THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
01/09/04 -- Vol. 22, No. 28
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:
New Heinlein Novel (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Spiders on a Bridge (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
PAYCHECK (film review by Dale L. Skran)
HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
COLD MOUNTAIN (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (APPLE OF MY EYE, UNDERFOOT IN SHOW
BUSINESS, THE MAN WHO FOUND TIME: JAMES HUTTON AND
THE ANTIQUITY OF THE EARTH) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: New Heinlein Novel (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
In case you missed it, there is a new Heinlein novel out this
year, FOR US, THE LIVING: A COMEDY OF CUSTOMS. Well, it's new in
the sense of this being its first publication, but it was
apparently written in 1938. That was shortly after Heinlein
worked for Upton Sinclair's political campaign in California, and
about the time he was running himself on a social reform platform,
and reflects his support of that and the Social Credit movement in
Canada. Caveat: according to friends who have read it, it is
probably only for Heinlein completists--it has a lot of political
lectures even less disguised than those in his later works. A
full review will follow in a little while. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Spiders on a Bridge (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I was crossing from Amherst to Northampton, Massachusetts, on the
Coolidge Bridge and I saw something interesting. I looked at the
railings on the side of the bridge and I happened to notice that
every single space, every hole through the railing, had a spider
web. This seems to be fairly common on bridges. I remember I was
on a fairly long bridge in Budapest, the famous Chain Bridge, and
I saw the same thing. The railing had been totally colonized by
spiders and webs. Some of the spiders looked fairly ugly. From
the distance the bridge looks magnificent, but when you walk
across it, every opening in the railing has a spider web. It has
been totally colonized by spiders.
Now you might just see that and note it. Most people would. I
start thinking about it. Well, in Budapest I didn't give it a
second thought, but in Massachusetts it suddenly occurred to me
that I was not sure how a spider gets to the center of a bridge to
build a web there. In my house I see spider webs all the time but
they are always within a few feet of places where you might not be
so surprised if you saw a spider. But how does a spider get to
the middle of a fairly long bridge? Do they crawl on all eights
that whole distance looking for a good place to build a web? That
seems unlikely, but nothing I could think of seemed more likely.
Immediately I had visions of the Great MacArthur Bridge Rush. The
day the bridge is completed tens of thousands of spiders from
dozens of yards around are collecting. They wait at noon on one
side of the new bridge. Sparrows have been invited in to go after
any spiders who cross the line too soon. The tension mounts.
Suddenly the starter's pistol is fired and the spiders go running
across the bridge rushing to find a parcel of unclaimed railing.
Big spiders, little spiders, spiders with sails of webbing letting
the wind carry them. Spider mites grab a space on a passing human
pedestrian. Spiders hitching a ride on passing bicycles. All
rushing out to find that little piece of bottom railing that they
have dreamed of. A place to build a web in the good clean air of
the river. A place to lay an egg sack and raise a family, right
there in the majestic shadow of the high railing. Some decide to
risk death to cross the roadbed to the other side of the bridge
for railings over there. But, of course, that means dodging car
tires. But that is a fool's hope because there are spiders over
there having a similar rush. Soon the good railing is all gone
(soon here meaning a week or so because the bridge is pretty long
when you are running on little tiny spider legs.) The spiders
register their claims by building a little piece of web on their
little piece of railing. Yes, it must be an amazing event.
But I decided that probably wasn't how it was done. That was
pretty silly, the more I thought about it.
So if that isn't it, just how do the spiders get to the middle
sections of the bridge? I don't really know. They could walk all
the way from the edges of the bridge. And spiders have been known
to fly, letting wind carry spider web. My guess is that it is a
generation thing. Little spiders have to try their new legs
looking for lebensraum. It may be that at first it was just the
interstices of the railing at the ends of the bridge. As there
are new generations of spiders they spread out toward the center
of the bridge. They drive a golden spike where... No, forget
that. Four different colonies of spiders start in the four
corners of the bridge, each moving toward the center. At the
center the spiders are new to the frontier. At the two ends of
the bridge, each on both sides, are the old family spiders. They
probably think of themselves as members of the DAR--the Daughters
of the Arachnid Rail-claiming.
That doesn't sound right either. I guess we will never know.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: PAYCHECK (film review by Dale L. Skran)
(We have a guest film review this week.)
At this point Philip K. Dick seems to be working from the grave
on a record for stories made into okay to excellent films. We can
now list (Movie/Story):
- BLADE RUNNER (DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?),
- TOTAL RECALL ("We Can Remember it for You Wholesale"),
- SCREAMERS ("Second Variety"),
- MINORITY REPORT ("Minority Report"), and most recently
- PAYCHECK ("Paycheck")
BLADE RUNNER is one of my all-time favorite SF films. MINORITY
REPORT is good, but the movie is overly gruesome and suffers from
a lack of editing. TOTAL RECALL is a decent adventure, but not at
the same level as MINORITY REPORT or BLADE RUNNER. SCREAMERS
appears to be a low-budget horror film which I haven't seen, so I
reserve comment.
Starring Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman, PAYCHECK seems to be better
than TOTAL RECALL, and far more watchable than MINORITY REPORT.
Some may complain about the classic John Woo structure (big car
chase in the middle followed by blow-out mega-fight near the end)
but the actual story is great. The only thing I can compare this
to is BRAINSTORM, my all-time "Engineer as Hero" movie along with
THE TIME MACHINE.
Affleck plays an engineer named Jennings who specializes in
illegal reverse engineering jobs, after which his memory is wiped
and he is paid off. Think of it as the ultimate non-disclosure
agreement. The wonderful opening sequence (which is not in the
short story) introduces the character and the nature of his work.
Then Jennings is offered a really big paycheck in return for two
or three years of his life. He accepts, and before you know it he
is walking out of the building holding an option statement worth
$90 million. He soon finds, however, that just before his memory
was wiped, he refused the stock options and sent himself a package
of odd junk, including hairspray, a coin, a paperclip, etc.
The rest of the mystery unfolds fairly closely with the plot of
the short story, although the ending is quite different, and the
Jennings of the movie a more moral figure than in the short story.
This is the best real SF movie I've seen in a long time. It
suffers a bit from being a John Woo action epic, but in truth the
action fits well with the plot, with the possible exception of the
long car chase screen. Jennings's engineering and fighting skills
are established in a credible and interesting introduction. The
backstory, the character, and the plot are excellent. Affleck
does a great job as a really smart guy struggling to figure out an
impossible puzzle. The bad guys are decent actors, and they make
for good opponents, never falling into a kind of "idiot bad guy"
approach. The story seemed to hold together well on one viewing,
although the plot is extremely complex, and on a second viewing I
might find some inconsistencies. Little details, like the
existence of two kinds of memory wiping technologies were very
well handled in how they operated and affected the plot. PAYCHECK
also operates well on a moral level, as a tale of a man who lives
basically as a rich playboy, trading his life for money, but who
comes to realize that there are things that no paycheck can buy,
including, in this telling, both love and survival.
This move is rated PG-13 for a number of intense action sequences,
fights, and car chases. There is one very brief and not
especially explicit love scene. I think the main issue with
taking a kid under 13 might be that some would find the plot too
complex and fast moving to understand. This is a much easier
movie to watch than, say, DAREDEVIL from a violence perspective.
Rating: +2 on the -4 to +4 scale; must-see for any serious SF fan.
After I see it again I may end up raising the rating to a +3.
Spoiler: The gimmick in this movie is that Jennings has invented a
time viewer, and has used the machine to give himself *exactly the
right stuff* so that he can come out the winner in a life and
death game. His victory in part seems to derive from his
engineering-based belief that he can use the machine to change the
future to his benefit, while the villains seem obsessed with
making whatever they see in the viewer come true. It is also
interesting to observe that he is a reverse engineer who must
reverse engineer exactly how he got into a particular very strange
situation!
It is interesting to note that Dick has Jennings taking over the
bad guy's corporation and using the time viewer to his own
benefit, while Woo's updating has Jennings destroying the time
viewer and setting out at the very end to make the world a better
place. I doubt we'll hear from him again in the movies, but
Affleck's Jennings must go down as one of the great engineer-
heroes in the true Campbell/Heinlein tradition. [-dls]
[Note: Other films based on the writings of Philip K. Dick include
CONFESSIONS D'UN BARJO based on CONFESSIONS OF A CRAP ARTIST;
DRUG-TAKING AND THE ARTS from A SCANNER DARKLY; and IMPOSTER, based
on the story of the same name. -mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: What is probably the best-written film of the year
functions as a thriller and as a human drama. Two people from
different backgrounds struggle for ownership of the same house.
This is a gripping film that works both as a thriller and as a
human drama, not an easy combination. Rating: +3 (-4 to +4) or
9/10
I knew immediately from the trailer that I wanted to see this
film. That is because I got through the trailer and was not sure
who the good guy was, or even if there was a good guy in this
story. Both characters seemed to have some right on their side.
That is very unusual in films. In the film A FEW GOOD MEN you
have two characters conflicting and either one could be right.
But Tom Cruise is young and earnest and Jack Nicholson is older,
smokes cigars, and is sexist. None of these faults are germane to
the conflict, but it is clear the filmmaker is telling you with
whom to sympathize. HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG is about a conflict
between two people, each of whom is arguably in the right. Each
desperately needs to own the same house.
Kathy Nicolo (played by Jennifer Connelly)--sober for three years,
well, sort of--is the kind of person who just wants to wallow in
her depression and to avoid the complexities of life.
Professionally she is a housecleaner, but she makes very little
effort to maintain her own house, which is much in need of a good
cleaning. She lies to her family so they don't find out her
husband has left her. She just ignores her mail letting it
accumulate unopened on the floor of her house much like the pile
of dirty dishes collects in her sink. A misunderstanding over
taxes that she has ignored for months comes back to bite her in a
big way. The county seizes her house and puts it up for auction.
This house was left to her and her brother by her father and she
desperately needs to get it back as the last part of her life that
she has not screwed up. If she loses the house she has lost
everything. One has a natural sympathy for Kathy and her
situation, but one also feels that her problems are really in
large part of her own making. If anything our sympathy for her is
a guilty emotion.
The house has been purchased at auction at a bargain price, a
quarter of its market value, by Massoud Amir Behrani (Ben
Kingsley). Behrani was once a colonel in the Shah of Iran's army.
When the Shah fell he had to flee his country and his whole family
will be murdered if he ever returns. In the US he was never
successful. Unknown to his family the best he could do for a
career is work on a road crew during the day and work at a clerk
at a convenience store at night. His wife, Nadi (Shohreh
Aghdashloo), stingingly upbraids him for not providing the kind of
luxury they had in Iran. But finally Providence has smiled on
him. He has bought a house at auction and he can parlay the
difference between its cost and its market value into a
comfortable life for Nadi and an education for his beloved son,
Esmail (Jonathan Ahdout).
The two principal characters seem to be opposites. One is a
young, attractive female and the other is a wizened old military
man. Nicolo is sloppy and casual. Behrani meticulous and is
wound as tight as a spring, covering his desperation with a
painful formality. Yet they have a lot in common. Each is trying
desperately to keep up appearances so that his/her family does not
learn what their situation really is. Each urgently needs
ownership of the house to recapture a piece of a better past that
is now forever beyond reach. The self-respect of each is tied up
in the same house. Upsetting the balance is a Lester Burdon (Ron
Eldard), a policeman who takes an interest in Nicolo that begins
benignly, but which will not remain so. Burdon wants Nicolo to be
dependent on him and slyly tempts her into a position where she
will be. Nicolo is happy to comply. The writing by Russian-born
writer/director Vadim Perelman is compelling. There are at least
three very well developed characters with powerful performances by
Connelly, Kingsley, and particularly Aghdashloo. The latter does
say much in the film, some minimal English and some Farsi, but she
is a strong dramatic presence.
It is a rare film that functions well both as a moving personal
drama and as a crime thriller. It has a finely crafted screenplay
of with genuine complexity and many ideas inherent. In the end it
is a film about conflict among people we come to like. We want
them all to work their problems out, yet from the very first scene
we know they will not.
What perhaps appeared at first to be a mundane thriller is a
strong dramatic film. I rate HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG a +3 on the -4
to +4 scale or 9/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: A French grandmother following her kidnapped grandson
comes to America and enlists the aid of a famous but eccentric
jazz-singing trio. Together the four pit themselves against the
French Mafia to try to rescue the boy. This French-Canadian-
Belgian production created by Sylvan Chomet is very much a 1960s-
style cartoon, but extended to feature film length. Much of the
humor is reminiscent of silent film comedy. Rating: high +1 (-4
to +4) or 6/10
Most animated films you see these days are intended to not just
tell a story but to show off what new capabilities are possible
with the animated film now that the computer is helping generate
images. And some pretty impressive things are possible. This
animation is a lot more interesting to look at than the plain two-
dimensional artwork that the majority of cartoons had back in the
1950s and 1960s. THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE is something of a
throwback to those cartoons of forty and fifty years ago. Had
this film been made forty years earlier, maybe contemporary with
the Mr. Magoo films, it probably would not seem particularly
remarkable. It would have been funny, but not really a radical
departure. But the animation style is not the point. Writer and
director Sylvan Chomet is not showing off the latest animation
technique. This is just a cartoon written at feature length. Oh,
the film has a lot of fun images, but they are not three-
dimensional and they are not realistic. This is not to say that
it is not a pretty good animated film, but that is all this little
French delicacy is. And that is enough.
In a cartoon with a minimum of dialog we have our story unfold
first in France and later in a sort of United States, but not
quite. When the story opens a little grandmother with Coke bottle
glasses, Madam Souza, is raising her apparently orphaned grandson
and his puppy. The grandson's interest is in bicycles and bicycle
racing. Madam Souza is going to coach grandson to compete in the
Tour de France. She follows him around wheezing through a whistle
to pace him. There is a lot more to see than this plot line.
There is humor with the dog and his habit of barking at the train
that passes the grandmother's house at the same time each day.
The years pass and finally the boy is ready to race in the great
Tour de France. But in the middle of the race, thugs from the
French Mafia kidnap the boy and take him to America where he is to
be part of a strange plot involving gambling. Madam Souza comes
in hot pursuit with the now elderly dog, but she cannot find her
grandson alone. Luckily she does not have to. She runs into the
title characters, a singing act that Madam Souza has seen on TV
for many years. Now they are old crones, but they are willing to
pitch in and help find the grandson, a more dangerous enterprise
than any of them expected.
The story progresses slowly, even in a short film. Where it takes
an interest is in the strange details of life. There are jokes of
how the grandmother trains her grandson using props like Buster
Keaton or Charlie Chaplin would. We see their quirky ways the
three old women make meals (and catch the meat that will go in the
pot). Little jokes catch the viewer off-balance and some are
quite witty.
The cartoon is full of some funny bits that seem to be out of an
old Jacques Tati film. And the film does acknowledge a debt to
the genius of Tati. This is being touted as a film of great
originality when, in fact, it is just a return to a much earlier
style of animated story telling. The jazz score is a good deal of
the effect and probably could stand on its own as a separate CD.
Don't avoid this film because it is French. There are only two
lines of dialog and they are dubbed into English in for the
American release. This is a film that for the most part speaks a
universal language of funny images and unexpected surprises. It
should be okay for all but very young children and just about
everybody will enjoy it. I rate THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE a high
+1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: COLD MOUNTAIN (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Nicole Kidman and Jude Law play two lovers separated by
the Civil War and struggling to be reunited. Kidman is a woman
not unlike Scarlett O'Hara who must go from being a useless
peacetime ornament to become a strong and self-sufficient
survivor. This could have been a powerful war story, but under
the surface it is contrived and unconvincing and the performances
are uninvolving. Most of the compelling storytelling is in the
first reel. Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
COLD MOUNTAIN is written and directed by Anthony Minghella (THE
ENGLISH PATIENT, THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY) based on the novel by
Charles Frazier. This is a story about cruelty and compassion in
the South during the last year of the American Civil War. All of
the cruelty seems to come from men and all of the compassion seems
to be from women. The main character, played by Jude Law, is an
exception, but the men around him from clergy to military seem a
worthless group of people. Minghella shows us a world full of
evil men and the women who are their innocent victims but who try
to help each other. Nichole Kidman plays Ada, the daughter of a
slave-holding minister in North Carolina. She was one of the rare
Southern women who had been reticent to see the war come. With
the war she loses Inman (Law) to the Confederate Army. Inman is
the man she loves and would have married if the war had not
interrupted.
The film opens with The Battle of the Crater, a particularly
horrendous clash which took place at Petersburg, Virginia. The
battle, I am told, was not in the original novel, but it is a
highly dramatic event and nobody else had filmed it. Inman is
injured in the fighting and is hospitalized. He deserts and
begins a long and perilous odyssey to return home to Cold
Mountain, North Carolina. But the story really centers on Ada,
who loses her father and for a while has to run her farm by
herself. This is a task for which she has no training, and she
makes a proper mess of it. A neighbor knows of a certain
unrefined but intelligent woman who needs a place to work. The
woman is Ruby (Renee Zellweger). Ada and Ruby set about making
the farm work. Ruby is coarse but she understands what is
necessary to do to get food from a farm. Everything she says is
rough but pure common sense. However, it will take more than
common sense and hard work to keep two women alive in these
dangerous last months of the Civil War. The focus moves back and
forth from Inman's adventures to Ada's. Not very originally,
Ada's main problems come from a lecherous Home Guard commander,
for whom it would be both a duty and a pleasure to kill Inman, his
rival for Ada. Inman meanwhile faces Confederate troops who want
to hang him and various dangers on the road.
It is a long haul to bring these two people back together, and the
audience is likely not to invest too much emotion in their
reunion. Neither Kidman nor Law seems to have much screen
presence beyond good looks to make us really care if they get back
together or not. In flashbacks we see that Ada could manipulate
Inman to clear a field, but her power over him does not appear to
get much ardor from him on-screen. One has cause to wonder if Ada
is in poverty so close to starvation, why is it that her clothes
are so well tailored and fit her so well? Civil War fashions were
apparently far more attractive that we had been led to believe.
Brendan Gleeson does a nice turn as Ruby's rascal of a father.
Donald Sutherland plays Ada's father who is as good a man as one
finds in the South, but it is still left to Ada to free his
slaves. Philip Seymour Hoffman is another type of scoundrel, but
is only passably believable as a man of the Civil War period.
Also present is Natalie Portman, as one more woman who suffers for
what the men are doing. That is a fairly impressive cast, but the
film has trouble really clicking.
To capture the unspoiled feel of the forests of the South during
the Civil War, and also as an economy measure, the film was shot
in the woods of Transylvania, Romania (the area erroneously
thought to be a particular center of vampire legends). I had high
hopes for this film, but it really is a well-made B-film and not a
great epic of Civil War times. I rate COLD MOUNTAIN a high +1 on
the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Helene Hanff is best known as the author of 84 CHARING CROSS ROAD,
but she has written some other books as well. One, APPLE OF MY
EYE, is a guidebook (of sorts) to Manhattan, written as a series
of descriptions of the trips Hanff took researching Manhattan to
write a book about it for tourists. (Whether this is the intended
book, or just a side effect is not clear.) Of course, being
twenty-five years old, it is quite out of date, and not just for
its descriptions of the World Trade Center. I know the suggested
admission to the Metropolitan is not $1.75, and many of the other
sights she described are gone or changed. For New Yorkers,
though, it is a great nostalgic look at the city.
Another book by Helene Hanff (and her first) is UNDERFOOT IN SHOW
BUSINESS, an autobiography of her life as a playwright and TV
writer up until 1961. (For readers of 84 CHARING CROSS ROAD, the
only familiar part will be her tooth work.) While a fairly
lightweight book, it does have some amusing anecdotes, such as the
one about the winners of the fellowships from the Bureau of New
Plays the year she won--and those of the previous year. Or the
one which truly illustrates the claim from SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE
that in the theater everything works out, but no one knows how
("It's a miracle."). But one I will recount here from her
experiences as an outside reader for a film studio. A reader is
someone who is given a book and is supposed to summarize it for
the benefit of those who needed to decide whether to option it.
The dread of a reader was to be given "a seven-hundred-page,
three-generation family saga that always had more subplots than a
soap opera and more characters than Dickens." Well, as she
writes, "On the blackest Friday I ever want to see, I was summoned
to Monograph and handed three outsized paperback volumes of an
English book which was about to be published here. I was to read
all three volumes over the weekend, and since each volume was
double the length of the usual novel I was invited to charge
double money for each. I hurried home with the three volumes and
after dinner began to read Volume I. And if Monograph's office
had been open at that hour, I'd have phoned and quit my job. What
I had to read, during that nightmare weekend--taking notes on all
place names, characters' names and events therein--was fifteen
hundred stupefying pages of the sticky mythology of J. R. R.
Tolkien. (I hope I'm spelling his name wrong.) I remember
opening one volume to a first line which read, 'Mr. Bilbo Baggins
of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his
elevnty-first birthday....' and phoning several friends to say
good-bye because suicide seemed so obviously preferable to five
hundred more pages of that." I guess she concluded that you
couldn't make a very good movie from THE LORD OF THE RINGS.
And I'll briefly mention Jack Repcheck's THE MAN WHO FOUND TIME:
JAMES HUTTON AND THE ANTIQUITY OF THE EARTH as being of interest
to those interested in the history of science, and in particular
in its interaction with religion. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Nay, fly to altars; there they'll talk you dead;
For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
-- Alexander Pope,
"An Essay on Criticism"
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