THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
07/13/01 -- Vol. 20, No. 2
Big Cheese: Mark Leeper, markrleeper@yahoo.com
Little Cheese: Evelyn Leeper, evelyn.leeper@excite.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
Topics:
Announcements
The Speeding Up of Time
SEXY BEAST (a film review)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Announcements:
Well, we discovered last week that the where we had intended to
send the MT VOID from imposed a limit on the size of outgoing
email, and that that limit was less than the size of last week's
MT VOID. (Admittedly, last week's was the largest we had published
in at least two years.) While we will probably be using a
different machine for email in the future, this raises the rather
frightening possibility that the MT VOID could become a semi-weekly
rather than a weekly newszine. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Also, note that the Big Cheese has a new email address. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Time (comments by Mark R. Leeper):
(This article contains nothing salacious, but it would be best
that children under 18 not read this. You will be finding out
about this soon enough. You are on your honor not to read what
follows. It is just the same as if it were a web site.)
Well, here we are. Can you believe it? The summer is about half
over already and it feels like it just began. You have probably
asked yourself where has all the time gone? Now a recent
discovery of science has the answer. We have all known
subjectively for years that as you get older time speeds up. When
you were young holidays always were far away. If you were waiting
for Halloween or Christmas it took forever to come. And we all
remember how long summers seemed when we were children. On that
first day of summer you had almost an eternity before school
started again. You had what seemed like years in which your time
was your own. Later as you grew up time started telescoping down
on you. By the time you reached college a summer was already much
shorter. You probably got yourself a job, stuck with it a while
and the end came faster than you realized it would. Then it was
back to school. By the time you got to be an adult summertime
went by very fast. It was like this year. You look at your
calendar and ask yourself where has the time gone. When you were
a kid half of a summer was so big you could not see the beginning
or the end from the Fourth of July. What is going on here?
For a long time science has thought that the speeding up of time
was easy to explain. As you grow older you see the same intervals
of time, but now you have a longer life of experience to compare
them to. When you were a child summer seemed long because you had
had only eight or nine years to compare that length of time to.
It was thought that as an adult with a much greater stretch of
life to compare to, summer only seems shorter by comparison. It
is an easy explanation and as often happens an easy false
explanation hid the not so obvious truth. Subjectivity was never
a totally satisfying or convincing explanation for the phenomenon.
We all had the feeling that something else was going on. Now it
can be revealed. There is another explanation, but it has been
suppressed because it is just too depressing. I am afraid I am
going to have to let you know what it going on. But don’t forget
you did not read it here.
Hold on to your hats. Here it comes. It is not an illusion.
Time is actually speeding up. You cannot prove it easily and it
is not obvious because we measure the passing of time with clocks
and watches that are themselves speeding up. Our subjective
measures of passing time do distort our perception of that time,
but not as much as we had been assuming it did.
What gives us the feeling that this measure of time is subjective?
Well, your children think that these summers last a long time,
just like you did when you were young. It feels long to them as
children and short to you as an adult. But what do they know?
They were not around to experience the really long summers when
you were young. To them this is a really long summer because they
have never experienced what summer that actually does seem really
long is like. But here’s a shock: you haven’t either. What you
thought was a long summer was really summer just flying by. Ask
your parents. Summers were REALLY even longer when they were
young. They were three months like ours, but they were three much
longer months. And your parents felt it at the time. They just
thought that what felt like the shorter summer when you were young
only felt that way because they were older.
If you could go back to Ancient Rome, summers were like what we
think of as eons. No wonder they had time to build all those
roads. The Roman children knew that the summers were long.
Perhaps they did not realize how long they were, but they seemed
long to them. Roman adults lived through these huge summers and
clucked their tongues and said in Latin how fast the year seemed
to be going. "Tempus fugit," they would say, to coin a phrase.
Here it is already the Ides of the Month of Julius. Before you
know it, we will be into the Month of Augustus. The merchants in
the marketplace are already showing their winter togas. It will
be cold in Rome soon. We better reserve a place in Pompeii. But
if you were there with your time sense it would seem like the rest
of the Month of Julius would be time enough time to walk to the
nearest star and back.
But the truly sad thing is that your children will have barely any
time at all. Time has sped up so much that even this pitifully
short summer will be long by their standards. When they are
adults twenty years from now (or seventeen months adjusting for
inflation) their lives will be going by so fast they will have no
time for anything.
Where will it all end? Nobody knows. We have calculated there is
a subjective 317 years left to the end of time. That is the
convergence point as you total an infinite number of years each
going by at a fraction (less than one) of the time the previous
year took. 317 years. Then what happens? [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: SEXY BEAST (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
CAPSULE: Gal is a 50s-ish London cockney gangster who has
retired to Spain. His old associates want him for one last
job and send the vicious Don to give him an offer he can’t
refuse. A standout performance by Ben Kingsley as Don cannot
save what is essentially a set of cliches recycled from old
Westerns. Rating: 4 (0 to 10), 0 (-4 to +4)
Roger Ebert asks in his review OF SEXY BEAST, "Who would have
guessed that the most savage mad-dog frothing gangster in recent
movies would be played by... Ben Kingsley?" My response would be
that anyone who has seen Alan Arkin in WAIT UNTIL DARK, Henry
Fonda in ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, or Anthony Hopkins in THE
SILENCE OF THE LAMBS should have guessed it. They should know
that the way for a film to create a really creepy sociopath is
cast someone who generally plays mild, sympathetic, or even
ineffectual character roles. The same characteristics that make
an actor seem gentle in most of his roles can work in his favor
when a role calls for him to be fierce and vicious. That is the
principle that works for Kingsley in SEXY BEAST.
Gary "Gal" Dove (played by Ray Winstone) has retired from a London
career of crime and is living on a luxurious villa in Spain. Life
has become a routine of sunning himself and relaxing. But his
paradise is about to be shattered by a one-two-punch. The first
punch is a boulder that comes rolling down the hill next to the
villa. The second punch comes from Gal’s past. Back in London
gang boss Teddy Bass (Ian McShane, TV’s Lovejoy) is planning to
break into a safety deposit room in a bank and he wants Gal. He
sends his most rabid henchman Don Logan (Ben Kingsley) to fetch
Gal. Don will accept any decision Gal makes from "yes" to
"certainly." However, if Gal says "no" Don will do whatever it
takes to turn it into a yes including threatening Guy’s ex-porn-
star wife DeeDee (Amanda Redman). In the meantime Don knows just
how to get under everybody’s skin. Kingsley makes Don a compact
package of fury and nastiness.
There are some serious problems in Louis Mellis’s and David
Scinto’s script that should have been caught before filming. When
we see the actual crime we have no idea why Gal was so important
to its success. Beyond an ability to use skin-diving gear, no
special talents are required of him. Any local hood could have
done what Gal is needed for. Additionally the crime involves
digging from a swimming pool to the bank vault, flooding the
vault. No only could they have let the water out of the pool and
avoided the complication altogether, but there is by far too much
water to be accounted for by what was in the pool.
In spite of the provocative title, the story is cliched and overly
familiar. I know I have seen all the plot elements of SEXY BEAST
in old Westerns like THE LAW AND JAKE WADE. The story is usually
of the reformed outlaw, a Robert Taylor type, who has hung up his
guns and is trying for a life of peaceful respectability. The old
gang, however, wants to do one more job with their old buddy and
sends a rabid Richard Widmark type to go and git ‘im. It is not a
great plot. In SEXY BEAST even the plot twists have gray beards.
Perhaps the film has a little more respectability because it was
made not as a Western but as a stylish British gangster film. It
is an old plot dressed up to look new.
If the plot is old, at least the style is creative. This is
director Jonathan Glazer’s first film, but he has reputedly done
some notable TV ads for Guinness Stout. His style does have some
unexpected touches including some very odd dream sequences.
Cinematographer Ivan Bird uses a lot of half lit scenes. We see
one side of a person’s faces. But the other side fades into the
darkness, a sort of metaphor for the half-world these characters
in-habit. Half of everything that is happening is also kept
hidden.
We Yanks will have a hard time with some of the dialog. At least
in my theater it was difficult to make out the words with the
quiet speaking, the heavy accents, and the cockney language.
SEXY BEAST is a very and familiar minor plot lent respectability
in the US by being done in what is here a still somewhat novel
genre, the London crime film. The plot may be new to British
crime films, but it would be overly familiar as a Western.
Further respectability comes from Ben Kingsley’s high-powered
performance. I give it a 4 on the 0 to 10 scale and a 0 on the -4
to +4 scale.
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
markrleeper@yahoo.com
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of,
he always declares that it is his duty.
-- George Bernard Shaw
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