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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 04/03/98 -- Vol. 16, No. 40
MT Chair/Librarian:
Mark Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-5619 mleeper@lucent.com
HO Chair: John Jetzt MT 2E-530 732-957-5087 jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian: Nick Sauer HO 4F-427 732-949-7076 njs@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist:
Rob Mitchell MT 2D-536 732-957-6330 rlmitchell1@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-2070 eleeper@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824
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 irregularly; call 201-652-0534 for details, or check
http://www.interactive.net/~kat/njsfs.html. 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.scifi.com/set/originals/. Complete
Seeing Ear Theatre original science fiction audio dramas in
RealAudio. [-ecl]
===================================================================
2. I was recently rereading Bram Stoker's DRACULA. I think that
the reason the vampire gave his Victorian opponents so much trouble
is not just that he had centuries of wisdom and experience, but
that he clearly was an expert in "out-of-the-box" thinking. [-mrl]
===================================================================
3. I don't know how many of you are bothered by this problem, but I
have a serious problem in my reading of non-fiction books in that
they use footnotes. What is a footnote really? I guess it is a
sort of afterthought. It is an additional point that the author
wants to make. It is a piece of documentation that the author
wants to put into the text. I mean, the author spent all this
effort writing a book, something that is not easy, and got the text
all together, then said, "Oh, yeah, I also want to say...," and
throws in a few more lines. Actually a footnote can be just a page
reference from some journal that I would never be able to find in
my local library. (This is not something that helps you understand
the text; it is a way authors have of sharing blame. "Don't blame
me. I didn't make it up. I am just repeating what so-and-so
said." There may also a sort of hidden message of "you may want to
go to the Library of Congress in Washington DC, get a copy of the
original writing yourself and just verify that I got it right.") I
mean, what is the point of this? You have to trust an author a
certain amount. If he is a good author, he will not take his facts
from a misspelled incoherent pamphlet handed to him on the way into
a subway tunnel by a guy wearing fluffy bunny bedroom slippers.
But sometimes there is a fair amount of information in the
footnotes. Sometimes the *only* really interesting stuff is in the
footnote. I have to ask myself, can I afford to skip this
footnote? There are some authors who want to appear serious and
put all the dry uninteresting stuff in the main text and then put
in the footnote the how they came by this information in a Turkish
steambath in return for saving a certain well-known French
economist from a mostly disrobed young blond woman carrying a
German Luger. (*) And you don't know when looking for a footnote
which type it will be.
Now an author can take one of two basic styles of listing
footnotes, one is a super-pain for the reader and the other is a
lot worse. The first is putting the footnote at the bottom of the
page. Now I don't know about you, but my reading speed has picked
up since my "See Spot run. Run, Spot, run" days. That means that
when I get to the bottom of the page I probably see the footnote
and realize I missed where this footnote was called. I look over
the page again and I still cannot find that tiny number. I usually
just skip the footnote. Or I skim it quickly for keywords like
"blond" or "Luger." But it is considered just not scholarly to put
the footnotes on the same page. No, that is too convenient;
generally they go at the back of the chapter. This means you have
to keep flipping to the back of the chapter. After all, you have
no idea if the footnote is of interest or not. Even if you have
two footnotes in the book it is a serious inconvenience. But you
know really scholarly books put all the footnotes at the back of
the whole dang book. And of course they start over numbering the
footnotes with each chapter. And the only way to find which
chapter's footnotes you are looking at is to flip back page by page
until you get to this chapter's footnote number one. Now I try to
outsmart the writer. What I do is I scan the footnotes before the
main text and make a note that there are interesting comments
associated with footnotes 3, 17, and 31. Of course then reading
the text I completely miss those references.
Now there are those who tell me that the answer is hypertext.
Rather then spending three minutes searching for the footnote you
simply click on the footnoted word and your reader freezes up and
in only five minutes it has retrieved an error message explaining
why it can't find the page.
I say enough of this foolishness. Footnotes should be included in
the main line of text. You can set them off with square brackets,
you can indent them, you can make them bold. You just *cannot*
make the reader go searching for them. Understand? Sheesh.
That was easy. Now what are we going to about magazines that in
the middle of one long article have side-panel articles on a
closely-related topic? I never know when I am supposed to skip
over and read those things. [-mrl]
===================================================================
4. MEN WITH GUNS (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: In an unspecified Latin American
country a naive doctor searches for the
students he sent into the mountains to help
Indios only to find a string of atrocities by
the army and the guerrillas. The film is slow
and totally obvious from the first reel. Flat
and uninteresting characters do little to help.
This is a heartfelt story, but tells us nothing
we have not known for decades. Rating: 4 (0 to
10), 0 (-4 to +4)
New York Critics: 12 positive, 2 negative, 4
mixed
One of the most respected names in American independent filmmaking
is John Sayles. He has built a strong reputation with films like
MATEWAN and THE SECRET OF ROAN INISH, and one of his best was his
last film, LONE STAR. After Sayles gave us this complex and
unconventional look at ethnic tensions on the US-Mexico border,
expectation ran high for his next film. Unfortunately, his MEN
WITH GUNS is not the film anyone was hoping for. We are
essentially told in the first reel where the film is going to go
and what it is going to do. Then the film does exactly what it
promised, a painful as that is. The plot of MEN WITH GUNS can be
summarized "In a Central or South American country things are
really bad for everybody in the mountains where the army clashes
with the guerrillas. Dr. Fuentes did not believe how bad things
were so he went. And he found out again and again and again." Of
course it is perfectly true that in many places in that region
armed conflicts have turned life into a living hell. A guerrilla
war is always bad for civilians. But the film talks down to the
viewer.
Dr. Fuentes (played by Federico Luppi) teaches medicine in the
capital city of his country. He has, as a great humanitarian
gesture, trained and inspired some of his best students to go into
the mountains and make the world a little better for the poor
Indios. Fuentes believe the students to be up there doing
humanitarian service. Then he discovers one of his best students
has instead returned to the city and runs a squalid private
pharmacy. In shame and disappointment Fuentes asks the student
what has happened to the others. The student tells him the others
are still in the mountains, but suggests that it may not be a good
place to be. Fuentes goes off to find and visit the doctors,
ignoring the advice of his family and a patient who happens to be
an army general. The results are little different than one would
expect.
Dr. Fuentes starts out incredibly naive. Even some American
tourists, present in the film mostly for comic relief, seem to know
better than Dr. Fuentes that things have gotten pretty bad in the
mountains. But Fuentes has to go from one scene of barbarity to
another and discover how wrong he was. Sayles certainly could have
used 126 minute of screen time to tell us something more profound
than that nasty things are happening down there and most of the
worst happens to the unarmed civilians.
The cast is mostly unknowns to American audiences. Federico Luppi
is the good Mexican actor who played the antique dealer torn by
mysterious forces in CRONOS. Damian Delgado makes a late
appearance as an army deserter. Mandy Patinkin has a small role
made to look bigger in the trailer.
MEN WITH GUNS is a film on a serious subject, but it has little new
or valuable to say on that subject. I rate it 4 on the 0 to 10
scale and a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
===================================================================
5. THE NEWTON BOYS (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: Lying somewhere between a Western and
a gangster film, THE NEWTON BOYS tells the
story of a five-year bank-robbing spree of a
family gang, culminating in the biggest train
robbery in United States History. An odd film
for Richard Linklater to make, but
entertaining, if a bit formless. The film does
have a good feel for 1919-1924 setting.
Rating: 7 (0 to 10), low +2 (-4 to +4)
Neither Sifakis's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN CRIME nor Nash's
BLOODLETTERS AND BAD MEN seems to know the Newtons existed. What
research I tried to do before seeing the film turned up nothing.
But the film turns up some corroborating evidence that the story
must have at the very minimum some truth. Apparently the Newton
Gang were the most successful bank robbers in American history.
From 1919 to 1925 this Texas-based gang robbed banks all over the
country, eighty in all, though their biggest job was the three-
million-dollar train robbery in Rondout, Illinois.
With Andy Warhol being dead, it is hard to imagine a director less
likely to make an atmosphere-heavy period film than Richard
Linklater, director of Generation X films like SLACKER.
Nevertheless, Linklater breaks from his mold and does a fair job of
recreating America of the early 1920s. And ironically his
Generation X serves him well when showing members of the gang in
their casual moments relaxing in postures you would never see in a
Bogart or Cagney gangster film.
Willis Newton (played by Matthew McConaughey) is newly out of
prison where he was railroaded for a crime he did not commit. What
particularly galls him is that friends and neighbors willingly
perjured themselves to abet the railroading. He decides really to
turn to crime, stealing from the banks and implicitly from the
insurance companies who, he rationalizes, are all crooks anyway.
After helping someone else with a daylight robbery he decides it is
safer to plan his own crimes and to rob banks only at night.
Soon Willis is bringing his brothers in to assist him in his
robberies. Realizing that he knows how to open a square-door safe
but not a round-door one, he has a bank manager list for him all
the banks he knows of that have square-door safes, a list that
contains banks all over the country. The film takes a very
whimsical look at their crimes. These are very clearly lucky
amateurs who do not know what they are doing, as we see in several
comic scenes. They seem to have an incredible run of luck, neither
killing anybody nor being killed themselves. Willis is the serious
planner, brothers Jess (Ethan Hawke) and Dock (Vincent D'Onofrio)
are in it just for the wild times. Joe (Skeet Ulrich) is the
youngest and most thoughtful of the boys. Rounding out the gang is
Glasscock (Dwight Yoakam).
McConaughey clearly provides what acting interest there is in the
film and he gives the only performance that is above being just
adequate. He is a little too handsome and polished for the role.
The viewer knows this because of the very intelligent device of
having interviews with the real-life Joe and Willis play with the
credits--in the 1970s Willis was interviewed in a documentary and
Joe appeared on the "Tonight Show" in 1980. The big surprise is
how under-utilized Vincent D'Onofrio is. He is a fine actor and
should have gotten a meatier role.
The story of the Newton Boys is apparently a neglected chapter of
American crime. I cannot verify the accuracy of the film but I can
say it was entertaining. I would rat it 7 on the 0 to 10 scale and
a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
In the film there is considerable mention square-door safes and
round-door safes. The Newtons say they can open square-door safes
but not the round-door ones. In order to decide what banks they
will rob, they need a list of banks with square-door safes. What
is this all about? Well, a square-door safe has a (rectangular)
door. It is like the door to your home, only it is made of steel
so it is a lot stronger. But it is still held in place by bolts
and it is possible to get behind the door and sheer the bolt,
possibly by blowing the whole door off its hinges. A round-door
safe does not have hinges. The door is a disk with threads around
the edge. The door is a separate piece which screws out of the
safe. (In the 1953 WAR OF THE WORLDS the ports on the Martian
spacecraft use the same principle. Remember Paul Birch's line
"It's the damnedest thing the way that's unscrewin'.") In place a
round screw-in door is just as secure as any other wall of the
safe. There is no way you can get explosive behind it. At the
time of THE NEWTON BOYS round-door safes (usually in spherical
safes called "cannonballs") were absolutely secure. Cannonball
safes were eventually defeated, but only by ignoring the opening
mechanism and cutting right through the wall. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 732-957-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
Of learned men, the clergy show the lowest development
of professional ethics. Any pastor is free to cadge
customers from the divines of rival sects, and to
denounce the divines themselves as theological quacks.
-- H. L. Mencken