND,
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE DISAPPEARING PRINCE AND OTHER
STORIES, and SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE GHOST OF BAKER STREET)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: Puzzle Solution
The answer to what order this represents:
8, 5, 4, 9, 1, 7, 6, 3, 2
is alphabetical order. Correct answers were sent in by Steve
Milton, Gordon Diss, Denise Moy, and John Palframan. David
Goldfarb had the correct entry last week, even with the error. In
the film, of course, the ordering was different because the film
was in Spanish.
==================================================================
TOPIC: Faster Than Light Travel (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
A TV documentary talked about faster-than-light travel. I am
convinced that the day will come when we will be able to reach the
stars in ships that travel faster than the speed of light. I am
just not sure that when that day arrives we will have the ships
that we need to do it. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Hiding in Plain Sight (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I got a little FM transmitter for my iPod to play when I am in the
car. I had to choose a radio station that would not interfere with
my local broadcast. I told Evelyn that what we needed was a
station that rarely uses its frequency like a numbers station. She
did not know what a "numbers station" was. So what is a numbers
station? Well, it is probably the nearest you can get to listening
in on some real James Bond stuff. It seems likely spies use
numbers stations, but only the spies know for sure. Or perhaps
drug-runners are using them. There are only a handful of people
who know what a given numbers station is doing and they are likely
to keep the secret.
Some of you may remember in the film THE LONGEST DAY people in
France were signaled that the invasion of France was on by hearing
on the radio the phrase "John has a long mustache." They knew the
meaning of that transmission, but it was kept a secret from
everybody else. This way they could broadcast it and the Germans
knew that it might have some meaning, but they had no idea what the
meaning was. They just knew that they were hearing the real thing.
A numbers station is much the same thing, but it is impossible to
trace who is transmitting it and usually the messages are expressed
in numbers. A numbers station will come onto the shortwave
frequencies and a voice will read off numbers. That's all. They
just read numbers. Then the station will go off the air. It is
most frequently a woman's voice, but men's voices and children's'
voices are not unusual. And they can be in different languages.
Most frequently the numbers stations use English, but Cuba is
thought to use numbers stations and they are in the Spanish
language. Sometimes the mysterious voices read off letters,
sometimes words, sometimes they play melodies, but most often they
read off numbers. Numbers are versatile and make so many things
easy.
People who listen to shortwave run across numbers broadcasts very
commonly apparently. So we know the broadcasters are out there.
But nobody admits to making the broadcasts. And there is not
enough information in the broadcasts to help decipher them.
Probably they use what is called a "one-time pad" to keep the real
message private. That is, there is some commonly agreed upon way
to decode the message. But it only works once and for a specific
message. Suppose the first letter of the message you want to send
is "w". You agree with the spy in the field that you will use some
specified chapter of some specified Charles Dickens novel. The
chapter starts with the word "The." So the first number you send
is an encrypted version of the number +3. The spy gets the message
and decodes +3. He takes his chapter of the novel and finds it
starts "T." He takes the letter three positions after "T" which is
"W." (T U V W) It sounds cumbersome, but these days it is a
breeze. Software can do all the hard work. But how secure can the
message be if the numbers are broadcast to the whole world?
Well, the NSA has the best cryptographers in the world supposedly
and I am sure they would say this code is completely impossible to
crack. I mean like impossible and no way. Also not a chance. Why
would the NSA cryptographers even think to look in Dickens? How
would they know where in the novel to look? And how would they know
what procedure produces the offsets.
So how long has this been going on? How long have the numbers
stations been broadcasting? Well they come and go. They change
shortwave frequencies and broadcast times. So it is hard to know
when you have a new numbers station or when one goes away. But the
history of the institution goes back to World War I. Not a lot of
people talk about them because they are such a perfect scheme for
sending information that there is nothing that can be done about
them. Even what the subject matter of the messages is only a
matter of pure speculation, but with such a secure channel, and one
that requires such effort, it is probably something really juicy
that is being broadcast. There is little that can be done about
them so they are just endured by the governments and probably even
used by them.
So if you hear one you will not know what is going on, but you will
know you are hearing the real thing. To read more you can start
with:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbers_station
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: KNOWING (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: KNOWING uses ideas seemingly borrowed from THE MOTHMAN
PROPHECIES but as a springboard to tell a larger, more engaging,
and far grimmer story. A page of digits written by a schoolgirl in
1959 seems to list every major disaster up to the present and even
a little way into the future. Nicolas Cage plays an MIT professor
who does not believe in determinism, but is forced to accept that a
girl in 1959 knew specific data about the next fifty years. And
the implications will have worldwide impact. Still, the script
balances ideas, action, tension, and even horror. This is a major
science fiction film that shows us some spectacular scenes of
destruction but still maintains a narrow focus keeping it a
personal film. Rating: high +2 (-4 to +4) or 8/10
Alex Proyas has directed some impressive films, including THE CROW
and especially DARK CITY. That made it seem odd when (even) after
a strange beginning KNOWING settled into a retelling of Mark
Pellington's 2002 THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES. For the first hour this
films seems to content to just be a remake of a film that was not
that impressive to start with. During that hour he builds a
feeling of dread much in the style of Pellington or of M. Night
Shyamalan's SIGNS. He takes an hour to build his characters and
polish the tone. Then the pace picks up and he packs a lot more
into this film. Like QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, it unifies a lot
disparate ideas and phenomena in a way that they have not been
associated before. I wish I could say that I liked the film as
much as QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, which I consider one of the
greatest of science fiction films. This is a screenplay that had
four different credited writers and each seem to have been
contributing ideas until the film is just busting with them. I saw
pieces from old "Outer Limits" episodes, from MARS ATTACKS, bits of
WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE, DEEP IMPACT, and even CLOSE ENCOUNTERS. This
is a film that takes world history and then unifies and
reinterprets it. I like that kind of film, but I am just
uncomfortable with the way it was unified. Proyas directs a
screenplay written by two different pairs of writers. Perhaps that
is why the film does not quite feel like it gels.
In 1959 a school class leaves a time capsule with children's
pictures what they thought the world of 2009 would be like. One
student, the one who suggested the time capsule in the first place,
chooses instead to leave a page of what appear to be random digits.
Flash forward fifty years and the pictures are to be handed out to
the current class. Caleb Koestler (played by Chandler Canterbury)
is given the sheet of numbers. His father, John Koestler (Nicolas
Cage), an astrophysics professor at MIT sees a familiar string on
the page, 911012998. That expands to 9/11, 2001, 2998 killed. The
paper is full of dates and death tolls of disasters that occurred
in the fifty years that the sheet was buried. It even includes a
few disasters that have not happened yet.
The script is an intelligent one and plays with concepts of free
will, determinism, religion, predestination, and the accuracy of
scientific prediction. How they get as much thought into a film
that has so much action is a bit of a surprise. Still, there are
problems with the writing. There are three disasters predicted,
but all are in the course of three or four days. And each is
within easy driving distance of where the Koestlers live. However
this gives Proyas the chance to show us some spectacular disasters,
but still keep this a sort of personal film, focusing on just a
small number of characters.
I like the sheer quantity of ideas in this film, but I am not sure
that they all fit so nicely together. I expect with some thought
the flaws will seem less important and the audacity of the plot
will win out. Even if you think you know where this film is
going--and you may be right--that is just one of many places this
film will take you. I expect that this film will be among the top
ten science fiction films of the decade. I rate it a high +2 on
the -4 to +4 scale or 8/10.
Possible (but unlikely) spoiler: This film takes place,
apparently, in late 2009. That is possible, but the major event of
the film would be much more likely to take place in the first half
of 2012. Get ready for it.
Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0448011/
What others are saying: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/knowing/
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: MONSTERS VS. ALIENS (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: This film has a little something for the kids in the
audience and a little something for the adults, but not so much
both can enjoy. The film builds a story of cute monsters defending
Earth from ugly aliens. A disenchanted young woman finds herself
first turned into a monster and then called upon to save the Earth.
The story is largely built from pieces taken from old science
fiction films as if they were Lego blocks. For me they were more
fun where they got them. Rating: low +1 (-4 to +4) or 5/10
I love films and I enjoy when I see a film reference in a film.
Also I love science fiction films, particularly from the 1950s.
MONSTERS VS. ALIENS has a treasure trove of references to monster
movies and alien movies. There were truly an awesome number of in-
joke allusions aimed right at me (in 3D yet). They were all on
target. It is just the movie that missed me. They started with a
standard feminist empowerment theme. On top of this they took a
stereotypical Toho plot--aliens are invading and monsters have to
band together to save the Earth. And then the filmmakers threw in
one action sequence after another. The characters were mostly
jokes based on ideas from the 1950s. The filmmakers literally
designed their monsters to be jokes. One was basically the
creature from the Black Lagoon but his origin was borrowed from THE
BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS. One was a modeled on THE FLY, but his
origin was borrowed from SHE DEVIL. Each is good for one laugh but
they have no interesting personality. It is perhaps even more
important in animation to give characters personalities to engage
the audience.
Appropriately enough for a new 3D movie the film comes polarized.
The simplistic plot is probably too childish to be appreciated by
the adults, but the kids would probably like it. At the same time
the film's many homages to old science fiction films will be
enjoyable to adults who grew up seeing the original movies on TV,
but the kids who have not seen the films will be blind to them.
Susan Murphy (voiced by Reese Witherspoon) is engaged and soon to
marry Derek Dietl (Paul Rudd), the town weatherman. Derek thinks
the two of them would make a good team, but he insists on being the
coach. On her wedding day she will be handed by fate something old
(lack of consideration from her chauvinistic fiancé), something new
(about 44 feet of new growth), something borrowed (a set of
monsters from the 1950s), and something blue (he's B.O.B. the
Blob). Just before the wedding a large meteor with strange energy
(think kryptonite) falls directly on her. Not only is she not
crushed (and not surprised that she was not crushed), but also she
has absorbed the weird energy. So she glows and she grows like the
Fifty-Foot Woman. The marriage is off, and instead she finds
herself in a huge fortified government bunker where the government
keeps its monsters. There is B.O.B the Blob (Seth Rogen),
Dr. Cockroach with the head of an insect (Hugh Laurie), the
aforementioned lagoon creature (Will Arnett), and a Mothra-like
giant caterpillar.
Meanwhile on Earth land aliens who were tracking the meteor and
want it for their nefarious purposes. The government decides to
use its monsters to fight the aliens. This affords the script
opportunities for two giant battles between monsters and aliens:
one on the Golden Gate Bridge and one inside the alien spaceship.
The animation is generally good, but in an odd way DreamWorks
animation seems to be better for sympathetic human characters than
for others who are less so. Characters like W. R. Monger seem to
be stiff in just the way Lord Farquaad was in SHRECK. Susan seems
more liquid in her motion.
The jokes are good; the animation is fine; the 3-D is awesome. But
still the film fails to make a monster or an alien as powerful a
character as the little clownfish Marlin from FINDING NEMO. And
lacking good characters makes MONSTERS VS. ALIENS no more than just
a diverting little film and nothing more. I rate MONSTERS VS.
ALIENS a low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 5/10.
Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0892782/
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/monsters_vs_aliens/
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS (film review by Mark
R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: With more the feel of a fable than of a genuine piece of
history, this film tells the story of Bruno, the loving son of a
father who was running an extermination camp for the Nazis. With a
child's innocence he does not understand what the camp is and, he
makes friends with an interned boy. If the film is a fable, it is
a powerful one. Mark Herman directs from his own screenplay based
on the novel by John Boyne. Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10
When the TV miniseries THE HOLOCAUST was made, Michael Moriarty was
playing a scene as a concentration camp commandant home for
Christmas. He says that the scene made him just break down and
cry. How can a father in that position look his family in the eye
and celebrate the holiday knowing he is a mass murderer? It is
rare that a film looks at the effects of the Holocaust on the
perpetrators rather than the victims. THE BOY IN THE STRIPED
PAJAMAS is a powerful look at the same sort of family. Father
(played by the reliable David Thewlis) has just been promoted to
the responsibility of running a death camp. He takes his family
from Berlin to the unidentified village where the camp has been
located. But though the two characters of Father and Mother (Vera
Farmiga) are well defined, the center of the film is eight-year-old
Bruno (a remarkable Asa Butterfield, actually eleven years old).
At first bored with his new home, he finds ways to sneak out the
back garden and go to the fence where he meets and makes friends
with Shmuel (Jack Scanlon) who Bruno thinks has a fun life on what
he thinks is a farm were people wear pajamas all day. Veteran
actor Richard Johnson plays Father's father and is probably the
source of Father's character flaws.
There are some problems with the narrative. Bruno never realizes
what a death camp really is. Of course, few of the audience
members are not far, far ahead of Bruno, though perhaps nobody who
did not go through the experience can really know. But the film is
not about what is happening beyond the fence, but how Bruno's many
misimpressions are slowly corrected. Even the suffering Shmuel
from whom Bruno learns knows little more than Bruno does. Also,
somewhat unrealistically, I think three people very close to Father
make very clear that they do not approve of Father's career in
spite of the prestige and success it brings him. It is very
unlikely to have so many open dissenters in the same family as the
camp commander. Multiple characters make quite a point in the film
how bad the chimney smoke from the camp smells. But the production
of this smoke seems be a rare event, and that really does not make
sense. Also why does Shmuel have so much time to sit by the fence?
Like LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, this film seems to soften the Holocaust in
order to tell a story that probably could not have happened in the
real world.
It has become a convention of the syntax of cinema to have an
accent substitute for speaking in a foreign language. The obvious
choice would be to either have the actors speak German, or with a
German accent. Instead an English accent was chosen, natural to
the English actors of the film. The colors when Bruno first comes
to his new home are bright and vibrant. As the film progresses
those bright colors seems to drain out of the film. The colors
become much more muted.
James Horner, at one time disdained by film music aficionados,
gives the film a lovely melodic score with a little foreshadowing
and also a feeling of innocence at times. Scores of this quality
have become infrequent. Texture music scores with little or no
melody have become the rule. It is nice to have melody back.
The film starts slowly and telling it tale very deliberately. By
the end of the film it is moving at a breathless pace. But the
film has a feel of insulating the viewer from the hard realities of
life in the camps. We are told that Shmuel is hungry, but we see
nobody who looks like he has been missing meals. The novel was
written for young adults and the film feels like it pulls its punches.
The final horrifying revelation is still a long way from the
painful realities of those days. I rate THE BOY IN THE STRIPED
PAJAMAS a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10.
Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0914798/
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/boy_in_the_striped_pajamas/
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Library Classification (letter of comment by Fred Lerner)
In response to Evelyn's comments on REDCOATS' REVENGE in the
03/27/09 issue of the MT VOID, Fred Lerner writes:
[Evelyn writes,] "For that matter, for reasons known only to the
publisher, they have decided to give the Dewey Decimal
classification as 973.5/2, which is plop in the middle of the
American history section, rather than in fiction."
I suspect that you should be blaming the decimal classification
folks at the Library of Congress, rather than the publisher. It's
the Library of Congress that does the pre-publication cataloging
that appears on the verso of the title page in most books from
major publishers. [-fl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
A few years ago, Baker Street Studios published a series of short
collections of Sherlock Holmes pastiches. In 2008, these were
picked up by F. A. Thorpe for its "Large Print Linford Mystery
Library" (under the auspices of The Ulverscroft Foundation, which
deals with research and treatment of eye diseases). The first of
these that I read was SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE GIANT'S HAND by
Matthew Booth (ISBN-13 978-1-84782-142-3, ISBN-10 1-84782-142-1),
originally published in 2004. It contains three stories: "The
Adventure of the Giant's Hand", "The Adventure of the York Place
Prophecy", and "The Adventure of the Hollow Bank". These are based
on the following off-hand references in actual Doyle stories:
"As I turn over the pages, I see my notes upon the repulsive story
of the red leech and the terrible death of Crosby, the banker.
Here also I find an account of the Addleton tragedy, and the
singular contents of the ancient British barrow." ["The Adventure
of the Golden Pince-Nez"]
"Of all the problems which have been submitted to my friend, Mr.
Sherlock Holmes, for solution during the years of our intimacy,
there were only two which I was the means of introducing to his
notice--that of Mr. Hatherley's thumb, and that of Colonel
Warburton's madness. Of these the latter may have afforded a finer
field for an acute and original observer, but the other was so
strange in its inception and so dramatic in its details that it may
be the more worthy of being placed upon record, even if it gave my
friend fewer openings for those deductive methods of reasoning by
which he achieved such remarkable results." ["The Adventure of the
Engineer's Thumb"]
"You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the
Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth which
the parsley had sunk into the butter upon a hot day. I can't
afford, therefore, to smile at your three broken busts, Lestrade,
and I shall be very much obliged to you if you will let me hear of
any fresh development of so singular a chain of events." ["The
Adventure of the Six Napoleons"]
Booth does an excellent job--he maintains the Victorian-era
atmosphere and does not encumber his stories with feminists, sexual
adventures, or any other "updating". The only problem for
Americans is that these British imports may seem a bit pricey,
running about US$20 each for about 35,000 words. If each volume
were a single story, it would be novella-length rather than novel-
length.
(The same day I read the parsley story, I also ran across the
parsley quote in a completely different context!)
The other collection in this series my library had was SHERLOCK
HOLMES AND THE DISAPPEARING PRINCE AND OTHER STORIES by Edmund
Hastie (ISBN-13 978-1-84782-110-2, ISBN-10 1-84782-110-3). These
were "original" pastiches, in the sense that they were not based on
cases referred to by Doyle. The title story is about the
disappearance of the Crown Prince of Japan from Oxbridge (that
marvelous merging of Oxford and Cambridge, used by writers to avoid
insulting either one or the other), and is reasonably well-written.
The other stories are actually fairly weak and poorly written--not
too surprising when you realize that the author was fourteen years
old when he wrote them. (I suppose what is surprising is that the
first one is as good as it is.) I'm not even sure why it was
published, as it just lowers the overall quality of the line.
SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE GHOST OF BAKER STREET by Val Andrews (ISBN-13
978-1-84782-110-2, ISBN-10 1-84782-110-3) is a bit different. It
is a novel about a screenwriter who goes to London in the early
1950s and takes certain rooms in Baker Street, only to discover
that they are haunted. The ghost of Holmes seems to be visible to
everyone and manages to walk around, sit on a sofa, and so on,
while claiming he is unable to affect material objects. I found
Holmes's inconsistent "properties" to be distracting. He can be
heard, so apparently he can affect air, at least to the extent of
forming waves in it. Although he can be seen with no problem, he
cannot be filmed or photographed (though he *can* be tape-
recorded). And I don't care how eccentric the (American) narrator
considers the English to be, his explanations of why his friend
"Cyril" shows up all over London in the same red dressing gown
would soon start to wear thin.
This volume was also abysmally proofread. I found "effect" instead
of "affect", "infer" instead of "imply", "Vivienne" instead
"Vivian", and "Hercules Poirot" instead of "Hercule". There is
also the problem of a story supposedly written by an American,
though with British spelling throughout.
Andrews has written well over a dozen other novels for this series.
From their titles, it appears that at least some of them are more
traditional Holmes stories, and I will probably give some of them a
try if my library has them, but if they do not, I will not be
terribly disappointed. [-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
The Bible tells us to love our neighbors,
and also to love our enemies; probably
because they are generally the same people.
-- G.K. Chesterton