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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 07/31/98 -- Vol. 17, No. 5
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.bucconeer.worldcon.org. The 1998
World Science Fiction Convention, to be held August 5 through
August 9 in Baltimore MD. [-ecl]
===================================================================
2. Victor Hugo wrote a novel with the title LES MISERABLES, meaning
"those who are miserable" or "the wretched of the earth." It is a
very moving title when you think about it. It refers to the poor
people who lead miserable lives. I wonder how he would react to
hearing his beloved poor called "Le Miz."
===================================================================
3. I recently spent some time near Chicago going to a class in the
town of Naperville. I never thought of myself as an architecture
fan, Chicago may be the city with the most beautiful architecture
in the country. I say that walking a tightrope. I don't want to
be too positive on Chicago or my management will think that I was
taking the class for fringe benefits. Let me assure you I tried to
go as economically for the company as possible. We stayed at a
motel chain. Of course we did not have a lot of choice. Just
about everywhere we have traveled across country staying in motels
we noticed that all you see are the same places: Motel 6's, Quality
Inn's, etc. etc. You see the same restaurants: Taco Bells,
McDonalds, Burger Kings, ad nauseum. You see the same grocery
stores, and the same department stores. I guess it really is true
that in the United States that man is born free and everywhere is
in chains.
But, and here is where the tightrope part comes in, I don't want to
be too insulting to the Chicago area since I do have a lot of
friends there. On top of which I was born in Cook County Hospital.
The funny thing is that every time I pass it now I have this
tremendous urge to spawn. But let's not go into that.
When I was in New Delhi I realized that this was a city with
different cultural assumptions. In the US traffic patterns are
really based on the queue. In New Delhi the traffic is based on
the crowd or the mob with people going in different directions at
will. Chicago has traffic based on the traffic jam. Wherever you
go you have varying degrees of traffic jam ahead of you. I think
there is a secret to designing traffic patterns so that the traffic
keeps flowing smoothly. I don't know what the secret is, but it
should not be difficult to find out. I think that just about every
city in the country knows it but Chicago. I have never been in a
place that has so many traffic jams for so little excuse. The
Eisenhower (so-called) Expressway must have wasted more people-
hours in the United States than professional wrestling. I saw two
cars hit head on at full expressway speeds. Luckily there was no
damage. 31 miles into the city on a Tuesday night took us 90
minutes.
But you can tell Chicago is an upscale area. A sign by the side of
the road says (and this is the truth) "Use car phone to report road
emergencies x999." Who said Social Darwinism is dead?
Chicagoans seem to love trolleys and there isn't one real trolley
within the city limits. They have what I would call a Faux
Trolley. They have trolloid busses. They have steering wheels and
gasoline engines. I hate to think of all the little Chicagoans
growing up loving trolleys and never experiencing a real one. It
is like the British with hamburgers. [-mrl]
===================================================================
4. SNOW IN AUGUST by Pete Hamill (a book review by Mark R. Leeper):
In the cold winter of 1946-1947, New York City, a young Irish-
American boy becomes close friends with Rabbi Judah Hirsch,
survivor of the Holocaust. Michael Devlin becomes increasingly
fascinated with Jews and wants to know everything he can about
them. Michael and the Rabbi become each other's teacher and guide
to the other's culture. But Michael is also the witness of a
hate-crime by the leader of a local anti- Jewish youth gang, the
Falcons. He would love to go to the police but his code of honor
forbids his turning informer. Yet his Jewish friends and has
anti-Jewish enemies are on a collision course.
Pete Hamill writes with a nice eye for detail about a boy immersed
in his own popular culture with Captain Marvel and Frankenstein.
Meanwhile he looks with the eyes of an outsider and learns about
Jewish culture and Judaism. As a Jew myself, I was flattered with
Hamill's positive view of Jews as a misunderstood and persecuted
people. It is a near certainty to me that Mr. Hamill is not Jewish
as his squeaky-clean appraisal is unlikely to come from a Jew. But
somehow this world is a little too idealized--it does not show
enough why Michael has fascination with Jews. Michael is making
big sacrifices for Jews and it is never clear why.
The novel seems to be simplified from real life, almost making it a
juvenile. Michael never has a serious moral decision to make, one
that could possibly be controversial to the reader. As long as the
reader can accept a moderate liberal viewpoint there are no issues
to which to object. What do I mean about these moral issues? When
I was growing up my friend Charlie Francis and I agreed we would
each go to the other's Sabbath service just to understand it
better. So one Sunday I went with Charlie to church, and the
following Saturday he was supposed to go with me to synagogue. But
that week Charlie said that he asked his priest and he was
absolutely forbidden to go to a Jewish ceremony. That sort of
moral issue could, but does not, arise in SNOW IN AUGUST. The
reader does not have to choose between what the priest believes and
Michael's inclination to learn about Judaism. In SNOW IN AUGUST
nobody objects to Michael's fascination with Jews but the youth
gang, the Falcons. Every moral issue has an obvious solution.
Because the characters are so polarized, the good and the bad, with
the bad threatening everybody good, everybody good liking everybody
else good, one has the feeling that Hamill is talking down to the
reader. Even Rabbi Hirsch is enthusiastic about Jackie Robinson
entering the Major Leagues. Baseball players are not usually a
subject of great fascination of rabbis.
Michael's dialogues act like a primer on Judaism that will probably
more of interest to non-Jews than to Jews. One problem with the
dialogue is that while the language may not be contrived, the
content of the dialogue certainly is. For example, Michael asks
the rabbi if there is a reason that Easter and Passover fall the
same time of the year. The rabbi explains that there is and goes
into why. Fine. But it seems like an unlikely question. Chanukah
is at the same time Christmas for no particular reason and had
Michael asked about those two holidays there would have been no
good answer. Michael just happens to ask the right question to
give the rabbi an opening for a small lecture.
Hamill has a pleasant writing style and while the story is
predictable, I would be lying if I denied that I wanted to get
return to the book each time I put it down, even though I was
fairly certain what was going to happen.
SPOILER...SPOILER...SPOILER...SPOILER.. .
My major complaint with SNOW IN AUGUST is its climax. The book
makes the same mistake as Tod Browning's film FREAKS. The biggest
part of the novel takes place in the natural world and shows a
group of people discriminated against and regarded with what is
assumed to be ignorant fear. Then at the very end we discover that
they have supernatural powers which they unleash, albeit in a good
cause. So, in fact, there is good reason to fear them. In the
case of the novel, the Jews really do have supernatural knowledge
that they can unleash against their enemies. And the book never
comes to terms with why the power would be unleashed in this
relatively mundane incident of anti-Jewish hatred when it
apparently has not been used for hundreds of years of pogroms and
the Holocaust. [-mrl]
===================================================================
5. SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: This is perhaps the most realistic and
at the same time perhaps the most violent war
film ever made. Eight men are sent on a
mission of mercy in the week following the
Normandy Invasion. Along the way we see the
invasion of Europe from the perspective of a
grunt soldier. It is not a pleasant sight.
This is an answer to every war movie that ever
made battle look glorious. Rating: 9 (0 to
10), +3 (-4 to +4)
I am sorry that John Wayne is not around to see Steven Spielberg's
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. Wayne made many films of the glory of war.
Perhaps during the war that was what was needed. But it presented
a totally artificial view of what war was really like. In a John
Wayne film when someone is killed they fall over--usually
bloodlessly. Nobody has to deal with people who have been cut in
half by machine gun bullets, with wounded solders looking for their
own severed arms. The deaths in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN are anything
but bloodless. And at a time when so many films show gratuitous
gore, as a special effect Steven Spielberg may be the only director
who knows how to shoot blood so that the viewer feels the pain.
There are four boys in the Ryan family, or at least there were the
week before D-Day. Mrs. Ryan will get three telegrams in one day
about the loss of three sons. The last remaining son was
airdropped behind enemy lines and nobody knows if James Ryan is
alive or dead. The brass wants to see him back safely with his
family. A squad of eight men is sent to find Ryan and send him
home. But the squad is decidedly ambivalent about the assignment.
Eight men are risking their lives in highly dangerous territory to
save the life of one private who is being sent home in what may be
only a public relations gesture. Is he more deserving of special
treatment because of what happened to his brothers? When they find
him is he even going to want to go home? Might he be already dead
and the whole mission pointless? Are eight people likely to be
killed for some general's quixotic notion of mercy?
No film in memory has ever taken such a gritty and un-romanticized
view of what the dog soldier experiences. The battle scenes are as
vicious and unrelenting as any film has ever shown us. The action
begins with a 25-minute subjective view of the squad landing on the
Normandy Beach-right in front of a nest of machine guns. There are
no dramatics here. It is just a bunch of men being delivered into
to mouth of a meat-grinder. Most of the delivered soldiers last
just seconds before they die in any of a variety of ugly ways. The
survivors of the squad are chosen for the Ryan mission and with
some trepidation they go off to find the private. Captain John
Miller, a blood-and- guts commander, played against type by Tom
Hanks leads the squad. Unknown to the high command but suspected
by the men, Miller is starting to crumble under the stress of
constantly dealing with the dying and dismembered. The squad is a
heterogeneous mix of personalities and ethnic types borrowed from
any film like A WALK IN THE SUN or THE BIG RED ONE. It includes
the loyal Sergeant Horvath (Tom Sizemore), the uncooperative
Private Reiben (Edward Burns), the Jewish Private Mellish (Adam
Goldberg), and a timid translator, Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies).
Among the issues contested by the unit is the question of how to
treat surrendering Germans and the individual's responsibility to
be sacrificed for the many.
Spielberg has not returned to the black and white of SCHINDLER'S
LIST but he does some playing with the color and look. At times he
will wash out the film, giving the feel of amateur photography of
the time. During battle scenes he will use a special filter to
tint the scene. Then he strobes the action so while the film is
not slowed down, it will give fewer images per minute. In this way
it looks like the viewer is not able to take in all he is seeing.
He will use hand held cameras to put the viewer into the action.
Miller's physical state of shock is represented by near silence on
the soundtrack in the middle of a battle scene. During some of the
battle scenes we get almost all of our information visually and the
sound is reduced to the din of battle. Other times Spielberg lets
the sound tell the story, particularly in scenes where the squad is
hearing the earthquake-like rumble of approaching tanks. Spielberg
makes his point in the loud numbing battle scenes or in quiet
moments as when Mrs. Ryan just folds up and sits on the floor of
her porch when she knows she is about to be given bad news. He can
make a point by letting his camera wander over the geometrical
lattice of a field of crosses in a military cemetery. Curiously
enough for so professional a production, there are some
inconsistencies in the Robert Rodat script. Early in the film we
are told that the boys at first served together and were separated
only after the five Sullivan brothers died in the Navy when the
boat on which the five served was sunk by the enemy. That true
incident, by the way, was probably the inspiration for this
fictional story. We see a picture of the brothers all in uniform.
But later we are told that when one of the brothers went to boot
camp was the last time they were together. One more minor glitch
if I saw what I think I saw, the men invading Normandy seem to have
guns covered in polyethylene to protect them from the water. Nope.
That is a decade or so too soon for that. What they did tend to
use is latex, which would have been more tight-fitting. It also
would be a product produced for another purpose. (Information on
polymers and WWII provided by Harold Leeper, Chemistry Docent for
the Tech Science Museum, San Jose, California. He and I go
The honesty and realism of some of the scenes of this film may
forever change the war film. This is not a pleasant film, but it
is a truthful one in a way that few war films have ever been
truthful. I rate it a 9 on the 0 to 10 scale and a +3 on the -4 to
+4 scale. [-mrl]
===================================================================
6. LES MISERABLES (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: Victor Hugo's often-dramatized novel
gets a new screen adaptation with Liam Neeson
as Jean Valjean and Geoffrey Rush as Inspector
Javert. This is a fairly accurate
interpretation of the novel, but too often the
film is dark-literally and in tone--and
occasionally the style is bloodless and
uninvolving. But it is still a pleasure to see
one of the world's greatest stories on the wide
screen. Rating: 7 (0 to 10), +2 (-4 to +4)
New York Critics: 8 positive, 4 negative, 6
mixed
The best and certainly the longest novel I ever read--about 1600
pages in my unabridged edition--was Victor Hugo's LES MISERABLES.
Hugo turned slow operatic pacing into a piece of monumental art
throwing in which fifty-page essays were just side comments. This
novel also has the distinction of being the only piece of written
fiction that ever moved me to tears. So I was very much looking
forward to seeing the new film version. The new version is not a
screen adaptation of the popular international musical, but a
straight dramatic rendering. Much of what I enjoyed of the novel
was missing, but then it should come as no great surprise that not
all 1600 pages of story would make it to the screen.
Liam Neeson plays Jean Valjean, a vicious ex-convict who is turned
in one night into a human saint by the goodness of the Bishop of D.
But in the course of the story he will be tempted to return to evil
many times as his past repeatedly fights to catch up with him. In
this case his past takes the form of the implacable Inspector
Javert, searching for the missing Valjean. SHINE's Geoffrey Rush
plays the inflexible lover of law and order Javert who hounds
Valjean for years. As the film opens Jean Valjean has already been
released from his nineteen years in prison, but with his yellow
passport nobody will give him shelter until an old woman suggests
he try the door of the Bishop of D. After the familiar story of
the Bishop's silver, probably the best-known sequence in the novel,
we jump forward ten years to see Valjean having become the
enlightened factory owner and mayor of the village of Vigo. Uma
Thurman plays Fantine, a woman fired from his factory who turns to
prostitution. Fantine has got to be the least glamorous role of
Thurman's career. Behind the (intentionally) ghastly makeup
Thurman is able to put some real passion into her role and gives as
good a performance as I can remember from her. Her love for her
daughter is a new inspiration for Valjean. Claire Danes completes
the set of principles as the adult daughter Cosette in a role that
requires little but that she be cute and a bit spoiled.
The film takes a number of small liberties with Hugo's plotting to
make things going on within characters' heads happen on-screen and
more visibly. In this version Valjean does not just slip out of
the Bishop's house with the silver; he physically attacks the
Bishop. Valjean's escape to find Cosette is much simplified from
the novel and turned into a carriage chase to add some excitement
to the story. The Thenardiers are reduced from major characters in
the novel to a single scene. The modification that is really the
most bothersome is the final meeting of Javert and Valjean.
Apparently Rafael Yglesias, who wrote the script, wanted a piece of
strong dramatic action. He ends the film in a major key, where a
minor key seems more natural to portray Javert's final doubts.
Liam Neeson is physically a large man making him instantly more
appropriate than Fredric March was in the classic 1935 version.
Neeson tends to underplay the role where some more passion would
have been what was expected. Geoffrey Rush is equally passionless,
but in this case it works to his advantage. Javert, after all,
makes himself little more than a machine for enforcing rules and
laws. The most disappointing casting is in having Peter Vaughan
play the Bishop of D. Vaughan appears to be something of a
ditherer, a nice man but not one with a great deal of intellectual
power. Yet the Bishop is really the most important character in
the story, and Valjean is only an extension of the goodness of the
Bishop into a second person. Valjean is the embodiment of the good
that the Bishop did living on rather than being interred with the
Bishop's bones.
LES MISERABLES too often is just a bit bloodless. It is a bit more
an intellectual exercise than the story of tragedy and triumph Hugo
wrote. Still it recalls the passion of the novel. I would still
give it a 7 on the 0 to 10 scale and a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
[-mrl]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 732-957-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
I don't understand guys who call themselves feminists.
That's like the time Hubert Humphrey, running for
President, told a black audience that he was a soul
brother.
-- Roy Blount