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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 05/09/97 -- Vol. 15, No. 45
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://cu-online.com/~avonruff/sfdbase.html.
The Internet Speculative Fiction DataBase.
===================================================================
2. There is a whole controversy about the casting of the new
British film JINNAH about Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of
Pakistan. They had to cast an actor to play the man and, of
course, the Pakistanis were very interested in who would be cast in
the title role. Well, I guess it is understandable. We would not
like it if Iran made a film about the founding of the United States
and cast someone like Jerry Lewis as George Washington. The actor
chosen was Christopher Lee. Now Lee is best known for playing
Dracula in several film from Hammer Studios of Britain. He also
has played the roles of Fu Manchu and Rasputin. The feeling of
some Pakistanis is that since he has been typecast as a villains
before, some even supernatural bloodsuckers, he should be
ineligible to play a Pakistani national hero. Richard Attenborough
had real problems casting the title role for GANDHI. Before Ben
Kingsley was offered the role it was offered to Dirk Bogart, Peter
Finch, Anthony Hopkins, Albert Finney, Sir Alec Guinness, and Tom
Courtney. Each turned the role down and it seems for good reason.
It is hard to imagine any of them doing a good job as Gandhi. I
sometimes wonder how these films ever get cast. Ben Kingsley seems
like so obvious a choice, but that is because we have seen him in
the role. At one point in the casting process Attenborough asked
some of the Indian people themselves whom they would like to see in
the role. One woman told him "I cannot see Gandhi being played by
anything but a globe of light." Rather ashamedly, Attenborough
relates that he told her he was not making a film about "bloody
Tinkerbell." But that would have sidestepped the whole issue of
casting.
But the same impulse is in American films. They talk about mystery
religions. I guess everybody's religion is a mystery if you really
look at it. One of the mysteries a religion likes to keep is what
its founder looked like. Take the film BEN HUR. The film has been
made twice, once as a silent with Francis X. Bushman, and once as a
sound film with Charleton Heston in the title role. The first one
has Jesus standing there in the picture, but there is always
someone or something between you and him so you cannot get a look
at him. There is something very symbolic that something always
stands between you and him, I suppose. But they thought it was a
sacrilege to show his face. Then they had the fancy remake of BEN
HUR on TV and throughout the whole film they have these scenes of
Jesus. And they film it from angles so you never see his face.
What is that? You can have an actor's knees playing his knees, but
his face remains forever off camera. His ears are unique and I
think we see them. So what is the big deal about showing his face?
They don't want to show you his face because it is not really what
he looked like? They show you other historical figures of the time
and I can tell you that wasn't what they looked like. What is the
big deal about showing Jesus's face? I guess we don't have a
problem like that in Judaism. If you have a film about Moses, you
can show his face. I think that cable TV just had a film about
Moses and there was no big deal that you saw who played the role.
But of course everybody knows what Moses looked like. Everybody
has pretty much the same image after seeing THE TEN COMMANDMENTS.
He looks a lot like Ben Hur.
===================================================================
3. CORRUPTING DR. NICE by John Kessel (Tor, ISBN 0-312-86116-8,
1997, 317pp, US$24.95) (a book review by Evelyn C. Leeper):
If this doesn't make my Hugo nomination ballot for 1997, there must
be some really amazing books showing up later. Kessel manages to
write a humorous, witty (no, they're not the same thing),
thoughtful, time travel, alternate history, religious dinosaur
story, which I think is the first. (Gore Vidal's LIVE FROM
GOLGOTHA came close, but lacked the dinosaur.) Having said this
much, I now have to try to review this book without telling you too
much more, because part of the enjoyment is watching it all unfold.
(Or perhaps a better analogy is watching it all come together, like
those puzzles with pieces of all different shapes than fit together
into a neat cube.)
How does he do this? Well, the underlying premise seems to be one
of branching universes, at least in the sense that you can go from
*now* to *then*, make all sorts of changes, and come back to *this*
now rather than *that* now. So the entrepreneurs of Dr. Owen
Vannice's "now" can go back to the Jerusalem of two thousand years
ago, build a Holiday Inn, bring several major religious figures
back to his present, and still not change one iota of the Crusades,
the Inquisition, or the Salem witch trials.
Vannice (Dr. Nice) is returning from the Cretaceous with an
apatosaurus when he finds himself in that Jerusalem, and soon
becomes embroiled in a plot by zealots to purge their world of the
"invaders." (I guess I forgot to say this was also about cultural
imperialism.)
Kessel also fills his bizarre story with references to other
science fiction stories, current journalistic tendencies, and a
wide range of prehistoric, historic and quasi-historic figures.
Yet within all this madcap whirl are insights and truths about us
and our world. In this regard Kessel is part of a long literary
tradition in speculative fiction, including Jonathan Swift, Mark
Twain, Gore Vidal, James Morrow, and Connie Willis.
This is a wonderful book, both entertaining and thought-provoking.
So in the words of Kim Stanley Robinson on the back cover, "Go buy
this book yesterday." [-ecl]
===================================================================
4. ROMY AND MICHELE'S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION (a film review by Mark R.
Leeper):
Capsule: Don't be fooled by this film's light
and breezy exterior. This is not just a pile
of blond jokes, this is a film with an
intelligent script with some real insight into
human relationships and behavior. Romy and
Michele find out that their high school is
having its 10-year reunion, but do not want to
admit to their class that they are really doing
nothing with their lives but having fun and
marking time. The reunion will be a chance to
reassess the people they knew in high school
and to get closure on some unfinished business.
But yes, the film is still fun. Rating: +2 (-4
to +4)
It would be easy to be deceived by the trailers for ROMY AND
MICHELE'S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION. The film looks like a not very
sympathetic look at two ditzy blondes who make fools of themselves
at their high school reunion. It could have been a very
superficial and even hurtful movie. In fact, it is the screen
adaptation of a late 1980s play "The Ladies' Room," a
characterization of two very shallow women that writer Robin Schiff
overheard in the ladies room of a singles club. Romy and Michele
have been friends since childhood and have lived together--
fraternally as the script makes clear--in Los Angeles since their
painful last days of high school. Romy is a cashier at a parking
garage and Michele is unemployed. The film, partially based on the
play takes Romy and Michele (played by Mira Sorvino and Lisa
Kudrow) through some trying moments. They realize that they are
going to be facing the people who made up the texture of their
lives in high school.
Their invitation to their reunion starts them thinking about how
little they have accomplished that would impress their classmates.
Together they decide that since nobody from their hometown of
Tucson knows what they have been doing they can pass themselves off
as successful business women. It is not a good idea, but worse
ideas are coming. When Romy jokes about what she had to do to
borrow a nice car and Michele is not quick enough to recognize it
is a joke, a wedge starts to grow between the two women. The
reunion could have been played purely for humor. It is funny but
there is a lot more to it than that. Virtually everybody coming to
the reunion has some unfinished business from ten years earlier.
Seemingly each had his or her place in the high school pecking
order and now each is hoping to show up somebody. The reunion is
used far more intelligently than the similar occasion in the
current GROSSE POINTE BLANK. Rather than just being a backdrop, it
is really an incisive look into high school behaviors. There are a
few predictable and one or two unpredictable surprises building to
a climax that is a little too much a deus ex machina to match the
quality of the rest of the writing.
The two main characters could easily have been irritating, but
instead they have a definite charm. Mira Sorvino's Romy is the
brighter of the two, but not so bright that she does not get the
two of them into trouble. Lisa Kudrow, veteran of the stage
version of "The Ladies' Room," is the more sensitive and easily
hurt. But the two actresses play with a real chemistry between
them. They care for each other and for each other in a way not
often shown on the screen. Janeane Garofalo, who has been playing
amiable people in other films plays very much against type as a
cynical and perennially bitter schoolmate who still has a chip on
her shoulder when she thinks of Romy and Michele. Alan Cumming
plays the high school's leading nerd and will no doubt leave
audiences wondering why he looks so familiar. In fact, he played a
similar computer nerd in the last James Bond film, GOLDENEYE. As a
trivia point he also did the voice of the title horse in 1994's
BLACK BEAUTY--an excellent film, by the way. Here his role is
off-beat even for him and includes a strange ballet-like dance with
the two leads. The film is directed by first-timer David Mirkin.
ROMY AND MICHELE'S HIGH SCHOOL REUNION is a film that works on a
superficial comedy level but also resonates from characters and
plot situation that are more substantial than they at first appear.
That makes this film a treat all around and one I rate a +2 on the
-4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
===================================================================
5. THE SAINT (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: Leslie Charteris's famed hero fails to
come to the screen in this film inspired as
much by the old MISSION IMPOSSIBLE program as
THE SAINT or Charteris's stories. Val Kilmer
gets a real field day playing in many
disguises, and his character certainly had
possibilities. But the script fell well short
of being a cracking good story of international
intrigue. Rating: 0 (-4 to +4)
New York Critics: 1 positive, 10 negative, 6
mixed
I am told that back in the 1970s a young filmmaker came to the
owners of the rights to the character Flash Gordon and said he
wanted to make a Flash Gordon movie. They turned the filmmaker
down so he created a brand new hero of his own, calling him Luke
Skywalker. Fortunes are made and lost on such decisions. But the
question is why would even some of the most talented filmmakers
choose to use pre-existing characters when they can create new ones
of their own who are just as interesting. One might be that they
think they can explore some new approach to an existing character;
the other is to exploit audience recognition value. A test to see
which is true would be whether the character would be recognizable
with the names changed. Frequently there are good films made that
re-examine Sherlock Holmes. Almost always these films would be
recognizable as being about Sherlock Holmes even if he were given
another name. One film that definitely does not pass the test is
the new THE SAINT. Without being told that this character
sometimes uses the name Simon Templar (but usually not) and without
the use of the Saint stick- figure logo toward the end of the film,
there is nothing in Val Kilmer's nameless character that at all
evoke Leslie Charteris's roguish troubleshooter. And that is
almost surprising since the original Simon Templar is sort of an
all-purpose adventure character. He might in one adventure be
battling diamond smugglers, in another dangerous spies, and in
still another his opponent would be a mad scientist who has bred an
ant the size of a train car. Frequently he was suspected to be on
the fuzzy edge of the law, but he never actually was. He usually
used his own name, rarely used disguises, and probably never used
Bondian gadgets though he did use his own suave personality. In
short, there is just about nothing in the new Val Kilmer version of
The Saint evocative of the character as written or portrayed
before. Not that this is not an interesting character. In fact,
this film would have been much better had it not played on the
audience's expectations to see Simon Templar.
The story opens in what can only be termed "the Catholic School
from Hell." Because one boy does not take to the Saint's name he
has been assigned, all the girls are locked in their dorms and the
boys will get no food. This seems like a particularly virulent
piece of gratuitous anti-Catholicism. Perhaps because the
character will later take the names of saints the filmmakers wanted
to make clear this was not a religious film. That becomes really
clear when the set loose dogs on some of the children in their
charge and one is killed. This incident has scarred for life a man
of mystery with no name, but who likes to occasionally use the name
Simon Templar. Flash forward a few years and the man is a hi-tech
cross between Batman and a James Bond without a British Secret
Service to serve. It is never explained where his money comes
from, but he obviously has a lot to spend on the latest gadgets.
He gets caught up in a really confused plot by the Russian Mafia to
steal a formula for practical cold fusion from an attractive
American scientist, played by Elizabeth Shue. The whole convoluted
story builds to an outlandish climax in Red Square.
Shue is appealing with her slightly geeky touches. Though somehow
there just does not seem to be much chemistry between her character
and Kilmer's and their romance only seems to bog down the plot.
Kilmer is just a little over the top in a fun way with his many and
varied disguises. They are each just a bit exaggerated much like
Rod Steiger's tour-de-force performance in NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY.
The problem is the story which is so totally artificial and which
so often depends on far-fetched coincidence to get Kilmer's
character out of trouble. I think I would like to see more of this
character, but in a plot that is much better thought out. And
frankly it still irks me that they hung this brand new character on
The Saint.
The score of this film by Graeme Revell is not inspiring (which is
probably why the trailers borrowed music from THE SHADOW and
CRIMSON TIDE). The film is full of scenes that are not well
considered. During one chase the character apparently changes
clothes (off camera) in the middle of a crowded public square with
nobody noticing.
It would have been nice to have a new film about Leslie Charteris's
character. It may even be good to have more stories about this
Simon Templar, but they are not the same and this story has too
many rough edges. I give this THE SAINT a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
[-mrl]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 908-957-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
It is human nature to think wisely and act foolishly.
-- Anatole France
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