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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 04/18/97 -- Vol. 15, No. 42
MT Chair/Librarian:
Mark Leeper MT 3E-433 908-957-5619 mleeper@lucent.com
HO Chair: John Jetzt MT 2E-530 908-957-5087 jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian: Nick Sauer HO 4F-427 908-949-7076 njs@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist:
Rob Mitchell MT 2D-536 908-957-6330 rlmitchell1@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 3E-433 908-957-2070 eleeper@lucent.com
Backissues at http://www.geocities.com/~ecl.
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-933-2724 for details. The New Jersey Science Fiction Society
meets on the third Saturday of every month in Belleville; call
201-432-5965 for details. The Denver Area Science Fiction
Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of every month at
Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
1. URL of the week: http://www.nightflight.com/htdocs/darwin.html.
NightFlight's 1996 Darwin Award nominees. [-ecl]
===================================================================
2. DARWIN AWARD WINNER FOR 1997 ANNOUNCED (PRESS RELEASE)
You all know about the Darwin Awards - It's an annual honor given
to the person who did the gene pool the biggest service by killing
himself in the most extraordinarily stupid way. The 1995 winner
was the fellow who was killed by a Coke machine which toppled over
on top of him as he was attempting to tip a free soda out of it.
In 1996 the winner was an air force sergeant who attached a JATO
unit to his car and crashed into a cliff several hundred feet above
the roadbed.
And now, the 1997 winner: Larry Waters of Los Angeles-- one of the
few Darwin winners to survive his award-winning accomplishment.
Larry's boyhood dream was to fly. When he graduated from high
school, he joined the Air Force in hopes of becoming a pilot.
Unfortunately, poor eyesight disqualified him. When he was finally
discharged, he had to satisfy himself with watching jets fly over
his backyard.
One day, Larry, had a bright idea. He decided to fly. He went to
the local Army-Navy surplus store and purchased 45 weather balloons
and several tanks of helium. The weather balloons, when fully
inflated, would measure more than four feet across.
Back home, Larry securely strapped the balloons to his sturdy lawn
chair. He anchored the chair to the bumper of his jeep and
inflated the balloons with the helium. He climbed on for a test
while it was still only a few feet above the ground.
Satisfied it would work, Larry packed several sandwiches and a
six-pack of Miller Lite, loaded his pellet gun-- figuring he could
pop a few balloons when it was time to descend-- and went back to
the floating lawn chair.
He tied himself in along with his pellet gun and provisions.
Larry's plan was to lazily float up to a height of about 30 feet
above his back yard after severing the anchor and in a few hours
come back down.
Things didn't quite work out that way.
When he cut the cord anchoring the lawn chair to his jeep, he
didn't float lazily up to 30 or so feet. Instead he streaked into
the LA sky as if shot from a cannon.
He didn't level of at 30 feet, nor did he level off at 100 feet.
After climbing and climbing, he leveled off at 11,000 feet. At that
height he couldn't risk shooting any of the balloons, lest he
unbalance the load and really find himself in trouble. So he
stayed there, drifting, cold and frightened, for more than 14
hours.
Then he really got in trouble.
He found himself drifting into the the primary approach corridor of
Los Angeles International Airport.
A United pilot first spotted Larry. He radioed the tower and
described passing a guy in a lawn chair with a gun. Radar
confirmed the existence of an object floating 11,000 feet above the
airport.
LAX emergency procedures swung into full alert and a helicopter was
dispatched to investigate.
LAX is right on the ocean. Night was falling and the offshore
breeze began to flow. It carried Larry out to sea with the
helicopter in hot pursuit. Several miles out, the helicopter caught
up with Larry.
Once the crew determined that Larry was not dangerous, they
attempted to close in for a rescue but the draft from the blades
would push Larry away whenever they neared.
Finally, the helicopter ascended to a position several hundred feet
above Larry and lowered a rescue line. Larry snagged the line and
was hauled back to shore. The difficult maneuver was flawlessly
executed by the helicopter crew.
As soon as Larry was hauled to earth, he was arrested by waiting
members of the LAPD for violating LAX airspace.
As he was led away in handcuffs, a reporter dispatched to cover the
daring re cue asked why he had done it. Larry stopped,turned and
replied nonchalantly, "A man can't just sit around."
Let's hear it for Larry Waters, the 1997 Darwin Award Winner.
===================================================================
3. ANACONDA (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: A documentary expedition to the Amazon
picks up a mystery man, little knowing that he
intends to turn the proceedings into a hunting
party for a huge man-eating snake. The plot is
weak, with only one decent character, but it is
tough to make too bad a film with so good a
monster. Rating: 0 (-4 to +4)
When I reviewed RUMBLE IN THE BRONX and said that I did not
particularly like the movie, one person wrote me to say that not
every film has to be so serious and that Americans make very few
"fun" films. That came to me as something of a shocker since I had
thought that the majority of feature films made in this country in
the 90s were "fun" films, or at least intended that way. I grew up
when the 50s science fiction films were hitting television and for
me a fun film is something not unlike Jack Arnold's THE CREATURE
FROM THE BLACK LAGOON. Arnold's Amazon opus is not a good film by
any objective standard but is a sort of a dark pleasure. The new
ANACONDA is not even enough unlike THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK
LAGOON, borrowing a good deal of its plot. For me more pleasure
than watching Jackie Chan kick somebody or gliding over them in a
hovercraft is seeing a snake the size of a small traffic jam making
mincemeat of an expedition to the Amazon. Not that ANACONDA is
even a well-made rip-off of CREATURE and it would be more enjoyable
with a better script, but it passes as a decent film. It is the
sort of film that I peg in the back of my mind as a "drive-in"
film, though in my part of the country the last drive-in died
several years ago. The script of ANACONDA borrows much of its plot
from THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, with a nod or two to MOBY
DICK and JAWS. But let us face it, it is fun to see a recreation
of a primordial battle between humans and some giant force of
nature.
The film opens with some young filmmakers on the Amazon planning to
make a documentary about a legendary tribe of people, the People of
the Mist. Immediately we know there is trouble brewing since these
people would not be safe on the Amazon even if there were no giant
snakes around. We have Terri Flores (played by Jennifer Lopez of
BLOOD AND WINE and in the title role of SELENA). She is leading
the expedition, believe it or not. Her cameraman is Danny (played
by Ice Cube). Why do I have the feeling that Ice Cube would last
on the Amazon just about as long as an ice cube would last in the
Amazon? What passes for adult supervision is Dr. Steven Cale (Eric
Stoltz) who seems to know a little of lore of the river, but mostly
from books. There are several others, just as hopeless. And as
someone who has actually been stranded on the Amazon in an outboard
canoe ... without gasoline ... and with an Amazon storm blowing up,
I could tell at the beginning that snake or no snake these people
are not all coming back. In a nick of time they pick up somebody
real who knows the Amazon. Paul Sarone (Jon Voight) is a
Paraguayan snake hunter who has some idea about how to handle the
river without getting killed. Unfortunately he has a plan of his
own. He wants to capture alive a forty-foot anaconda he has reason
to believe is living in a little traveled tributary. (Actually for
those interested, a forty-foot anaconda is not that much of a
stretch. These aquatic boas have been reported to actually reach
to lengths of thirty feet and the largest may never have been seen
and reported.)
Eric Stoltz is a good actor, but the script does not give him
nearly enough to do. He is the logical descendent of the Whit
Bissell character in THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON. Actually
is surprising that with three names credited to the screenplay and
at least two more people who worded on the script, there should
have been more to the story than a patchwork of other films. But
the characters are flat and uninteresting, with one exception. Jon
Voight is a terrific actor and his Sarone is what keeps the film
watchable between snake attacks. The role is something of a
departure for him and the hardened Amazon Paraguayan with the
down-turned mouth and the understated manner of talking really is
the best thing about ANACONDA. The snake isn't too bad either.
The snake is done as a combination of animatronics and digital
animation. Somehow the animatronics work better. The film was
directed by Luis Llosa who must have been an obvious choice for the
producers as his last four films were two action films (SNIPER and
THE SPECIALIST) and two documentaries about the Amazon. But Voight
was the most solid choice.
I cannot give the film a high rating, but it was watchable and
between the snake and Voight's performance I did not feel cheated.
I rate it a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
===================================================================
4. LIAR LIAR (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: Jim Carrey stars in a morality comedy
about the value of veracity and the price of
prevarication. A lawyer finds his own son has
cursed him to speak nothing but the truth for
one whole day. A little bit of the Carrey
personality goes a long way and too much of it
steals what just a bit would have given the
film. The script seems a bit inconsistent
about just what are the terms of the curse.
Rating: high 0 (-4 to +4)
New York Critics: 12 positive, 0 negative, 7
mixed
LIAR LIAR is basically a retread of a 1961 episode of THE TWILIGHT
ZONE. In that story Jack Carson played a lying used car dealer
Harvey Hunnicut who bought a car that came equipped with a curse.
Whoever owned the car could speak only the truth. Carson made a
few contorted faces as he tried to force himself to lie to
customers but eventually had to give in to the acceptance that the
curse really worked on him. Eventually he was able to become a
double winner not just because he sold the car to someone else:
the person he sold it to was Nikita Krushchev, Premier of the
Soviet Union. A similar concept was used in THE WHOLE TRUTH, in
which Bob Hope agrees to tell the truth for a whole day. LIAR LIAR
is, however, much closer to the TWILIGHT ZONE story, with the lying
profession changed from used car salesman to an unscrupulous lying
lawyer. The sorrowful or bewildered facial gestures Carson gave
his Hunnicut character. But the facial gestures are exaggerated by
Jim Carrey into, well, what we would expect from Jim Carrey.
Carrey plays Fletcher Reede, not just a lawyer but the paragon of
lying lawyers. Fletcher makes his living by subverting the truth.
And what he does in his professional life he does in his private
life. With cheating and lies he destroyed his marriage to his
former wife Audrey (Maura Tierney) and is in the process of
alienating their son Max (Justin Cooper). Fletcher has promised to
be at Max's fifth birthday party and is instead in bed with his
boss (Amanda Donohoe of LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM) trying to screw his
way to the top. The disappointed Max makes a wish that his father
cannot lie for a whole day. And the wish comes true, on a day when
Fletcher needs to be a skillful professional liar Fletcher
discovers that only the truth can issue from him mouth.
LIAR LIAR could have had a deeper resonance if its positive
statements were not always undermined by what is just too much
slapstick. The film was directed by Tom Shadyac of ACE VENTURA and
THE NUTTY PROFESSOR where it really needed someone of the caliber
of Billy Wilder. In addition, it builds to an action-packed finale
that goes too far beyond what is really needed for this sort of
material. Again the subtlety of Wilder could have worked wonders.
But for me the real problem with LIAR LIAR is that the
scriptwriters, Paul Guay and Stephen Mazur, are never sure of the
ground rules of the premise and so the audience is never sure
either. What exactly is the wish all about? Supposedly it was
that Fletcher cannot tell a lie for twenty-four hours, but what
does that mean? Does it mean that he can or cannot evade the
truth? Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes no. Can he remain
silent or does he have to always be candid? Is a promise made in
good faith and then later broken intentionally the same thing as a
lie? For that matter is a promise made in good faith and broken
due to uncontrollable circumstances the same thing as a lie? Do
the same forces that compel truth from Fletcher bend fate so that
what he has promised will come inevitably true? These are all
questions that should have been answered before the first word of
the script was typed. There were moments in this story when a
truthful answer of "I really would not want to answer that question
right at this moment" would have been the logical way out of
Fletcher's current problem when he instead seems compelled to give
an overly candid response.
In addition something not required by the premise are the over-
the-top rubber-faced expressions from Carrey who breaks through to
telling the truth like he is smashing through a physical barrier.
It would not be a Jim Carrey film without some of this, but as he
usually does he carries a good thing too far. Carrey is amusing,
but his antics get in the way of the viewer getting any real
feeling out of his part. Implied, but never fully developed, is
that the most important effect of the curse on his character is
that he can no longer lie to himself. By just being honest with
himself he achieves a new level of self-understanding that allows
him to put his life in order. The script makes another ironic
point. While the film shows how much damage Fletcher has done with
his lies, some of his lies have had positive effects. His
uncontrollable candor hurts people who relied on some of his little
fibs to bolster their egos. Telling the truth to everybody is
almost as destructive as lying was.
With a little more concentration on the script and a little more
subdued Carrey, this could have been a much better film. As it is,
it gets a high 0 on the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
===================================================================
5. THE DAYTRIPPERS (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: After a woman finds a love poem among
her husbands things, she and her whole family
spend a trying day in Manhattan looking for the
husband and playing detective. The ultra-low
budget comedy- drama has a few nice moments,
some pointless-seeming sequences, and finally
seems to run out of film just when the story
starts. Rating: 0 (-4 to +4)
New York Critics: 13 positive, 0 negative, 5
mixed
THE DAYTRIPPERS has the feel of a story written in a PC. It starts
as scenario that can be described in two or three sentences. But
that is too short to make a film so sequences are added one at a
time like Christmas decorations on a tree to pad the scenario until
there is enough there to fill out a script. Some of the added
sequences interconnect, most do not. Mostly you take the scenic
route through the original three sentences, learning about the
people traveling with you and some of the people you pass along the
way. In the end the value of the whole comprises very little more
than the sum of the value of the parts. It is apparently
writer/director Greg Mottola's belief that if you see the
characters in enough disconnected situations you will see
sufficient facets of their personality to come to understand them.
Perhaps there is some truth to that, but one wants more of a story
than is provided here.
Eliza (played by Hope Davis) and Louis (Stanley Tucci) are a
comfortable suburban couple living not far from Eliza's parents
Rita (Anne Meara) and Jim (Pat McNamara). Eliza teaches fourth
grade and Louis is an executive at a Manhattan-based book
publisher. Then on the day after Thanksgiving, Eliza finds an
Andrew Marvell love poem that has fallen out of Louis's pocket.
Asking Rita for advice, her mother suggests going into Manhattan
and confronting Louis directly. And the more people for support
the better. So Eliza, her parents, her sister Jo (Parker Posey)
and her sister's boyfriend Carl (Liev Schreiber) all go trooping
off in the family station wagon to Manhattan to find Louis and
hopefully the truth. It is a trying day in the city for each of
them as well as some of the people in Manhattan that they involve.
Along the way they have various small adventures, but the
adventures are not very interesting in themselves, do not tell us a
lot about the family members, and do not advance the plot. Much of
this film is picking up on the texture of the characters, which is
a bit threadbare, and waiting for something to happen. We get
validation of our first impressions that Rita is a meddling
busybody. There is confirmation that Jim is a long-suffering
father who really is a font of wisdom if people would only notice
and listen to him. We see that Jo is not as ready to commit to
Carl as she thinks she is. And Carl, the writer, is really just a
big fish in a small intellectual pond. We get something of how he
thinks as he recounts in detail the plot of his novel, a rather
simplistic symbolic work about a man with the head of a dog.
(Curiously the release of this film seems to coincide with the
publication of a real novel that would seem to have some
similarities to his fictional novel: Kirsten Bakis's LIVES OF THE
MONSTER DOGS.)
Anne Meara actually does a fairly good job as the overbearing Rita.
In many ways she is more believable than Debbie Reynolds was in
MOTHER. The film does not make adequate use of Pat McNamara who
really makes the film come alive when he is given anything to do.
Parker Posey who at one time seemed to overpower her roles
intentionally gives a somewhat more subdued performance in this as
she did in WAITING FOR GUFFMAN. Director Mottola seems to be
keeping an eye on expenses as is producer Steven Soderbergh, whose
films tend to be simple actors in front of a camera. The score is
apparently done on a single guitar. Perhaps it was just the
quality of the print I saw, but the colors were a little washed
out.
By structuring his story so that the most interesting events fall
in the very latest part of the film Mottola makes his film at once
too long and one that the viewer is hoping will not end when it
does. This is a film for the patient. I rate it a 0 on the -4 to
+4 scale. [-mrl]
===================================================================
6. GROSSE POINTE BLANK (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: GROSSE POINTE BLANK is not sure if it
wants to be a deep allegory or a comedic action
film. John Cusack plays a freelance assassin-
for-hire who returns home to attend his ten-
year high school reunion and rekindles the
romance he walked out on a decade before. The
dialogue is smooth but neither it nor the
characters nor the plot seem to be believable
for any place in this solar system. Rating:
low +1 (-4 to +4)
New York Critics: 12 positive, 2 negative, 2
mixed
The last film I saw with such hip yet unrealistic dialog had
Kenneth Branagh looking for revenge on his own uncle for the murder
of his father. This is another smoothly written but violent tale
of a man in his twenties dressed in black who is seeking something
different in his life, but there the resemblance ends. John Cusack
is Martin Blank, who has been out of high school for ten years, the
last five of which he has been a professional assassin. Like Sam
Spade he works out of a dingy office where he is tended by a
mothering secretary. It might have been fun to see a steamy
relationship between him and his secretary, but I think that the
American public might not have been ready for that given that his
secretary was played by sister Joan Cusack. Martin's profession
throughout is treated almost as just another job. His chief
competitor is Mr. Grocer (Dan Aykroyd) a cheerful killer who is
trying to organize all the assassins and hit men into a sort of a
union so they could do less work for more money, but would have to
attend meetings.
At the near insistence of his secretary he decides to attend his
ten-year class reunion in the posh Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe.
Reticent at first, he decides he will combine questionable business
with dubious pleasure by performing a contract hit in the same
area. So off he goes to the reunion, but one of his first stops is
to see his old girl friend Debi Newberry (Minnie Driver) who now is
best known in Grosse Pointe as the host of a local radio program,
making strange elliptical comments on the music. When the two of
them get together, it is going to be a bizarre weekend.
Of course, bizarre is the word for Martin and just about everybody
he knows. To anybody who asks what he does for a living, Martin
very openly admits he kills people. The response is always a quip
and at first it seems that nobody is taking him very seriously.
However, when he kills somebody late in the film, a high school
buddy very matter-of-factly helps him dispose of the body
apparently without giving it a second thought, as if he was helping
Martin change a tire. Often there seems to be logic missing in the
plot, but then plot frequently seems to be only a vessel for the
clever dialogue. Not that what people say makes sense all the time
either. The dialogue, like that in PULP FICTION, is stylized, but
somehow it never has the same spark and sometimes just seems to be
forced filler. "What do you want in your omelet?" "Nothing."
"Well, that technically is not an omelet." The line is neither
accurate, realistic, nor funny. But what can we expect from a
production company called "Caravan Pictures," and whose logo is a
solitary man walking down a road? Unlike in PULP FICTION we feel
we are listening in on people who are all style and no substance.
Some of the films better moments occur when the two Cusacks (John
and Joan--actually there are at least two more in the credits) play
off of each other. It perhaps gives us a feel for what it must
have been like in the Cusack household. The screenplay credits
John for some of the writing, though it might well be for ad libbed
quips. Minnie Driver has a little less of the likable quality she
generally exudes due to being just a bit too smooth, much like her
father, played by Mitchell Ryan. (Ryan, incidentally, has the
distinction of playing in three unrelated major films showing at
the same time--THE DEVIL'S OWN and LIAR LIAR.) Alan Arkin has a
small part as Martin's analyst, but comes off the most humane as
the only person who seems really disturbed by the fact that Martin
kills people.
Like most its characters GROSSE POINT BLANK is uneven, hard to
believe, occasionally funny, but has too much style and not enough
substance. These are people who are thinking more about their next
clever comment than they are about killing. The film is
entertaining, but its flippant attitude toward murder leaves a bad
taste. The film gets a low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 908-957-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
The secret of the demagogue is to make himself
as stupid as his audience so that they believe
they are as clever as he.
-- Karl Kraus