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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 07/10/98 -- Vol. 17, No. 2
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 2E-537 732-957-6330 robmitchell@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
201-447-3652 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.cc.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/bartlett/. Bartlett's
Familiar Quotations (1901). [-ecl]
===================================================================
2. I think we need to talk about Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.
Well, maybe you won't think so, but I do. All kinds of standard
reference books have had overhauls over the last few years. The
Encyclopedia Britannica is nothing like the staid 24 volumes that
it was when I was a kid. Now they have their Micropedia, their
Macropedia, their Orthopedia, their Centipedia, and their
Millipedia (the latter two only are for the real bookworms, I
suppose). But actually they have anything a pedophile could want,
coming at you in a sort of Stampedia. But the Britannica has been
a fraud for years. I think it is published in Chicago. Yup, the
British sold off their encyclopedia. When they really started
suffering from the brain drain to the United States, they let their
brains take their encyclopedia with them. So both the Encyclopedia
Americana and the Encyclopedia Britannica are actually American
encyclopedias. That presumably means that there is no British
national encyclopedia unless like us they have bought up someone
else's. I know there is an Encyclopedia Italiana because it used
to take up twenty feet of shelf space in the Springfield Library,
Springfield, Massachusetts. I told my very Italian economics
teacher, Mr. Rapucci, that the reason it was so long is that it
included all the hand gestures.
But of course I am drifting. By and large, most of our better
known reference books are fairly honest. If you buy a Webster's
Dictionary it will genuinely be a dictionary, though I am told that
the law now says that any dictionary publisher can call their
dictionary "Webster's." I am not sure why that is. If you build a
hotel, you can't say it is Hyatt's. But at least the part about it
being a dictionary is true. And the last I had heard a book called
"Roget's Thesaurus" has to be able to prove its lineage back to
Roget.
But the people who publish these reference works at least have a
well-defined task. A dictionary should have all the words and
their definitions. Every few years they update it so that recent
slang gets in. But what about Bartlett's Familiar Quotations?
They have to decide if a quotation is really familiar or not.
That's not easy. How do you decide if a quotation is familiar or
not? Don't you have to include just about all the lines from the
great tragedies like HAMLET, MACBETH, and TITANIC? Twenty years
ago there was not much familiar in MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING. Then we
had a popular film version and phrases like "converting all your
sounds of woe into 'hey, nonny nonny'" become familiar even if they
are not particularly comprehensible. For a little while after the
film was released you may remember we had people who discovered
they had been short-changed at the gas station dismissing the
incident by saying "hey, nonny nonny." or "Oh, that police car
caught me passing another car on the right. Oh, well. Hey, nonny
nonny." Of course, eventually the good feeling of the film wore
off and people went back to the ever-popular "oh, shit." I mean,
how do you decide if a quotation is familiar right now? Bartlett's
gets out of date faster than a World Atlas.
Now if they were serious they would have standards on whether their
quotes are familiar or not. They would check quotes in front of a
live audience and see "how many out there have heard this one
before: 'with affection beaming in one eye and calculation shining
out the other.' Nobody? Anybody have any guesses? No? Okay,
Bob, drop CHUZZLEWIT." But do they do that? No. So even in the
post-literate society Bartlett's is headed up toward 2000 pages of
one-time familiar quotations. There are all sorts of has-been
quotations, and perhaps no small number of never-wases. [-mrl]
===================================================================
3. ARMAGEDDON (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: A group of working-class heroes is
humanity's only hope to destroy a meteor headed
straight for Earth. This is a very heavily
cliched film. It uses comic-book-style editing,
too many melodramatic plots, and too much
over-ripe camerawork. Some of the visuals are
undeniably impressive, but the script is aimed
at twelve-year-old boys. Rating: 4 (0 to 10),
0 (-4 to +4). Spoiler: warning: I list some of
the cliches that are used in this script.
They say that any film that opens with an overhead view of a city
has got to be bad. Another bad opening is the words "A Jerry
Bruckheimer Film." Bruckheimer's name indicates that it will
likely have more action than sense. ARMAGEDDON is our second film
of the season to deal with a possible meteor impact on the Earth
and it out-Bruckheimers Bruckheimer.
What is there to say about the plot? An asteroid knocked from
orbit is on a collision course with Earth. Such a collision, we
are told in the pre-credit narration by Charlton Heston, destroyed
the dinosaurs. (Curiously, the president of the NRA resists
suggesting we could prevent collisions if only we were all armed
with large rocks.) The film gets off with a bang as in the first
minutes we see the first of the mini-meteor showers, all of which
seem predominantly to target land masses and major cities. (Being
fair, there is a line in the dialog saying that they are hitting a
wider area.) Later in the film we see the destruction of three
cities including Shanghai. The latter looks like the Aberdeen area
of Hong Kong. (Jerry, there are no junks in Shanghai any more.
It's a propaganda thing. They got rid of the junks.)
The survival plan is to place a nuclear bomb in the core of the
asteroid. NASA, in an effort headed by Dan Truman (Billy Bob
Thornton) needs to train its astronauts to drill to the core of the
asteroid. Truman calls in foremost drilling expert Harry Stamper
(Bruce Willis) to train the astronauts and Stamper convinces Truman
it would be easier to train drillers to be astronauts. With the
fate of the Earth in the balance Truman makes this dubious
concession. Astronauts, it seems, can be trained to know all they
need to know in two weeks, but it takes a lifetime to know how to
be a good driller. So Stamper's drilling crew are on their way to
space. Of course, first comes the training, with our high-spirited
drilling team making life miserable for the NASA trainers. Then
after the training comes the even more riotous R&R, and these
drillers are really wild by NASA standards. At no point does it
seem to dawn on our happy drill team that losing the whole Earth
with its Michelangelos and its Pizza Huts could be a real bummer
for all of them. Finally comes the dramatic cliche-ridden space
mission, complete with gun threats, a "which-wire-to-clip?" ticking
bomb threat, and a "success-with-two-seconds-to-spare" climax. It
is amazing how much of GOLDFINGER they could shoehorn into this
film.
That ARMAGEDDON should follow so closely on the heels of the
similar but far more intelligent DEEP IMPACT is a near ironclad
guarantee that ARMAGEDDON will suffer by comparison. Even so the
difference in quality beats the point spread by a gap as big as the
state of Texas. This film is a sort of THE DIRTY DOZEN IN SPACE,
and if nothing else it proves you can get into space piecing
together nothing but off-the-shelf cliches. It fact apparently it
took six writers or more to find all the cliches necessary. The
main character and his crew, for example, are based on the old John
Wayne film, THE HELLFIGHTERS. There are some scenes of the
astronaut training in which the viewer may not know what is
happening or why it is funny without having seen THE RIGHT STUFF.
ARMAGEDDON, it seems, was not so much written as assembled after a
scavenger hunt. Then there are the in-jokes. Without knowing what
films have been released this summer the viewer may not realize why
one character is named Truman and or why the visual joke with the
toy Godzillas. It is a pity that the film did not come out next
year when the scavengers could have raided DEEP IMPACT to at least
get some idea how Earth people react to impending world-
destruction. The "we-all-wait-and-pray" reaction shown in this
film seemed hokey when George Pal used it in WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE.
And Pal's street riots in WAR OF THE WORLDS were more realistic
than what we see in ARMAGEDDON.
Bruce Willis plays an unflappable expert, always keeping things on
an even keel even in the face of trouble like the world as we know
it possibly coming to an end. This means that he never has to do
much in the way of acting. He just plays his usual bland
character. Will Patton made a memorable Civil-War-esque villain in
THE POSTMAN. Here as the second in command on the team he does not
play so flamboyant a character, but he is always watchable. Steve
Buscemi and Peter Stormare who were the mismatched partners in
crime in FARGO are reunited as a wisecracking American driller-
astronaut and a burned-out (in more ways than one) Russian
Cosmonaut. Together the two of them account for about 87% of the
interest value of the crew in space. Liv Tyler, playing Stamper's
daughter and the lover of another of the flying drillers, seems to
dissolve into a one- woman Greek chorus in the second half of the
film. She silently looks on, watching the action from Mission
Control and strikes poses.
More and more we are seeing a style of film editing based on the
comic book. It made sense for films like THE CROW that were based
on comic books. Here we have in the action sequences many short
cuts, each showing about what you would see in one panel of a
comic. Sometimes the camera lingers over a single static and
over-composed or melodramatic image, as if one is to pause over the
composition. For example, Liv Tyler may be standing at attention
in front of an American flag watching her father and her lover
blast off. In another scene we see just her hand touching a
television screen that a moment before showed what was happening in
space and now has only static. Buried deep in the film are about
fifteen minutes of beautiful state-of-the-art special effects.
These at times reach the level of breathtaking. But everything
else about this film is formula. The action cliches do generate
the same suspense they always do. But the thought that went into
DEEP IMPACT only points up the total cynicism about what the
audience wants that went into making this overly familiar mess. As
a science fiction movie, it has more action than thought. I give
it a 4 on the 0 to 10 scale and a 0 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Nobody seemed to care much about my comment that the angle of
tipping seemed to vary erratically from scene to scene in TITANIC,
but I will make another comment about the geometry of the action.
When cities are shown being hit by smaller meteor showers in
ARMAGEDDON, the meteors should be coming in on parallel or near
parallel courses. They come in from different directions. Is the
idea that they blew apart and just happen to be converging again?
[-mrl]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 732-957-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
People commonly educate their children as they
build their houses, according to some plan they
think beautiful, without considering whether it
is suited to the purposes for which they are
designed.
-- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu