THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
12/12/03 -- Vol. 22, No. 24
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
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Topics:
Answer to Last Week's Puzzle (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Puzzle (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
State Names (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The Drive-In Theater (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
THE LAST SAMURAI (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
THE GRUDGE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (GUNPOWDER EMPIRE and THE BEST
JAPANESE SCIENCE FICTION STORIES) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Answer to Last Week's Puzzle (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
We got no correct answers to last week's puzzle. The question was
"Find the name of a world-famous American writer. This writer has
a first and last name. Reverse the order of the two names.
Remove one or more letters from the end of the first name and one
or more letters from the end of the last name. The result is the
name of a famous science fiction, horror, or fantasy writer. Who
are these two writers?"
The answer is Tennessee Williams. Reverse the order of the names
and remove some letters at the end of each to get William Tenn.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Puzzle (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
In EX LIBRIS: CONFESSIONS OF A COMMON READER, Anne Fadiman talks
about a book that had by her count at least twenty-two words she
not only couldn't define, she couldn't remember ever seeing them
before. She showed the list to several people in publishing and
academia to see how they would do. Before telling you the
results, we figured we would give you the list and see how you all
do. This is on the honor system--no looking them up. Let us know
how many (and which) words you know of the following:
monophysite, mephitic, calineries, diapason, grimoire, adapertile,
retromingent, perllan, cupellation, adytum, sepoy, subadar,
paludal, apozemical, camorra, ithyphallic, alcalde, aspergill,
agathodemon, kakodemon, goetic, opopanax
[-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: State Names (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The answer to last week's puzzle is Tennessee Williams. Ever
notice that some times characters in fiction get named after state
names. Well, you probably already know Indiana Jones. Dennis
Weaver played a Kentucky Jones in a TV show. Jackie Gleason
played Minnesota Fats in THE HUSTLER. Wallace Beery was called
Rhode Island Red in PONY EXPRESS. There was a western about
Nevada Smith starring Steve McQueen. Previously, Alan Ladd played
the same character in THE CARPETBAGGERS. Most he-men have the
option of taking the state they are from as a nickname. It occurs
to me that an Indiana Jones type is as some kind of a disadvantage
in this regard if he is from Virginia or Georgia. It kind of puts
Washington Irving in a new light too. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: The Drive-In Theater (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I was discussing drive-in movies on Usenet to someone who had
never been to one and wondered what it was like. I tried to
answer his questions and as I did a flood of nostalgia came to me.
I guess I kind of miss the old drive-ins. If you see how the
drive-ins appear in the media they appear to be trysting places
that showed only bad movies. Let me say that I never saw anyone
"making out" at a drive-in, but my attention was usually on the
screen. As for the quality of films shown I must say that films
like THE BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER KWAI, THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, THE
EXORCIST, THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE, THE DEVIL'S BRIDE, and THE FLY
(1958) I saw for the first time on a giant outdoor screen. I
suppose more often the films were like THE GIANT SPIDER INVASION,
HOUSE OF THE SEVEN CORPSES, and MARK OF THE DEVIL, PART 2. But it
depended a lot on the drive-ins you picked and of course you could
be selective.
New Jersey, where I live now, is the home of the drive-in movie.
The first drive-in theater was in Camden, New Jersey. Richard
Hollingshead patented the idea of the permanent outdoor movie (as
opposed to putting a bedsheet over a laundry line like the
traveling film shows did in the silent film days). Hollinshead
opened that first on in June of 1933. It has been something like
thirteen years since that last drive-in movie closed in this
state.
So what was it like? There were rows of speakers on stands and
you would drive in and park next to one of these stands. This
meant that though the sound could be fairly loud, it was in
glorious monophonic. There was no good way of having stereo
sound. Most movie theaters were a fair-weather business. They
would close in the autumn and not open again until spring the next
year. To keep the season going longer some theaters installed
in-car heaters you pulled into the car like the speakers. Whoever
sat close to it got toasted and in the far corner of the backseat
it was still pretty cold. On the same stands that had the
loudspeakers some also some theaters had in-car heaters. The
management had to forever remind people to return the speakers and
the heaters to the stands when leaving because some people would
forget and then rip the heaters and/or speakers off their cord
when they tried to drive away. They could also destroy their
windows. The rows for parking were banked so by moving your car
forward and back you could aim at the screen at a higher or lower
angle. You would inch your car forward and back until everybody
in the car could see the screen. That was not an easy job of
framing the screen in the windshield because most drive-ins had
really big screens. You don't see screens that big these days.
That meant that even the first row had to be a good distance back
from the screen. That gave the manager empty space and many put
in playgrounds for the kids to play in before the show started.
Shows had to start pretty late, particularly in early summer
because the sun did not go down until late.
In Detroit I remember some drive-ins stayed open all winter. The
reason why there is that in Detroit anything that had something to
do with the automobile seemed like a pretty good idea to the
locals, most of whom to one degree or another were supported by
the automobile industry. I remember getting stuck in the snow
leaving the Fort George Drive-in after seeing THE GIANT SPIDER
INVASION and BUG! The drive-ins stayed open in the rain, though
they would be empty it the weather seemed like it could be bad.
If it started raining during the film you had to run your wipers
and watch the film around the wipers. Even if it didn't rain you
frequently had to run your engine to defog the window.
The concession stands were a big part of the business's income.
They would often charge something like only $5 per carload for
movie admission and they made it up on sales. But I rarely went
to the stands. When I was young we would bring popcorn in a
grocery bag as the snack. It always looked better than what was
at the concession stand. They would run ads for the various
selections at the stands in the intermission between movies.
Whoever distributed the ads used bad film stock and the colors of
the food we saw in the ads was never quite right. The hot dogs
were plump and juicy looking but they frequently has a sort of
greenish tinge. (Perhaps the ones from the concession stand did
also, but in your car it was too dark to tell.) They would
advertise corn dogs, popcorn, candy, pizza ("a delicious tomato
pie"), and Hot Toddy (hot chocolate). Every minute they would
show you for five seconds a clock counting down to zero ("The show
starts in SIX minutes. There is still time to visit the snack bar
where we have ice-cold Coca-Cola."). They would illustrate with
cartoon hot dogs turning somersaults and jumping into buns. They
would have little cartoons of candy boxes, popcorn boxes, hot
dogs, etc. marching across the screen singing "Go on out to the
snack bar. Go on out to the snack bar. Go on out to the snack
bar, and have a bite to eat."
In the summer if there were mosquitoes they would also sell
this spiral wire coated with something that you lit one end and it
burned slowly in a spiral releasing insect repellant. Sometimes
they would have all night movies and free coffee and doughnuts to
people who stayed through the whole night. I always wanted to go
when they had five horror films in a row, but as a kid, what were
my chances? Years later when I actually saw some of these films
on TV I realized how lucky I was not to have paid to see some of
them. But of course you could always take a little nap and have
someone wake you for the next film. Parents frequently would
bring their kids already in pajamas so they could sleep through
the movies. Young parents didn't need to hire a baby sitter.
Sometimes they let their kids, still wearing pajamas out of the
cars to go play in the playgrounds just under the screen while
waiting for the sun to set so the films could begin. Those were
good days.
I understand in Japan there are still drive-in movies. In, the
United States the drive-in is an endangered species. In my home
state it is already extinct. I hear that in Japan drive-ins are
popular. At night they are drive-in theaters, during the day they
are commuter parking lots. Marvelous people, the Japanese. They
missed out on the 1950s so they are having them now. You should
see the "Elvis Dancers" who rock and roll dance on Sunday
afternoons. They don't want to miss the fun of having drive-in
theaters. Here in the United States, at least in New Jersey, the
party is over. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE LAST SAMURAI (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: THE LAST SAMURAI chooses some overly familiar pieces from
other films and assembles them in an enjoyable--though not always
believable--package. Cruise plays a burned out and alcoholic hero
of the Indian wars who around 1876 is captured by a samurai
leading a rebellion to reject foreign influence. The American
learns to respect and embrace the way of the Samurai. The battle
scenes are splendid, the script is not. Rating: 6 (0 to 10), high
+1 (-4 to +4)
When I see a Tom Cruise movie these days I always have the knee-
jerk reaction to think of it as a vanity piece. Most of his films
seem rather thin and intended to show him doing feats of physical
prowess. He is a sort of the modern-day Douglas Fairbanks. The
problem is that description fits too many actors. What sets Tom
Cruise apart from the Vin Diesels is that Cruise can act and once
in a while he gets a really good original script. Viewed from a
hilltop, the script of THE LAST SAMURAI looks pretty good. An
American in mid-1800s Japan--a Japan torn between holding on to
its feudal traditions and embracing the rapid changes of the
modern world. The problem is that when you actually get into the
story, every bit of it seems to have been borrowed from someplace
else. The script seems to be SHOGUN crossed with DANCES WITH
WOLVES and laced with THE WIND AND THE LION, themselves not that
far apart from each other. There are sub-plots that have been
years ago worn thin with overuse. Cruise's character is humbled
by the fact that he is hopelessly bad at Japanese styles of
fighting and also is picked on by bullies. He likes an attractive
woman who has every reason to hate him. He is living among
Japanese rebels who to his foreign mind dress in funny ways and
have funny customs. Gee, I wonder what they will do with these
plot threads? In spite of the "stranger in a strange land"
structure of the film, the viewer never finds himself on a piece
of plot that he does not know where it is going.
Tom Cruise plays Nathan Algren, a hero of the Indian wars and a
veteran of Custer's 7th Cavalry. Cruise has seen too much of the
viciousness of the sadistic and one-sided war against the Indians.
Nightmares and flashbacks of the barbarism of the whites in those
wars trouble him. He is an alcoholic burnout traveling as the
chief attraction of a firearms show. Even this less than
ambitious position he cannot hold. He is hired to travel to Japan
to modernize the Emperor Meiji's new army and prepare them to
fight a rebellion of samurai who are bound to the Bushido
tradition and do not want to give it up for Western technology.
(It is well to remember that any historical film is about both the
time it is set and the time is it made. Similarities to the
politics of the Middle East are probably intentional.) Chief
among the rebels is the guerilla Katsumoto (played by Ken
Watanabe). Algren is called upon to lead his under-trained army
against this Katsumoto.
In the battle Algren finds a respect for Japanese fighting
techniques and is captured by the enemy. Katsumoto believes
Algren has the spirit of his totem, the tiger. Algren may be a
little surprised to find he still has that spirit himself. Such a
man one does not just put to death. Katsumoto decides this is a
man worthy of studying and keeps him a prisoner in the hopes of
talking to the man and understanding both Algren and the sort of
enemy the Americans are. He places Algren in the house of the
comely widow of a man Algren killed. With the setup complete,
director Edward Zwick and writer John Logan are now free to make
the film look good and to let events follow their natural film
cliche course.
What would have saved this film from cliche at this point? Logan
could have taught the viewer a little about Bushido, the code of
the samurai. Of this philosophy we get one quick lesson in the
importance of concentration. We see a testimonial that with
Bushido Cruise becomes a better fighter and person, but we never
get into the meaning of Bushido or how the samurai thinks. For
this reason we never get any understanding of Katsumoto. Algren
supposedly does come to understand his captor, but the viewer is
left behind. Like with an infomercial Zwick spends more time with
the promised results of Applied Bushido than with the philosophy's
nature and content. Zwick also wastes time with a superfluous
romance.
The film has three endings, which is two too many. The first one
would have been the most effective. An Akira Kurosawa would have
left it there on the battlefield. The second ending one slops
over onto the silly side. And I swear the third ending is
borrowed from a particular Frank Capra film. The film generally
has a good look with a nice battle sequence toward the end. But
scenes of a then modern Japanese city seem a little digitized.
A film that immerses us in the Japan of the samurai cannot be too
bad and in fact this one has a lot to like. But it falls short of
the intelligence that was within its grasp. I rate it a 6 on the
0 to 10 scale and a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE GRUDGE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4)
THE GRUDGE, written and directed by Takashi Shimizu, does not have
an intelligent plot, but it is still an intelligent horror film in
that Takashi Shimizu has thought out what it takes to make a ghost
scary on the screen. William Castle would put a skeleton on the
screen and perhaps over the audience. A film like GHOST would put
a translucent image of a human on the screen. Neither of these
are really scary images because they are so familiar and were when
they were used. Takashi Shimizu makes his images unfamiliar as
well as weird. Or he creates a symbol of security on the screen,
for example a blanket, and then has it betray its victim. The
story is not intelligent but the images are. Many of the
frightening images are associated with strange ghostly child.
This is not one long story but a number of short stories,
connected incidents somehow connected to one modern and innocent-
looking house that is filled with malice. The stories are told
out of chronological sequence and really do not shed a lot of
light on each other except to show how ghosts can spread their
evil. If Shimizu's THE GRUDGE catches you in the right mood, this
is a very effective ghost story. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Harry Turtledove's GUNPOWDER EMPIRE is the first in a new series,
"Crosstime Traffic". It's clearly intended as young adult
reading. (The cataloguing information includes "Teenage boys--
fiction" as a category, but not "Teenage girls--fiction," even
though the female protagonist gets just as much time.) Amanda and
Jeremy are the teenage children of a couple who are involved in
crosstime trading. While the children are on vacation from
school, they live in "Agrippan Rome"--a world where Agrippa
outlived Augustus and Rome never fell, etc. Something happens,
Mom and Dad go back to our world, and then something else happens
and all communication between the two timelines is cut off. And
then the Lietuvan army decides to attack the city.
This story takes place a hundred years in the future, yet
Turtledove makes all sorts of references to PowerBooks, Wal-Mart,
Safeway, and Home Depot. The teenagers attend Canoga Park High
School, a building 150 years old. The technology in both
timelines seems uneven, with Agrippan Rome having cannons and even
pistols, but missing a whole lot of stuff that came along before
those in our world. And our timeline is basically one with
today's technology and social structure, which considering the
rapid rate of change we are living with is highly unlikely.
Turtledove also indulges in punning, and in such in-jokes as
having Jeremy playing a computer game of aliens invading the earth
which he later refers to as a World War II game--a clear reference
to Turtledove's "World War" series. All things considered,
though, it's not a bad book for the target age group.
Though it was published in 1997, John L. Apostolou and Martin
H. Greenberg's THE BEST JAPANESE SCIENCE FICTION STORIES doesn't
include anything more recent than 1989. I suppose the time and
effort required to translate works makes it more reasonable to
choose older ones that have proved their worth--certainly the
Seiun Awards for translated works are for older works as well. At
174 pages, this book is much shorter than many anthologies, but
because the stories are all fairly short it does include thirteen
stories. (No novelettes or novellas here!) I don't know if most
Japanese stories are this short, or if these are atypical. Not
surprisingly, the best stories in this volume are by what everyone
seems to refer to as the "big three" of Japanese science fiction:
Ryo Hanmura, Shinichi Hoshi, and Sakyo Komatsu. I loved Ryo
Hanmura's "Cardboard Box", though I can't say why. And I would
call it fantasy rather than science fiction. Shinichi Hoshi's
"He--y, Come on Ou--t!" was science fiction but a bit predictable.
However, it was somehow short enough that the predictability
didn't bother me. Sakyo Komatsu's "The Savage Mouth" was so
disturbing that I actually stopped reading it, so I have to say it
was effective horror. His "Take Your Choice" was another story
that seemed predictable, but again, this didn't bother me.
Thinking about it, I think there is a difference in ... something.
Not style, but perhaps purpose. The predictable stories don't
have the purpose of giving you an amazing new idea, but they do
let you consider the implications of what is happening while you
are reading the story, rather than the "American" style of having
the reader think about the implications only after the story is
finished. It's almost as if you are re-reading the story, even
the first time through. On the other hand, some of the other
stories I found rather opaque, suggesting that there may be some
major literary differences between English and Japanese science
fiction. Still, a good anthology. One might wish for more like
it, but I suspect that there aren't enough Japanese translators,
or enough of a market for the translations to pay them very well.
If Japan wins the Worldcon bid for 2007, it would be nice if they
could do a similar book as a souvenir book. (And I wrote this
review before I realized that this issue would end up as a
Japanese-themed one.) [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Say what you will about the Ten Commandments,
you must always come back to the pleasant
fact that there are only ten of them.
-- H. L. Mencken
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