THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
05/10/02 -- Vol. 20, No. 45
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
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Topics:
Query (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Richard Cowper (obituary)
Mona Lisa (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
SPIDER-MAN (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Query (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
How long a Jedi Master must you be before the order of sentences
in English grammar can you figure out?
For that matter, what exactly does it mean that Yoda spoke
convoluted English grammar a long time ago in a galaxy far, far
away?
Come to think of it, other than our own, aren't all galaxies far,
far away? [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Richard Cowper (obituary)
Richard Cowper (whose real name was John Middleton Murry, Jr.)
died 29 April 2002. His best known works were THE TWILIGHT OF
BRIAREUS and the trilogy consisting of THE ROAD TO CORLAY, A DREAM
OF KINSHIP, and A TAPESTRY OF TIME. He also wrote many short
stories, including the Hugo-nominated "The Custodians" and "Piper
at the Gates of Dawn," and was nominated for several other awards
as well. He wrote some non-science fiction as Colin Murry.
I believe (though I haven't dug through the very early MT VOIDs to
check) that the MT Holz SF Club read THE ROAD TO CORLAY as one of
its earliest discussion books. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Mona Lisa (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
A friend who has visited the Louvre asks why is "Mona Lisa" so
popular when there are other great da Vinci paintings around?
Because I think he deserves a full answer and because I am
desperate for a subject for my weekly editorial, I will give him
this verbose answer.
I think there are really two questions there. One is why it gets
any special attention at all and, more interestingly, why the
attention it gets is so great.
Why does it get any special attention? I think it appeals to a
broad band of people. It offers something for both the art
connoisseur and the general ignorant observer. Since I fall
mostly in the latter category I will not go into how the
background matches the foreground in showing the creative forces
or that the face is a balance of being idealized and individual.
Let us just say that it supposedly demonstrates great virtuosity.
I will not say much more since this much I say this not so much
with erudition as with plagiarism.
Most of the public likes the painting because the smile is
ambiguous and the action of trying to interpret it has become a
game itself. Whether Leonardo da Vinci saw anything enigmatic in
the smile is open to conjecture. Interpreting the smile is like
looking at the famous ambiguous picture that could be interpreted
as either a young beautiful woman or an old and ugly lady. It is
a game nearly as interesting as the popular "Six Degrees of Kevin
Bacon."
This explains why Mona Lisa has some marginal interest over other
paintings by da Vinci. It hardly explains why it is so much more
famous. The only other da Vinci painting that can match it is
probably "The Last Supper." With apologies to the old marching
song "We're here because we're here because we're here," the Mona
Lisa is famous because it's famous because it's famous. I do not
mean that in the tautological sense. I am not saying just
"because." Fame is a crowd phenomenon. Crowd phenomena are
heavily influenced if not dominated by feedback loops. Feedback
loops have large, perhaps exponential, multiplier effects.
Trivial subjective differences in the interest values of a work of
art can make one world famous while the other may be extremely
obscure.
Let me show you this effect in action with the Mona Lisa. I
remember seeing an animated cartoon in a movie theater. An art
thief had stolen a painting and was being pursued by the police.
At some point he opens the painting and while the rest of the
frame is still cartoon style the painting is a photographic
reproduction of the Mona Lisa. I guess the joke is that it is a
painting that we really recognize and were likely to have seen
before. Some of the kids might not get the joke. They may not
have seen the Mona Lisa before. But they are seeing it here. And
they got the point that this is a famous painting. Next time they
see it they will probably remember it. Because it was a famous
painting it had just gotten more famous. Fame feeds off of fame.
As another example, everybody knows Shakespeare is great so he is
repeatedly taught to the next generation. Every year in my high
school English classes we read a Shakespeare play. (This in spite
of the fact they were teaching modern English, a language
unfamiliar to Shakespeare.) Christopher Marlowe was a great
dramatist of the same magnitude. I have been told that the poet
John Donne was an even greater literary genius. Equal emphasis
could have been put on them but it was not. Shakespeare was more
famous because the parents who attended the high school PTA had
heard of him and respected him. They read him in school and
remembered his writing. Even their parents insisted their
children know Shakespeare. Shakespeare more than Marlowe was the
thing to read because Shakespeare more than Marlowe was the thing
to read.
You find a lot of these feedback phenomena that feed on
themselves. It is even more so when finance is involved. There
was the South-Sea Bubble, the Lucent Stock Fiasco, and the Dutch
Tulip Craze. They all follow the pattern of thinking something
must be good because everybody else knows its good. Then the
bottom falls out. The poet Schiller said, "Anyone taken as an
individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable--as a member of a
crowd he at once becomes a blockhead." The Mona Lisa is a little
more interesting than other paintings by da Vinci. The rest is
crowd phenomenon. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: SPIDER-MAN (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Sam Raimi does a comic superhero story that is more
character driven than fight driven. Toby McGuire plays Peter
Parker, the boy bitten by a spider and finds himself with special
spider powers. The film is fairly faithful to the comic book and
at the same time is fast-moving and fun. Rating: 7 (0 to 10), low
+2 (-4 to +4) Following the review is a non-spoiler discussion of
Spider-Man's capabilities.
I have not read a lot of comic books since I was in Junior High.
At that time Spider-Man was still a new comic, but I read several
issues and have read a few since. To be honest it was neither
sufficiently weird, nor sufficiently science-fictional to hold my
interest at that time. I did like that the characters portrayed
were a little better developed than the DC superheroes. I have,
however, read enough Spider-Man and X-Men comic books to know that
the new film SPIDER-MAN seems closer to the original comic books
than the recent X-MEN did. But that is not the only reason I
think this is the better of the two films. For my taste the
characters of X-MEN did not seem as well-developed and to a much
greater extent that film was fight-driven and while SPIDER-MAN is
more character-driven. Peter Parker is something of a cliche,
much like the title character of CARRIE, but at least we get a
better idea of who he is than we did with the characters of most
comic book based films.
Peter Parker (played by Tobey Maguire) is his school's science
nebbish. He can tell you anything about science, but he cannot
work up the courage to talk to his attractive next-door-neighbor
and classmate, Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst). An orphan, he is
lives a frustrating life in a minor key in a lower-middle class
neighborhood of New York. Then Peter is bitten by a spider that
was altered by DNA research. (Originally in the comic it was
altered by atomic radiation, but writer Stan Lee seems to use
whatever science that is current, mysterious, and topical.)
Parker is very sick for a few hours, but when he recovers he gets
considerably better than just well. He finds he has the power to
shoot webs from his wrists. (Why would he develop this at his
wrists? I suppose it would be a very different film if he had
inherited spinnerets in the same anatomical location where a
spider has them.)
Now, after hundreds of years when presumably nobody in New York
City had super-powers, the same day that Peter Parker becomes
spiderized by sheer coincidence someone else gets super-powers
also. (What are the chances?) It is Norman Osborn (Willem
Dafoe), the father of Peter's best friend (another twist of fate!)
who becomes a super-powered schizophrenic. Osborn is much like
Jekyll and Hyde, but instead of Hyde he turns into lurid Green
Goblin. Actually, his most amazing power seems to be to keep his
balance on a sort of high-speed anti-gravity speeder. But while
the film does have fight scenes between him and Spider-Man, they
do not drag on as they do in some films like the current BLADE II.
Instead, the film focuses on how Parker's relationships change as
he discovers his powers. Parker interacts with Ms. Watson as well
as his aging aunt and uncle. The latter is played by the
venerable Cliff Robertson. (That is an interesting casting
choice. Robertson's signature role was Charly Gordon who also
finds his relationships changing when he is altered by a
scientific experiment.)
Actually, the special effects of SPIDER-MAN may be of a lower
average quality than most other blockbuster fantasy films of late.
In spite of this being one film where wirework might work well,
too often the filmmakers rely on digital effects that do not
convince the eye. The images create look three-dimensional but
frequently will accelerate in ways that look more like cartoon
figures.
Also, the fact is that while SPIDER-MAN may have a nifty suit, the
whole concept does not work well for a movie superhero. Spider-
Man's powers are that he is strong and fast, he throws sticky
webs, and he sticks to things. His sort of rescue is generally
limited to throwing a web to stop someone from falling. But to
make a sequence long enough to be interesting on film the person
has to fall from a very great height. People fall from very high
up indeed in SPIDER-MAN. I will discuss more limitations of the
Spider-Man character after the review. And in addition to
conceptual limitations, he has another restriction imposed by the
writers. As my wife has observed in films, apparently superheroes
are frequently not allowed to kill their opponents directly any
more, even in fights to the death. Notice that SPIDER-MAN does
not kill his opponents. Instead he frazzles them to the point
that they make some stupid blunder and conveniently kill
themselves. We see this happen at least twice in this film. The
writers apparently do not want to risk losing audience sympathy.
In fact, these "frazzle-to-death killings" seem to have become
standard in many action films.
Tobey Maguire simply does not look like the Peter Parker of the
comic books, but he does a reasonably convincing job. I am a
little reluctant to see him in a mass market film since he has
been very good in some arthouse films and now he may not return to
that sort of film. Dunst does fine as the attractive friend of
Parker. But having recently seen her in THE CAT'S MEOW as an
actress who hides her intelligence behind a veneer of perky
childishness, I think she is wasted in this simple role.
J. K. Simmons is terrific as Parker's nasty boss J. Jonah Jameson.
Sam Raimi known for THE EVIL DEAD and DARK MAN directs.
SPIDER-MAN was more fun than I was expecting. I'd give it a 7 on
the 0 to 10 scale and a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
As long as we are on the subject, there are some things I have
never known about Spider-Man. The first observation I would have
is that there are marked similarities between Spider-Man and the
introverted villain in the episode "Spider Boy" of the radio
series "The Shadow" (November 11, 1945) I would be curious how
much Stan Lee knew of that episode.
In the comic book Spider-Man looks really dramatic swinging among
tall buildings, but I have never established how Spider-Man is
able to travel very well with his web-swing approach. Necessary
(but not sufficient) would be to have buildings at least thirty
feet higher than his plane of travel. Actually, depending on the
distance between suspension points, it would probably have to be
much higher than that. Even in Manhattan he would be extremely
limited in where this means of locomotion could take him. He has
to alternate suspension points first on one side of his line of
travel, then the other or he would end up flattening himself in
the plane of the face of the building. He probably would find
that it is very difficult to find a sequence of buildings he could
use without finding one recessed too far from his line of travel.
Web-swinging would of necessity be a very limited means of travel.
My guess is that a real Spider-Man would simply walk most places
he went. That is a lot less spectacular.
Spider-Man's wall climbs would also be impossible. I am not an
expert on spiders, but I think that even tarantulas have problems
climbing a vertical surface because they are just too heavy.
Parker is A LOT heavier than a tarantula. The film suggested that
Parker grows hooks on his hands, but even with fishhook gloves one
could never get enough purchase to support a human's weight.
Not only would ha probably not be able to get to where the crime
is, it is not at all clear how he knows where the crime is.
Apparently Parker usually just happens on crimes being committed.
Most of the crimes he seems to stop are in broad daylight and not
in high-crime parts of the city. If it were so easy to find
crime, police would probably be better at doing their job and
stopping it. It seems to me that the comic book refers to so-
called "spider sense." My question is what "spider sense?" Most
spiders have a hard time knowing what is going on one or two leg-
spans from their body. Web spiders can sense movement further
away, but that is really because it causes web vibrations under
their bodies. Some hunting spiders, very distant relatives of the
spider in the film, have considerably better eyesight, but nothing
to match the eyesight of a mammal. If Peter Parker inherited
spider senses about all he would need is a tin cup.
All this is not to say that spiders cannot do some pretty
impressive things--most of which have probably never been used in
the Spider-Man comic. Spiderlings use strands of silk to catch
the wind and get carried into the air. Live spiders have been
found floating in this way in the upper levels of the stratosphere
and come down miles out to sea. Most of the impressive things
Spider-Man can do he does not get from his spider inheritance.
Oh, and at this stage of his maturity he seems to be looking for a
mate. Male spiders do this also, of course, but many do not
survive the mating ritual. I hope his human side helps him to
make a better choice. [-mrl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
"Frog. n. A reptile with edible legs. The first
mention of frogs in profane literature is in
Homer's narrative of the war between them and the
mice. Skeptical persons have doubted Homer's
authorship of the work, but the learned, ingenious
and industrious Dr. Schliemann has set the question
forever at rest by uncovering the bones of the slain
frogs."
-- Ambrose Bierce
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