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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 06/01/01 -- Vol. 19, No. 48
Chair/Librarian: Mark Leeper, 732-817-5619, mleeper@avaya.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper, 732-332-6218, eleeper@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist: Rob Mitchell, robmitchell@avaya.com
HO Chair Emeritus: John Jetzt, jetzt@avaya.com
HO Librarian Emeritus: Nick Sauer, njs@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
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 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. In this issue I review PEARL HARBOR, which l liked considerably
better than most of the critics. I do not think it affected my
judgement, but it would be hard for me not to like a film in which
the main character is a man who loves flying and who folds origami
to win a beautiful and very capable woman named Evelyn. [-mrl]
===================================================================
2. The people who attend or support the World Science Fiction
Convention each year get with their membership the right to vote on
the Hugo Award, the equivalent of the Academy Award for the field
of science fiction. As is appropriate to science fiction, this
year they are voting on the Hugos for two different years. The has
been a move of late to fill in Hugo Awards for some of the early
years that science fiction was popular but for which there were no
awards. That is sort of appropriate, I guess. We are supposed to
vote as if we were from that year but came to this year via time
machine, a process that seems more appropriate to the Hugo than to
just about any other award. This year the attendees are voting on
awards for science fiction from the year 2000 and from the year
1950. To this end I am reading Isaac Asimov's 1950 novel PEBBLE IN
THE SKY, which is one of the five novels which have been nominated
for a retro-Hugo.
PEBBLE IN THE SKY was written after the novellas that comprise
FOUNDATION and FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE. It is actually the first
real novel that Asimov wrote that fits into his "Foundation"
series, though perhaps only for one minor passing reference to
Trantor. In this book a middle-aged man is catapulted into the far
future when there is a galactic civilization and nobody is quite
sure any more even what planet mankind started on. Also fitting
into the plot is the age of the man sent. He is about to turn
sixty. That would have seemed very old, indeed, if I had read this
book first as a teenager. These days it does not seem so old. But
the time traveler mentions he is going to turn sixty. The question
that pops into my mind is how will he know when it happens. One of
the things that become much more difficult for a time traveler is
determining his own exact age.
First, we have to discuss what it means to be a certain age if you
happen not to be a time traveler. Well, the way we tell age on
Earth is purely by counting birthdays. Age in years is actually is
an imprecise measure of age since not all years are the same
length. Sometimes we throw in leap-days. We have even been known
to add leap seconds. This makes for a very faulty measuring stick
and you run into the quite possible problem that if the days fall
right you can be 26 and be marginally older than your father was at
a time when he was already 27. You may have lived through one more
leap-day than he did. In our calendar it cannot be a big
difference, but it happens. The problem is also complicated by
this age of fast travel. Even on a 24-hour clock, if you move
westward time slows for you a little, at least in the regard that a
day can last longer than 24 hours.
Things are even more mishugah in the Hebrew calendar in which you
have entire leap months. There you can turn 27 and be several days
older than your father was when he turned 27. And the day before
that you were 26 but older than your father was at 27. And forget
what happens if you measure on two different calendars. Then the
number you use for your age can be really confused. This is
particularly true if one of the calendars is the Muslim calendar.
The year on the Muslim calendar is not even the length of a solar
year on the average. That means that your birthday moves around
the solar year and falls in different seasons. I am not an expert
on this subject but I think that means the number of years since
the founding of Islam is significantly different in the Muslim
calendar and in ours. They are measuring in different length
years.
This is complicated enough, but it becomes even more so when you
add the concept of time travel, as Asimov does in PEBBLE IN THE
SKY. I suppose the main character could with some justification
claim to be many thousands of years old since he was born thousands
of years earlier. But counting that way would mean that if he had
gone back in time rather than forward he would be a negative age.
This is not a useful measure of his age.
What you would want is that at birth a clock be started for him and
tied to his hip. It would remain in the same frame of reference
that he does. Then every 31,557,600 seconds in his frame you would
say he is a year older. But assume that he was to have such a
clock. When he moves forward in time he is unlikely to move some
whole number of years forward. That would mean that his hip clock
would no longer click to a new year on his birthday. He would
essentially have two different birthdays, one the date on which he
was born and the other when he is an even multiple of the length of
a year. For a person who had time traveled a lot, like maybe the
people in another of Asimov's novels, THE END OF ETERNITY, the
effort to figure his age would soon be not worth the effort.
Presumably he would have lived through fractions of days. If you
time travel a lot in your job, you probably have completely lost
track of how many hours old you are and you never would know when
to say you were now a year older. [-mrl]
===================================================================
3. PEARL HARBOR (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: Flawed? Perhaps. Bad? Perhaps not.
The story is simplistic, but not unwatchable.
Close friends separated by a love triangle are
brought back together by a higher cause and
their mutual love of flying. The story is told
against the backdrop of the Japanese sneak
attack that brought the US into World War II.
The film features some nice visuals and some
good special effects used imaginatively.
Rating: 6 (0 to 10), +1 (-4 to +4)
Months ago the trailer for PEARL HARBOR intrigued me. Then I got a
rude shock at the end that it was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and
directed by Michael Bay. Bruckheimer is the king of sound and fury
action film blockbusters. Michael Bay was his director on THE ROCK
and ARMAGEDDON. PEARL HARBOR got some really negative critical
response prior to its release. This may have lowered my
expectations, but I really do not see what the fuss was about. I
would probably call PEARL HARBOR a flawed film, but not a bad one.
Its historical accuracy is better than many films set in the past
but still worse than some. PEARL HARBOR suffers a great deal from
comparison to TORA! TORA! TORA!, one of the finest and most
accurate films about World War II and the classic account of the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The plot is a somewhat mythic
story (some might call it "cliched") of two close friends who fall
out when they innocently both come to love the same woman. Then
they have their relationship patched up when they face a cause more
important than their differences.
PEARL HARBOR is the story of two men, friends since their boyhood
in Tennessee. Rafe McCawley (played by Ben Affleck) and Danny
Walker (Josh Hartnett) have a friendship based on each's love of
airplanes and flight. They join the Army Air Corps together and
during the physical Rafe falls for an attractive nurse, Evelyn
Johnson (Kate Beckinsale). Evelyn quickly becomes the second love
in Rafe's life; flying remains the first. Even as he woos her,
giving her origami birds, flying is never far from his mind.
(Origami is ironically a Japanese art.) When Rafe gets an
opportunity to fly with the RAF he takes it leaving Danny and
Evelyn behind. Then he is shot down and thought to be dead the
predictable love triangle is set in motion.
The casting of PEARL HARBOR, like most aspect of the film is
flawed. Affleck is hardly the most charismatic lead, but here he
flies rings around the low-key Hartnett. Beckinsale is a good
actor, probably most familiar for her role in COLD COMFORT FARM.
John Voight's face is just enough wrong for FDR to be irksome, like
a musical note played just slightly off-key. Mako, of the Conan
movies, somehow plays a very different type of officer from how we
are used to seeing Yamamoto from films like TORA! TORA! TORA! and
MIDWAY. Alec Baldwin plays a somewhat idealized Doolittle while
Dan Aykroyd, looking a little fat, is a navy intelligence officer.
It is, perhaps, unfair to compare TORA! TORA! TORA! too closely
with PEARL HARBOR. The former is an attempt at a very accurate
representation; the latter is a polished and soft focus love story
told against a backdrop of America's entry into the war. It might
be more accurate to compare it to HANOVER STREET, even with the big
spectacular set piece of the half-hour of film devoted to an attack
that was only about an hour long in real life. Bay uses time to
show the viewer a lot of different scenes of the destruction and
how the Americans fought back.
PEARL HARBOR is a film that has an extremely nice look. The
cinematography seems far better than the writing. It is one of
those films in which you could take a frame from one of any number
of the scenes and use it for a poster for the film. The frame
composition is often beautiful and occasionally even a little too
perfect and overly dramatic. Early in the film Bay captures a very
nice 1941 feel and then drenches the scenes in a rich blue to top
off the image. The viewer can frequently tell the CGI from
reality, but when it is following a bomb from the moment it is
dropped down into a compartment in a battleship, at least it is an
imaginative use. At another point two sailors on a scaffold on the
side of a battleship see a torpedo approaching below them and
hitting their boat. In another interesting usage of the visual
effects a nurse is slowly overcome by the horror of the casualties
she is seeing she enters a state of shock. The camera shows this
by leaving her in focus and selectively loses focus on her
surroundings. These are scenes that could never have been shown
even in a TORA! TORA! TORA!
The style of PEARL HARBOR is spotty. While the film shows half an
hour of unremitting violence, it is fairly reserved in its showing
of blood and there is no visible dismemberment, unlike SAVING
PRIVATE RYAN. Only the hospital scenes show serious carnage. The
dogfight scenes seem a little too much like a video game. And the
rock song over the end credits was horribly out of place and will
be an embarrassment when this film is seen again in years to come.
Pearl Harbor is over three hours long, but is always worth
watching, if not worth listening to. The film had undeniable
problems, but it was released needing only a fine tuning not the
overhaul must critics are implying is called for. I rate it a 6 on
the 0 to 10 scale and a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
HO 1K-644 732-817-5619
mleeper@avaya.com
Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Live with it.
-- Betty Friedan
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