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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 01/29/99 -- Vol. 17, No. 31
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.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert. The
Dilbert Zone--a review of the television series follows later in
this issue. [-mrl]
===================================================================
2. How come at the end of an episode Star Trek shows you scenes of
what they call an "all-new episode?" If these are really scenes of
the episode it won't be all new. [-mrl]
===================================================================
3. I write this going into a cold and I can tell this is going to
be a bad one. I have been known to get the kind of colds that are
strong enough to stomp whole cities. My colds are the kinds of
things that people make disaster movies about. My throat gets
sore. My nose runs, I start coughing uncontrollably. Sometimes my
digestion goes caflooey. I lose my sense of taste. So I know what
you are asking yourself. Why am I complaining? Aren't these
things that I look forward to when I eat spicy food? Sure they
are. But I want to earn them myself, not have some virus force
them on me. After all, who knows where that virus has been? It is
bad enough getting infected by a virus, but what if it is a dirty
virus?
Of course, these days I rarely get a cold like this one. It has
been a while since I have had a bad one, which may be, because I
have been taking Vitamin C, which acts like Kryptonite for colds.
And my colds need something like Kryptonite. Vitamin C seems to
work for me to fight colds. But as luck would have it this one
started at about 9:30 AM on a workday. If we had little emergency
Vitamin C dispensers at work--in case of cold, break glass--I might
have been healthy today. But I have to take Vitamin C in the first
few hours of symptoms or it does not prevent the cold. I took more
than enough to know I will not get scurvy on top of the cold, but
that was about all the good it will do. If I had been smart, I
would have run home and taken Vitamin C at the first throat
tickling, but that would just not have been practical.
Science tells us that Vitamin C does absolutely nothing for a cold.
Vitamin C is good only for preventing the aforementioned scurvy.
And it may be that my colds are really just a breed of scurvy, but
I doubt it. Let's just say that I love the illusion that Vitamin C
gives me that it is doing something good for my cold. The only
light colds I ever get are when I take Vitamin C in the first few
hours. For once I think I will believe in a folk remedy.
Particularly if the folk are people like Linus Pauling.
When I was a kid, I would these colds that I knew would last me
three months. Maybe the cold would end, but I would have a cough
for three months. And I would think of the cough as being part of
the cold. It would not be unusual for me to get a second cold
while the first one was still going on. You would think that you
should get some sort of deferment in a just universe. One cold
should give you resistance to the next one, but I am living proof
that it does not work that way. I had a friend who had a cold all
through high school.
Back then and ever since every time I got a cold I would get the
same picture in my mind that some alien organism has come to earth
on a comet, landed in my back yard, and has found me as its first
human host. These few hours of misery were the quiet before the
storm. It would not be long before it would totally engulf me.
First there would first be more of it than me, then take me over
entirely, then (as though it matters to me at that point) it will
go on and take everybody down. Like the Blob, it would just keep
engulfing people. At the same time next week Earth will have a new
master. At least this took some of the sting out of catching cold.
I was being a pioneer. Back when I was a kid my mother thought it
was important for me to stay inside when I had a cold. She had no
idea why I kept combing the back yard looking for a tiny meteor
crater. I don't know how that would help, but it would. But then
we don't really have a good grasp of what causes disease.
That was one of my cold fantasies and one that persists. These
days I don't check the back yard. When someone is looking. My
other cold fantasy came from Richard Matheson's I AM LEGEND. That
was the novel in which the main character was bitten by a bat at
some point in his past. He had gotten very sick but survived.
Many years later there is a pandemic disease, literally pandemic.
Everyone gets it and apparently dies. Everyone dies but our bat-
bitten hero. Everyone around him sickens and dies, but his former
disease has left him immune. Scary thought. So when I get a cold
I consoled myself with the thought that everyone else including my
bully English teacher would be dead, but I would live on. (Mr.
Lynch ran his English class like a Marine drill instructor. Most
of what I know about English literature I know from Lynch, but it
is really hard to summon up much gratitude for him.)
Well, hope you fair better in this cold season than I did. Button
up. [-mrl]
===================================================================
4. PLAYING BY HEART (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: Here are six stories with people
talking about love intercut together. The
stories by writer/director Willard Carroll are
about love and death, candor and lies. PLAYING
BY HEART is also something of a puzzle film
along the lines of THE USUAL SUSPECTS. But
mostly the film proves that veteran actors like
Gina Rowlands, Sean Connery, and especially
Ellen Burstyn can act rings around their
younger competition. Rating: 6 (0 to 10), +1
(-4 to +4)
"Talking about love is like dancing about architecture." That one
line is probably the cleverest thing about PLAYING BY HEART and
will probably be remembered as a trivia question long after the
rest of the film is forgotten. (Actually the quote is a variation
on the aphorism that talking about music is like dancing about
architecture which has been variously attributed to Frank Zappa,
Laurie Anderson, Thelonious Monk, and Steve Martin.) Yet, knowing
the futility of talking about love, yet knowing that futility the
film still attempts to tell a series of stories about love, all cut
together.
In PLAYING BY HEART we have the story of Joan (Angelina Jolie)
whose intended new lover Keenan (Ryan Phillippe) is totally
uninterested in relating to another person. Gillian Anderson of
THE X-FILES plays stage director Meredith who is suspicious of
Trent (Jon Stewart) who would like to start a relationship with
her. Gracie (Madeleine Stowe) and Roger (Anthony Edwards) have a
great time together and are married, but not to each other.
Mildred (Ellen Burstyn) and Mark (Jay Mohr) are mother and son
talking one last time before Mark dies of AIDS. Hugh (Dennis
Quaid) is looking to form a relationship with anybody, female or
male, as long as he can build the relationship on a lie. Finally
and perhaps best, there are Hannah (Gina Rowlands) and fatally ill
Paul (Sean Connery) who after a long marriage want to reaffirm
their vows, and just now Hannah has discovered that early in their
marriage, Paul loved another woman. Six stories about six
relationships, working and failing.
As he tells these stories Willard Carroll is doing something behind
the curtain that the viewer comes to suspect early on, but is not
actually confirmed until late in the film. By the time it becomes
clear what the script has done, it is probably too late to pick up
all the details, at least on the first viewing. Like THE USUAL
SUSPECTS, one probably has to see the film twice to pick up on some
of the subtleties.
Sean Connery's character Paul is dying yet even he does not have
the vulnerability of Ellen Burstyn's Mildred who has to cope with
the death of her son. It may be that having to deal with the death
of a loved one is harder than dying oneself or it may be just that
Burstyn is an actor who can reach from the screen and tear at a
viewer's heartstrings. Paul Newman was approached for the part of
Paul. In fact, he seems to fit the role better than Connery. It
was probably written with Newman in mind. It may say something
about acting styles, but ten hours after having seen this film one
still cares about the Burstyn, Connery, and Rowlands characters.
Speaking for myself I can picture the younger characters, but I do
not really care a whole lot for what happens to them and their
relationships. Burstyn can whimper more powerfully than Angelina
Jolie can shout. Perhaps the problem is that there are too many
characters to cover the material more than superficially. Carroll
is satisfied to just give us a feel for the personality of the
characters. The veteran actors know how to make the most of their
time.
In 1998 Willard Carroll wrote and directed PLAYING BY HEART as well
as TOM'S MIDNIGHT GARDEN. Before this year Carroll has not has not
directed since his debut in 1990 with a somewhat under-appreciated
horror film, THE RUNESTONE. If PLAYING BY HEART is no worse then
THE RUNESTONE, it is really little more accomplished. I would give
it a 6 on the 0 to 10 scale and a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. Of
some tangential interest is the fact that the MPAA in a bizarre
ruling rejected the shooting title of this film DANCING ABOUT
ARCHITECTURE as being too similar to the current DANCING AT
LUGHNASA. It is hard to imagine the two being confused. [-mrl]
===================================================================
5. DILBERT (a television review by Mark R. Leeper):
One of a small elite of the funniest men in America--up there with
Gary Larsen, Kenneth Starr, and Dave Barry--is Scott Adams, the
creator of the "Dilbert" cartoon strip. In an era when American
business management is so frequently awarding itself higher and
higher salaries for questionable business decisions, Dilbert has
become the voice of the middle class. He is a typical engineer
facing the pains of the late 20th century. Many but by no means
all of those pains are being visited upon him by obvious
insensitive blunders by bad management. The line level engineers
have adopted Dilbert as one of their own. It is unlikely that
there is a technical company in America without some Dilbert strips
decorating hallways.
And now for the time being there is a "Dilbert" television series,
but catch it quick on UBN if you want to see it because it probably
will not last long. The problem is that something that works well
as a three-panel daily comic strip does not necessarily work as
well in a longer format. A half-hour program requires a plot. The
"Peanuts" comic strip made the transition with what was at some
infrequent television specials. The creators mastered the art of
balancing little comic strip incidents and at the same time telling
a story. Eventually they even went into feature films. But
"Dilbert" is starting as a weekly half-hour show. The task of
telling a story worth telling and long enough to fill a half-hour
slot, week after week, is going to be much more difficult. And
judging by the first half-hour the series is already struggling.
The half-hour had many short chuckles that would have made good
comic strips, but the narrative plotting was weak. The first story
came to a climax that was not even obviously any sort of climax.
Dilbert had to find and choose among names for an unknown product-
-unknown not just to the audience but also to the characters in the
story--and in the end one silly name was hesitantly chosen. Here
we have even less idea than in the strip what Dilbert's company
does. In the comic strip we get a strong impression Dilbert and
his cronies are in the telecommunications business. Indeed Adams's
background was from one of the Bell Operating Companies. But in
the cartoon his company seems to have dabbled in herbal lozenges.
That is, to say the least, disorienting. It was, perhaps, better
to leave the business vague.
Visually there are some problems adapting to the new medium.
Dilbert is always shown in the comic strip with his tie turned up,
which I had always interpreted as meaning that the wind had somehow
picked it up. But perhaps it was better to leave that mysterious.
In the animated version we see that his tie is always stiffly
curled as if there is a wire inside it. This makes far less sense.
The mouthless Dogbert is given a mouth in the animation, but only
when he speaks. The animation seems to otherwise be consistent
with the comic strip. The music accompanying the show is by Danny
Elfman. The theme is called in the credits "The Dilbert Zone." In
fact, Danny Elfman recycled it from his score from THE FORBIDDEN
ZONE (1980), a film he made with his brother while with the Mystic
Knights of the Oingo Boingo. That recycling may not be
unreasonable since I would estimate that only about forty-seven
people saw this weird little film and eight of those saw it at my
house.
The first half-hour of "Dilbert" is not a promising start and many
of the decisions made in the production will be disappointing to
loyal "Dilbert" fans. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
MT 3E-433 732-957-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.
-- Oscar Wilde