THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
09/03/04 -- Vol. 23, No. 10
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:
ConKopelli (Westercon 57) Report (announcement)
Frank Frazetta Documentary (announcement)
The Warner Wolf Legacy (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The Age of Targeted Warfare (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
HERO (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (SNOW CRASH) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: ConKopelli (Westercon 57) Report (announcement)
My report on ConKopelli (Westercon 57) is available at
. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Frank Frazetta Documentary (announcement)
There is a documentary about Frank Frazetta running on IFC this
month. It is called "Frazetta: Painting With Fire" and is 105
minutes long. The next airing is on September 7 at 12:15 PM and
7:15 PM EDT; check listings for future showings as well. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: The Warner Wolf Legacy (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Why do people like TV sportscasters who can do this artificial
enthusiasm thing? They don't do that in their other news. How
about trying it with restaurant reviews. "Well, I ordered and
things are getting a little lethargic. Wow! Did You See That?
THEY BROUGHT BREAD TO THE TABLE!" [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: The Age of Targeted Warfare (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Back when martial arts films first got popular I made a comment
that some people found strange. I thought that they were
exercises in nostalgia. That got me quizzical looks. Why
nostalgia? They reminded us of an age when to be a formidable
fighter you had to train and use self-discipline. Even in those
days (the days of the film) there were kids on the street,
sporting Uzis or AK-47s, more deadly than Bruce Lee. Put them
both on an open field twenty yards apart and Bruce Lee probably
hadn't a chance. His style of warfare still had its uses under
the right circumstances, but it was no longer what fighting was
about. But it was nice to look back to the days when it was.
On my last big trip I re-visited the Wright Patterson Air Force
Base Museum in Dayton Ohio. The museum is huge and seemingly
constantly growing. There are big galleries in the form of
hangars for The Early History, WWII, Korea and Vietnam, the Cold
War, and a new one for the present. It is interesting to see the
new graceful and very untraditional shapes for stealth aircraft.
The curved surfaces intended to prevent radar detection give the
planes a surreal and almost science-fiction look. The guide at
the museum told the story about a stealth bomber that was parked
and a bat flew into it and knocked itself out. That may seem
like a minor incident, but it is significant. Bats' sonar detects
tiny insects but this one could not tell there was a many-ton
aircraft right in front of it.
The new technology is laser-guided bombs. American forces
actually got a bomb in the front door of Saddam's palace with one
of these. The technology is easier to understand than I had
realized. If you have a laser pointer you can put a little red
dot of light on an object a fair distance away. Even the ones
they sell in campus bookstores have a range of hundreds of yards.
The dot of light is almost undetectable unless you are looking
right at it. The military just developed a missile that can see
it and home in on it. Hold it in place and you can put a missile
just exactly where you want it. This is real precision bombing.
But does it really make us a lot safer?
The thought that scares me is that just as they have made such
strides in what I would call targeted warfare, the sort of enemy
we face is not one that gives us targets to aim at. In a guerilla
war there are no big targets to shoot at or they materialize
unexpectedly only just before they strike. After Pearl Harbor we
knew where we had to go to strike back and the problem was getting
there. In World War II there were Berlin and Tokyo as major
targets. After 9/11 we could go pretty much wherever we had to in
order to fight back, but we really didn't have any good targets
allowing us to attack the enemy directly. We had to hit back
extremely indirectly. It seemed to be the right thing to do
because when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a
nail. And our huge military is only a kind of hammer. But what
we got was a very dubious sort of revenge. Shakespeare noted in
MACBETH, "Naught's had, all's spent, Where our desire is got
without content: 'Tis safer to be that which we destroy, Than, by
destruction, dwell in doubtful joy." We don't know where Osama Bin
Laden is, but we do know where Baghdad is and we know where
Afghanistan is. Neither of the latter is going anywhere. So those
were so we went after targets rather than the key enemies.
And it seems only logical that if we get so good at targeted
warfare overcoming the enemy will arise that does not use those
defenses. Being an obvious target for your enemy is very
obviously a liability. What the Wright-Patterson Museum seems to
demonstrate, I am worried, is that we have gotten really, really
good at fighting a World War II sort of war when the enemy was get
its orders from a known location. But the Age of Targeted Warfare
may well be ending. We may be entering an age of nebulous
enemies. The Wright-Patterson museum may be essentially a
nostalgic look at a style of warfare for which big planes and
technology were an answer.
I will have more to say on this subject next week. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: HERO (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: China tries to make its own CROUCHING TIGER with a story of an
enigmatic stranger who has killed a triad of assassins for the benefit
of China's first Emperor. The stranger tells the emperor multiple
versions of how he killed the emperor's enemies. Visually HERO is
stunning. The telling is operatic in style but becomes muddled.
Rating: high +2 (-4 to +4) or 8/10
In the last half of the 20th century China saw Japan study American
culture and then move in to compete with us in technical, economic, and
artistic fields. China has made tremendous strides in many of the same
directions. Much more than in the past they are now vying for the
international cinema market, not just with artistic films, but with
entertainment films also. I expect that in the near future we will see
more Chinese films intended not to show us something edifying, like
Chinese village life, but more to entertain and even impress. HERO is
one such film.
HERO is the most expensive film ever made in mainland China. It is
historical spectacle, but in the mold of CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON.
It has jaw-dropping art direction and martial arts that still astound,
even making allowances for the obvious assistance of wires.
In the Third Century B.C. what we now call China was a patchwork of
kingdoms. Qin Shih Huang-ti, the ruthless king of the Qin fought to
conquer all the other kings and to make himself the first Emperor of all
China. That much is history. In this tale his greatest danger lay came
from a team of three superb assassins who had sworn to kill him. Then
suddenly they were gone, killed by a lowly prefect from one of the
king's provinces. This man (Jet Li) is of such low origins he does not
even have a real name and is called Nameless. Nameless is taken in
pageantry to have an audience with the future Emperor and to tell him
how he accomplished the deed. But the king recognizes that he is being
lied to so Nameless gives several very different accounts. Is Nameless
merely working on a different plot to kill the king?
HERO combines the fantasized martial arts of CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN
DRAGON with some of the same history from the under-rated THE EMPEROR
AND THE ASSASSIN. It has neither the rousing adventure of CROUCHING
TIGER nor the historical epic sweep of THE EMPEROR AND THE ASSASSIN.
But the visual style of production designers Huo Ting Xiao and Yi Zhen
Zhou and cinematographer Christopher Doyle makes this one of the most
beautiful films that has been seen on American screens in quite a while.
Director Zhang Yimou has been more known for beautiful and contemplative
films such as RAISE THE RED LANTERN. He has shown, among other things,
that he likes playing with color. In this film that taste turns into
full-blown passion. Some scenes will have so much of one color that
they almost look like tinted monochrome. In others he will have the
entire scene in one tone and the two main characters in another color so
they stand out. The colors are specifically chosen each to represent a
given mood. As Nameless tells his tales he keeps returning to a
mystical connection between beautiful calligraphy and swordplay.
HERO will break the rules of physics but never the rules of the Chinese
cinema. With its strong and heavily stylized action scenes, this film
is like KILL BILL in overdrive. Zhang Yimou avoids showing us any human
stained with blood in keeping with the Chinese sensibility. Though the
plot involves sex there is just one quick flash of partial nudity. Like
CROUCHING TIGER there is plenty of violence but it is choreographed more
like high-speed ballet. It is easy to see how this became the most
expensive film in Chinese history. Zhang Yimou may use CGI to show a
storm of arrows or vortexes of golden leaves, but unlike Peter Jackson
he never seems to use a computer image of a human in lieu of a real
human. When he shows us a huge army of soldiers it looks like it is
played by a huge army of people. It might be politically incorrect to
use a computer image rather than employing an actor.
That said the producers were not afraid to borrow talent from other
lands. Tan Dun provided the musical score as he had with CROUCHING
TIGER. It is a little strange to see a credit for violin and fiddle
solos performed by Itzhak Perlman. A few western names do show up in
the credits.
Some of the story may seem obscure to American audiences, but in this
film the visual style is much more important than the actual plot. This
is a case where it might have been better to dub carefully than to
subtitle. I had to let several subtitles go unread to appreciate the
images above them on the screen. This film is not the entertainment
that THE EMPEROR AND THE ASSASSIN was, but it certainly is a film that
can be appreciated by wide audiences. I give HERO a high +2 on the -4
to +4 scale or 8/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Neal Stephenson's SNOW CRASH (ISBN 0-553-56261-4) is a favorite of
mine (and it still is, in spite of the quibbles I will make in
this column).
The writing is utterly enthralling. The main character is named
Hiroaki Protagonist, but always called "Hiro". The second lead is
nick-named "Y.T." (for "Yours Truly"). This is a hint as to the
sort of word-play Stephenson goes in for. He also looks
far-fetched (a.k.a. creative) similes and metaphors. For example,
the first paragraph says, "The Deliverator belongs to an elite
order, a hallowed sub-category. . . . His uniform is black as
activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A
bullet will bounce off its arachno-fiber weave like a wren hitting
a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a
breeze through a freshly napalmed forest."
It is sometimes hard to follow everything, because Stephenson also
delights in acronyms. He does explain them--once. So on page
176, we find out about the Executive Branch General Operational
Command (EBGOC). Then a hundred pages later, he's talking about
"EBGOC" and you're desperately trying to remember what it stands
for. It is a lot like real life.
There is, of course, a certain irony in that the main characters
are concerned over viruses (memes) that control people, but the
world they live in is already full of them--franchises for
everything, including nations,etc. And Stephenson notices this,
and acknowledges this (pages 190-191).
I love the discussions with the Librarian about ancient Sumer and
other cultures, but I think Stephenson is wrong when (on page 229)
the Deuteronomists are described as working to get the Jews to
read the book instead of going to the temple (so as to avoid
viruses). The problem with this is that the general theory is
that the "reading the book" was formulated as a response to what
to do after the Babylonian Conquest when the temple was destroyed,
the people exiled, and sacrifices were no longer possible,
reversing the order of Stephenson's cause and effect.
There are parts that are just sloppy writing (or copy-editing).
For example, on page 50, Y. T. negotiates a $750 billion bribe to
be taken to a particular jail, on page 146 Stephenson describes
"street people pushing wheelbarrows piled high with dripping clots
of million- and billion-dollar bills that they have raked up out
of storm sewers." and on page 243 someone says that Y.T.'s
skateboard probably cost $100 trillion. But on page 175, Y. T.
thinks she "has great stuff to tell Hiro now. Great intel on
Uncle Enzo. People would pay millions for it." Later on (pages
394 and 409) it becomes clearer than there may be two different
kinds of dollars being talking about, but it still seems careless.
There are also several typos of "it's" for "its", on page 140 we
find "Catonese" for "Cantonese", and on page 184 a comma where a
semi-colon is called for.
However, as I said at the start, I love this book, and it is only
because I have read it several times (as well as listening to the
abridged audiobook) that I notice some of these things. This is
highly recommended. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
How do you know so much about everything?
was asked of a very wise and intelligent
man; and the answer was 'By never being
afraid or ashamed to ask questions as to
anything of which I was ignorant.
-- John Abbott
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