THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
04/04/03 -- Vol. 21, No. 40
Big Cheese: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Little Cheese: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
To subscribe, send mail to mtvoid-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
To unsubscribe, send mail to mtvoid-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
Topics:
Leeperhouse Film Festival
Bollywood on Turner Classic Movies (film comments)
Locus Pocus (more comments by Mark R. Leeper)
THE CORE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
UTOPIA (book review by Tom Russell)
This Week's Reading (book sales, GRANTA BOOK OF TRAVEL,
IN RAJASTHAN, and THE TRANSLATOR) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Leeperhouse Film Festival
SEVEN DAYS IN MAY (1964) dir. by John Frankenheimer
On Thursday, April 10, at 7:30 PM, the Leeperhouse Film Festival
returns with SEVEN DAYS IN MAY. Back in the 1960s John
Frankenheimer made three very interesting thrillers: THE MANCHURIAN
CANDIDATE, SEVEN DAYS IN MAY, and SECONDS. These three films are
the highpoints of his career and critics frequently rate the first
two as the best political thrillers ever made in the United States.
For SEVEN DAYS IN MAY Rod Serling adapted Fletcher Knebel's and
Charles W. Bailey II's best-selling novel into a tight, tense, and
very dark script. Frederic March plays the President of the United
States with such integrity I have often wished he were President
instead of whom we had currently. Burt Lancaster plays a
MacArthur-like general and demagogue who has his own ideas how the
country should be run and is prepared to take a wild gamble with
the United States Constitution to achieve those ends for the
country. Caught between them is Lancaster's assistant, played by
Kirk Douglas. The musical score by Jerry Goldsmith is tense
and powerful. Serling's dialog is sharp and taut as a drumhead.
(The IMDB will frequently list one or two memorable quotes from a
film. For SEVEN DAYS IN MAY the memorable quotes go on for five
screens!) Though the film is most relevant to the politics of the
1960s it has lost little of its strength. Cinematography is by
Ellsworth Fredericks and under Frankenheimer's direction the film
has some very impressive visual layouts, well worth looking for.
The cast also features Ava Gardner, Martin Balsam, Edmond O'Brien,
George Macready, and Andrew Duggan. This is a good one. (On
DVD.) [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Bollywood on Turner Classic Movies (film comments)
Coincidentally, just after Mark's article on Bollywood films,
Turner Classic Movies listings for June were posted, and their
theme for the month is: Bollywood!
Here's what's available:
June 5:
8:00 PM Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) A young man follows the
woman he loves to India to stop her arranged marriage. 192m.
11:30 PM Bombay (1995) Religious unrest threatens the marriage of
a Hindu man and a Muslim woman. 102m.
2:00 AM Amar Akbar Anthony (1977) Three brothers separated at
birth come together to track a kidnapper. 184m.
June 12:
8:00 PM Rangeela (1995) A young actress' rise to stardom is
complicated by conflicting affections for her co-star and her
childhood sweetheart. 130m.
10:30 PM Dil Chahta Hai (2001) Three friends have their lives
transformed by love during one marvelous summer. 183m.
2:00 AM Sholay (1975) A vengeful police chief forces two small-
time crooks to hunt down the bandit who destroyed his family.
200m.
June 19:
8:00 PM Pakeezah (1971) A free-spirited young woman refuses a
prince's proposal for love of a man she only met once. 125m.
10:30 PM Junglee (1961) Young lovers defy the caste system to
fight for happiness. 150m.
1:00 AM Awaara (1951) A bitter young man vows revenge on the two
men who destroyed his mother's life. 193m.
June 26:
8:00 PM Mother India (1957) A family struggles to survive the
machinations of an evil moneylender. 172m.
11:00 PM Do Bigha Zamin (1953) Family members risk all in a move
to Calcutta to raise money and save their land. 142m.
1:30 AM Pyaasa (1957) A young poet searches the world for pure
love. 146m.
Further details are available on the Turner Classic Movies web
site: http://www.turnerclassicmovies.com/ (The June schedule is
at http://turnerclassicmovies.com/Schedule/Print/0,,06-
2003|0|,00.html) [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Locus Pocus (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Evelyn and I subscribe to LOCUS, the newspaper of the science
fiction community. This is the one that seems to win the Hugo
Award in the semi-professional category just about every year.
You would think that that honor would give them special respect
for the real Hugo awards. But LOCUS gives out their own version
of the Hugos each year in categories like "Best SF Novel," "Best
Fantasy Novel," "Best Anthology," "Best Single-Author Collection,"
etc. That's all well and good, I suppose. But I started looking
at the form that has to be filled out and I got a little shock.
In order to vote, you have to fill out a little demographic
information about yourself. Well so far that is fair enough.
"Are you currently: [] married, [] single, [] formerly married, []
other"
That struck me as a little odd. What are they trying to figure
out? How is marriage status relevant? Do single people like one
kind of science fiction? Are they trying to figure out if married
people are fantasy fans?
"Do you have any children? [] yes, [] no"
I suppose they could be trying to find out if people with children
still have time to read. Maybe if you have kids, you like fantasy
better. I think William Tenn did an anthology of science fiction
about children.
"Do you: [] own home/condo, [] live with relatives, [] rent
house/apartment, [] share house/apartment, [] other"
Oh, of course. LOCUS must be trying to figure out what sort of
reading home-owners prefer. What are they driving at? What does
the type of domicile have to do with anything? I suppose there
might be some differences from homeowners. Unfortunately I don't
think they have ever published a correlation.
"Annual family income: [] $0-10,000, [] $10,001-20,000, ..."
Now wait just a dang minute. Let me answer your question with a
question. What the hell business is it of LOCUS what my family
income is? I wanted to take your poll but not now. Take your
poll and shove it!!! Or put another way... no... any other
way to put it would just not be sincere. That is just about
exactly how I feel.
LOCUS does not say this filling in this information is optional
to vote. They don't even say thank you. They don't even say what
they want the information for. They don't set any limits on for
what the information will be used. And what bothers me more than
the questions themselves? They don't even promise to keep any of
this data private. They just imply that to take part in the LOCUS
poll you have to divulge a bunch of personal financial information
that just by an odd coincidence happens to be valuable to all
sorts of people. And some of these people may not use it in my
best interests. They already have my name address and zip code.
They know what sort of a neighborhood I live in. Now they are
looking to pair it with all sorts of financial information about
me. And they are doing it so matter-of-factly. "What books do
you like and, oh by the way, we need to know your income. And how
about what your mortgage payments are?" If I were reading their
poll results, I might be curious to know whether the people
responding like spicy food or prefer winter to summer or what kind
of movies they like. But that is not the sort of think that
interests LOCUS. They want to know about science fiction tastes
and what PCs people have and then they go for the wallet. In fact
the go-for-the-wallet questions come first.
Americans have become very careless about giving their personal
data to Internet Sites. Many of these sites have privacy
statements that it would take a lawyer to understand. That is not
a problem with LOCUS. There is no complex privacy statement to
unwind. There is no privacy statement at all. That is the same
as saying any data you send to LOCUS belongs to LOCUS to do with
whatever LOCUS feels like doing. Maybe what they want the data
for is purely innocent. Almost certainly it is. But possibly it
isn't. LOCUS isn't saying anywhere on the form. All they are
saying is "If you want to take part in the LOCUS poll, you have to
pay for it by trusting us and giving us marketing data about you
that could be misused. Oh, we'll send you a free magazine in
return."
My suggestion when you see requests like this is to ignore them if
possible. That was not always my advice. There was a time when
my advice was if financial information was irrelevant as it
certainly is to LOCUS reader preference polls to put in false
information to confound the system. However, if you tell LOCUS a
family income too low, it could conceivably affect your credit
ratings. If you put in a value too high, it could be like ringing
a dinner bell for marketers. You don't know where this data will
go because LOCUS doesn't tell you. It is better to remain silent
than to give away private personal data.
I don't mean to single out just LOCUS. The worst that they may
be guilty of is the bad taste of asking questions that are more
personal than they ought to be asking in a non-anonymous poll.
But there are a lot of people trying to get your personal data.
My recommendation to our readers is be a little paranoid. LOCUS
should say ON THE FORM that personal data is optional or they
should make the poll anonymous. One way or another if people
trust them with valuable data LOCUS should be willing to promise
in writing on the poll that data will be kept private. And
participants should also be smart enough to realize that their
personal financial data is not the business of LOCUS and worth is
a whole lot more than a free issue of LOCUS.
Am I being paranoid? Perhaps. And perhaps paranoia is a survival
trait.
At least LOCUS does not also ask for Social Security Numbers or
sexual preferences.
Postscript: When asked about the questions LOCUS responded, "We
don't have a privacy statement, but we don't use the data for
anything except compiling the survey results, which are published
later." Somehow that is not a very satisfying answer. They are
promising no responsibility to protect the data or even that it
will be kept private. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE CORE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: A spectacular set of disasters and a heroic expedition to
save mankind. Some real science and some nonsense mix. If the
film does not quite click, it is probably because we have higher
standards than we had for science fiction films in their heyday of
the 1950s and 1960s. THE CORE is still a good time in a movie
theater for the right audience. Rating: 6 (0 to 10), high +1 (-4
to +4)
THE CORE is a disaster film and an expedition film. For those who
don't know, there really is a solid core rotating at the heart of
our planet. That much of the premise of this film is true. In
THE CORE something has robbed the center of its angular momentum.
For a while nobody has noticed anything different. That much is
kind of hard to believe. Then some mysterious phenomena are being
seen. It is hard to believe that there would not be a whole lot
observed a lot sooner, but perhaps the core is slowing to a halt.
Dr. Josh Keyes (played by Aaron Eckhart) sees some strange
behavior in nature and gets nervous. He guesses what is wrong and
brings his ideas to Dr. Conrad Zimsky (Stanley Tucci), a superstar
scientist who has that rare ability to see any discoveries of
another scientist and make them his own. Zimsky is convinced by
Keyes's work that the Earth is doomed. But there is no way to do
anything about the situation. Then Zimsky remembers that a man
from whom he once stole some ideas, Dr. Edward Brazzelton (Delroy
Lindo), may have the technology to build a mole machine. If it
can be built the machine could be used to travel into the interior
of the planet and set off some bombs to start the core spinning
again. The mission is planned. To pilot the craft come two
shuttle astronauts played by Bruce Greenwood and Hilary Swank.
This is a film that intermixes some good science with some real
balderdash. The science, while applied with large liberties, is
far better than that in its most similar predecessors--films like
1951's UNKNOWN WORLD, 1959's JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH,
or 1965's CRACK IN THE WORLD. A lesser effort would have not
thought beyond using the premise to show just a lot of earthquake
effects. Where this film has class is the focus on geo-electrical
disasters, a possibility that most of the public has probably
never really thought about. And it does create a set of bizarre
and seemingly unrelated phenomena in the early parts of the film.
The frequently intentionally funny script written by Cooper Layne
and John Rogers and directed by Jon Amiel is a nonstop ride from a
man having an unexplained heart attack in a Boston boardroom (yes,
that is directly caused by a geological event) to the explosive
finale. The film is 135 minutes long and unlike films like
OUTBREAK and even TITANIC it has not padded the story with human
villains. Virtually every scene in the film is about the
geological crisis, which is threat enough. There are no
gunfights, chases, or martial arts; the film is all science
fiction. There is one chaste screen kiss. On the other hand the
film could have used some good advisors to tidy up even the non-
science. Every major disaster just coincidentally occurs in a
major city. And I refuse to believe that even after the military
knows how dangerous the situation is there is still only one
general assigned to track a problem that has such global impact.
Visually the film is not all it could be. Many of the spectacular
scenes of destruction have that indescribable flavor of computer
graphics. Similarly when Virgil--the drill machine is named for
the poet--is moving the "windshield" view is always a computer
graphic. The entire craft seems to be done only as a computer
graphic. To hide the graphics somewhat we never really get a good
look at Virgil. It is there on the screen but as a vehicle it is
rather nondescript. Viewers like to savor the contours of crafts
like the Nautilus and the Enterprise, but you never see Virgil
well enough to do that. Admittedly it is hard to imagine really
exciting images of a machine boring through solid rock or magma.
If it is completely enshrouded in opaque material as it would be,
most of the time there is nothing to see.
THE CORE is not a film I have a lot of respect for or learned a
lot from, but as an old CRACK IN THE WORLD fan I was looking
forward to it and I did enjoy it, perhaps for many of the reasons
I enjoyed EIGHT-LEGGED FREAKS. I think Paramount expected more
from the film than that it be just good "drive-in movie" fun. I
have affection for the film but rate it 6 on the 0 to 10 scale and
a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. Of its kind it is quite good.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: UTOPIA by Lincoln Child (book review by Tom Russell)
Summary: Don't buy this book. Don't even read this review.
What I liked best about UTOPIA was when Lincoln Child wrote that
one of the bad guys "uttered an expletive." Many authors would
treat the reader to a choice four-letter word instead. For this
dignity, lots of points.
UTOPIA has lots of scenes that would be good in a PG-13 movie or
computer game: fire works and explosions; hidden passageways;
suspicious characters in bizarre costumes; machine gun killings;
wild roller coaster rides; and an assortment of robots of varying
skills, smarts and cutes or uglies. (The movie producer would
have the teenage daughter and a un-nerdy boyfriend be the
computer-whiz heroes instead of her widowed father and his cute
co-worker/girl friend?)
My problem with UTOPIA is: it offers little - no, make that
nothing - new. "Utopia" is a futuristic computer-controlled
"Magic Kingdom"-like park with, among other attractions, scary
holographic projections of park visitors (but not the holodeck)
and smart robots (but more primitive than WestWorld).
I'm glad this book is going back to the library. No sale, SFBC.
[-tlr]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Well, T. S. Eliot says that April is the cruelest month, but
around here it's March. At least that's when the various library
book sales start kicking in, which in turn means my stack of books
to read gets high enough to be a menace if we should ever have an
earthquake here.
So first there was the East Brunswick Library sale, followed by
the Bryn Mawr sale (with an additional stop at Half-Price Books in
Rocky Hill), followed by the Hazlet Library sale (with an
additional stop at Second Hand Prose in Keyport). Luckily, we
didn't find quite as much as last year. The best find was at the
first, where we got an ex-library copy of Bleiler's two-volume
"Supernatural Fiction Writers". The Bryn Mawr sale is strange,
almost like two separate sales, where some of the books seemed
quite over-priced (or at least priced for the collector), while
others were more like a typical library sale, though copies of the
same edition of the same Tennessee Williams play might be priced
at three different prices. I picked up a few collections of
essays, a few plays, and a few books of travel writing. All in
all, it was worth the drive to Princeton. And the Hazlet sale,
though small, was very cheap (paperbacks a quarter, five for a
dollar). We even got a couple of "Goon Show" audiocassettes for
fifty cents.
Oh, and a stop at Nobody Beats the Wiz for their close-out sale
got us two sets of Avengers with Honor Blackman for about $21
each. I suspect they're going out of business because 1) their
regular prices were higher than places like Best Buy, and this
store was right across the street from a Best Buy, and 2) what
kind of stupid store name is "Nobody Beats the Wiz"?!
Before retirement, we used to go on shopping trips to New York and
buy lots of books at the Strand; now we go to book sales and get
as many books, but cheaper. (In large part this is because most
book sales start during the week, so we can now get to their best
stuff on the first day.)
And I even got to some of the books already. The GRANTA BOOK OF
TRAVEL is a collection of travel writing from Granta magazine (one
of those magazines that looks like a trade paperback). Several of
the articles were duplicated in the first issue of Granta that had
been devoted to travel writing, which I bought at the same time.
The stories vary from the humor of Bill Bryson to the more serious
articles about coups in Africa, the "Shining Path" terrorists in
Peru, and the conditions in Castro's Cuba.
Royina Grewal is an Indian woman who decided to travel through
Rajasthan and write about her experiences. Since most travel
writing about India is done by non-Indians, IN RAJASTHAN gives one
a new and different view of that region. Grewal clearly has more
access to the everyday life of the region, both in the villages
(she ends up at weddings, in temples as a participant in
ceremonies, etc.) and with the upper classes (she meets with the
rajputs, talks to all sorts of government officials, and discusses
the future of handicrafts with various artisans). She also
presents what some might consider too balanced a view (for
example, explaining why child marriages may not be the total evil
everyone outside seems to think they are).
I had seen John Crowley's THE TRANSLATOR in a new bookstore and
resolved to try the library, but when I saw a copy at Half-Price
Books, I figured it was probably as good a way as any to use some
of my store credit. Unlike his other books, this has no overt
fantasy element, but is the rather straightforward story of an
exiled Russian poet and a college student during the Cuban missile
crisis. Crowley has his characters spend a lot of time not just
writing poetry but explaining why they chose this word instead of
that word, and how this phrase was a reference to that other
quotation, and so on. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
A scholar who cherishes the love of comfort
is not fit to be deemed a scholar.
-- Lao Tze
------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Make Money Online Auctions! Make $500.00 or We Will Give You Thirty Dollars for Trying!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/yMx78A/fNtFAA/i5gGAA/J.MolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
mtvoid-unsubscribe@egroups.com
Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/