THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
10/17/03 -- Vol. 22, No. 16
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.
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Topics:
Calories (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The Best Radio Drama Web Sites (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
INTOLERABLE CRUELTY (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
THE SINGING DETECTIVE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
THE YES MEN (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
THE BREAD MAKER (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (GOLDEN VINE, GETTYSBURG)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Calories (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The nice thing about calories in food is that they are dependable.
If you store food to long you can destroy the vitamins. You can
kill the nutrition. You can kill crispiness and the appeal. The
green leafies can wilt. It can sog up. But the calories will not
go away. Those stick around forever and never lose their potency.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: The Best Radio Drama Web Sites (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Last week I gave a list of web PC-based radio stations that play
all or almost all old time radio. That is pretty much "catch as
catch can." If they are playing something good when you are
listening, you get it. You rarely know in advance what they will
play and you cannot go back and play something a second time, much
as if it were broadcast on the radio. The next category of sites
is the ones that put out a radio drama to be downloaded and it
will stay in place for a week. You can download at any time in
that week.
WEEKLY SOURCES FOR RADIO DRAMA DOWNLOADS
1. BBC Saturday Play: 60-minute weekly plays. The BBC Saturday
play tends to be light entertainment. It typically may be a
comedy, a crime story, or a thriller. There are a few romance
stories (which I tend to skip). BBC radio plays generally have
high production values.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/saturday_play.shtml
2. BBC Friday Play: 60-minute weekly plays. I find that these are
much like the Saturday plays, but they tend to be on more serious
subjects.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/friday_play.shtml
3. BBC Afternoon Plays (45-minute plays, five a week). This is
more a mixed bag. There are love stories, comedies (some quite
funny), fantasies, detective stories, you name it.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/afternoonplay.shtml
4. The Listening Booth: Two weekly classic SF/horror/fantasy radio
programs. Generally nothing but good stuff.
http://www.otrplotspot.com/ListeningBooth.htm
5. Transmedia: Imagination Theater is a weekly radio program of
newly produced original drama. Each is a program of about
50-minutes with two stories. They have series characters. They
do stories with detectives like Sherlock Holmes and their own
Harry Niles. They also have stories with an occult detective.
Then a lot of their stories are not in series. This is the most
accurate pastiche of Old Time Radio currently available. If you
have heard all the old shows, this station will have some material
you have not heard before. I get the impression that the same
people syndicate to local radio stations, but the material is also
available at their web site.
http://www.transmediasf.com/sorry.htm
6. The Halls of Ivy: This is a weekly program about a college
president. It stars the distinguished Ronald Colman and usually
stresses intellectual values.
http://www.lynnpdesign.com/classicmovies/ivy.html
7. The Shadow: This was the most popular superhero of old time
radio and he still is popular today. He makes himself invisible
using occult secrets that he learned in the Orient. "The weed of
crime bears bitter fruit. Crime does not pay. The Shadow knows."
The self-satisfied attitude is a minus, but the stories are
decent. The ads for Blue Coal are unintentionally hilarious.
"Order a sample ton today!"
http://www.shadowradio.org/index.html
8. The Goon Show: The BBC's classic comedy series with Harry
Secombe, Spike Milligan, and Peter Sellers. One is funnier than
the next. If you don't know what Goon Shows are, find out. This
is one of the funniest radio series of all time and is definitely
a precursor to Monty Python.
http://www.angelfire.com/darkside/scoffo/goonshow/Remote4.html
9. "When Radio Was" Past Shows: Radio Spirits seems to have cut
back from several of their radio weekly programs. These days they
have just Stan Freeberg's program in which he plays one or more
old time radio programs. They put a new one up each weekday and
they stay up seven days.
http://www.radiospirits.com/onradio/wrw_past.asp
10. RTA Radio One Drama: This is from the Irish equivalent of the
BBC. They do a play each Sunday, generally one that they are
replaying from some other country's nation radio station. The
plays are usually on a serious (frequently downbeat) theme.
http://www.radio1.ie/weekend/sundayplayhouse/
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: INTOLERABLE CRUELTY (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: A cagey divorce lawyer and a cagier divorcee match wits
in a battle over who gets the proceeds of multiple divorces.
INTOLERABLE CRUELTY is very much a mainstream film with a prosaic
style and plot. That is uncharacteristic of the inventive Coen
Brothers. Adequate for a fun night but disappointing as a Coen
Brothers film. Rating: 6 (0 to 10), +1 (-4 to +4)
Think of a Coen Brothers film and you usually think of flashy
camera moves. Frequently it will have a weird point of view that
can be accented with bizarre humor. Almost always the Brothers
write their own stories from scratch. All but HUDSUCKER PROXY
have been crime films. INTOLERABLE CRUELTY is a crime film, but
really just nominally. Even watching this film one never gets the
flavor of a Coen Brothers film. It is more like a screwball
comedy than it is like a MILLER'S CROSSING.
George Clooney plays Miles Massey, a motor-mouthed divorce lawyer
of national renown. He is a master of the prenuptial agreement
that protects the financial assets of a marrying client from the
spouse when it comes time to dissolve the marriage. (Usually that
is from six months to six years.) Massey designed the classic
cast-iron pre-nuptial agreement that protects each partner's
prenuptial assets and which cannot be broken. Some schools spend
an entire semester studying it. Divorce is really a game. A
beautiful woman marries a rich man, stays with him a short time,
and then they let the lawyers fight it out to decide how much of
the man's assets the woman can take. A group of such women are
repeatedly shown luxuriating in a pool at a country club as they
discuss the game. One of these rich divorcees is Marylin
(Catherine Zeta-Jones). Massey defended client Rex Rexroth
(Edward Herrmann) against her and finds he is attracted to her
himself. When Massey meets her Marylin is sucking dry her former
husband and is ready to leave the husk and move on. Massey is
smitten with Marylin and figures he is the one man with legal
dexterity to best her at her own divorce game. Massey is like a
praying mantis male, trying to mate and still not be eaten.
The Coen Brother use Welsh actress Zeta-Jones to seduce the
audience the way Hitchcock used Grace Kelly. She does not show
much range but she is undeniably desirable. George Clooney has
resurrected much the same overripe oiliness of his character in O
BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU and transplanted it to the opposite end of
the social spectrum. He is supposed to be an unflappable cast-
iron divorce lawyer, but in the presence of Marylin he loses his
control and just stares enraptured at her, saying things like "You
fascinate me." His slightly gawky exaggerated performance is the
one thing that stands in the way of there being screen chemistry
between him and the elegant Zeta-Jones. Of course, part of the
premise is that the rich are all a little wacky.
Familiar faces punctuate the rest of the cast. Billy Bob Thornton
plays a Texas oil millionaire with some very strange tastes in
marriage ceremonies. Geoffrey Rush is a television producer who
ends up a victim in the divorce game. Cedric the Entertainer who
played Eddie the Barber in BARBERSHOP is along as the guy who
loves his job of getting videotape evidence of infidelities.
If this does not seem like the usual Coen Brothers fare, it is not
really their story. Joel and Ethan Coen were invited in to
rewrite the script for one of its many revisions and considerably
later they were asked to direct. The result is a script that is
not a Coen Brothers sort of story, but one that has some Coen
Brothers touches. INTOLERABLE CRUELTY is not a bad film, but it
certainly isn't the uncommon material one usually expects from the
Coens. I would rate it a 6 on the 0 to 10 scale and a +1 on the
-4 to +4 scale.
Minor spoiler---It is absurd to assume that either partner can
terminate a contract at any time just by destroying the original.
Who would sign an agreement so easy for one side to unilaterally
cancel? [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE SINGING DETECTIVE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Rating: 0 (-4 to +4)
The British TV playwright Dennis Potter first came to the
attention of United States audiences with the broadcast on Public
Television of his seven-hour play "The Singing Detective."
Director Keith Gordon says that a project near the end of Potter's
life was to adapt the play to the screen in such a way that
American audiences could appreciate it. Keith Gordon claims that
this film version is very near to Potter's vision.
The story, if that is what it can be called, is very hard to
describe. Much of what we see is going on in novelist Dan Dark's
mind. The thoroughly unpleasant Dark has been admitted to a
hospital with a painful skin disease. It is difficult to decide
which is uglier, Dark's disease or his personality. Dark (played
by Robert Downey, Jr.) cynically attacks anyone around him within
range. Meanwhile his mind keeps flitting to scenes from his novel
or to dancing production numbers lip-synched to the tune of 1950's
rock-and-roll or to scenes of his wife being unfaithful to him
while he is out of the way. He casts his fantasies with people
from his unpleasant childhood. His wife's lover and his
detective's partner are all cast in his mind as the man he saw his
mother having sex with (Jeremy Northam). A femme fatale in his
novel is his wife (Robin Wright Penn). His detective is himself,
minus the scaly scabby skin and given the mannerisms of Humphrey
Bogart as Sam Spade. The psychiatrist trying to cure Dark is
played by Mel Gibson, well-disguised in makeup.
Part of the problem is that Dark is so ugly in both look and
action that we really do not care what happens to him. Rather
than wanting to see him cured we just want the film to end.
Watching the original play required patience, but it had the
excellent Michael Gambon in the lead rather than Robert Downey,
Jr. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE YES MEN (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Rating: +1 (-4 to +4)
This is a documentary about a team of political practical jokers
and some hoaxes they have perpetrated in the name of satire. The
Yes Men claims to be an association of some three hundred
imposters worldwide but the film concentrates on only two who must
be the stars. They run the web site www.gatt.org, which satirizes
the World Trade Organization's web site. That seems not too
uncommon a joke, frequently you see someone who has managed to get
a domain name that sounds like it should be someone else's site.
They then put up something satirical in the web site. But in this
case the joke was carried further. People who did not realize the
site was a joke started inviting the page's authors to conferences
to represent the WTO's policies, and the Yes Men started sending
their own counterfeits. News programs would have Yes Men to
defend the WTO's stance and policies, not realizing they were
imposters. The primary hoaxer (Andy Bichlbaum, according to a
Google search) uses the false name Dr. Andreas Bichlbauer.
The film tells the history of this small group, from their first
satire web site, gwbush.com (still active). Their www.gatt.org,
somewhat more subtle than the www.gwbush.com site, does fool
people and they authors. The style of the documentary is less
than polished. At one point we watch Bichlbauer having breakfast
for no apparent reason than to stretch the running time. We do
however get to see some of Bichlbauer's fraudulent presentations
and they are quite funny. They include presenting to textile
manufacturers a strange and obscene-looking cyber-suit for
monitoring employees. Another presentation suggests the recycling
of food to get more nutritional value.
It is not clear what the market will be for this documentary. It
is too slight to get a theatrical release by itself. The style is
frequently dull, but it is also quite entertaining and comical.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE BREAD MAKER (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Rating: -1 (-4 to +4)
This is a Canadian film on videotape about the on-again, off-again
romance between a romance writer and a TV weather man, Edmund
Gooby. Honey writes romances and works in a bakery. The romance
she is currently writing is about an 18th century baker. She
keeps dropping into the fantasy world of her story giving a second
meaning to the film title. Honey has a problem with alcohol about
which she is in denial. A third meaning comes from her buying a
bread-making appliance, sharing the cost with Edmund and there is
a custody question when they split up. Good aspects of the film
include scenes showing how the machinery works in a big high-
production bakery. And there is a dog in the film. I did find
myself chuckling at two or three of the jokes. The scenes in
which Honey escapes into the fantasy of her book should work and a
similar gimmick did work in ROMANCING THE STONE, but it was more
intricately and cleverly handled there. This amateur effort is
really amateur. The fact this film is playing at the Toronto
International Film Festival indicates just how hard Canadians are
trying to promote their own films. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
I've been catching up on my alternate history reading with a
couple of books.
Jai Sen's THE GOLDEN VINE is a graphic novel that assumes that
Alexander the Great didn't die in trying to conquer India, but
spent some time consolidating and securing his empire before
heading that way. This isn't a premise that has been over-used,
but there isn't enough development here for my tastes. Many
people have remarked on how beautiful the gold ink is that was
used, but I found it more of a distraction--between that and the
shiny black, I had to keep shifting the book to avoid glare.
Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen's GETTYSBURG, on the other
hand, has a lot of detail. Alas, it's all military maneuvers
rather than interesting political or social developments. This is
the first book of a projected trilogy, so maybe this will come,
but I'm not holding my breath. (For that matter, "1945" was the
first of a projected series, but it did so poorly that the series
was canceled.) Other quibbles include: Lee's horse was
"Traveller", not "Traveler". Chamberlain was called "Lawrence",
not "Joshua". And *why* do the authors refer to characters
sometimes by their first names and sometimes by their last (and in
the case of Chamberlain, both those *and* by his middle name as
well!), often on the same page? And I'm not talking about in
dialogue. Henry Hunt should be either "Henry" or "Hunt",
preferably the latter, but not both alternating. (Lee and Lincoln
seem to be among the few characters who escape this fate.) [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind
only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
-- Franz Kafka
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