THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
10/14/05 -- Vol. 24, No. 16, Whole Number 1304
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:
Your Horoscope (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
My Brush with the Classics (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Talking to Onesself (comments by Tom Russell)
SERENITY and WALLACE & GROMIT (letter of comment
by Joseph T. Major)
WHERE THE TRUTH LIES (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
GEUDDAE GEUSARAMDEUL (THE PRESIDENT'S LAST BANG)
(film review by Mark R. Leeper)
ELIZABETHTOWN (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
BEHIND THE IRON MASK (theater review by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (THIS BOOK-COLLECTING GAME and
THE FINAL SOLUTION) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Toronto International Film Festival Report Available (site
pointer)
My report on the Toronto International Film Festival (including the
ten worst things about it) is
available at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper/tiff2005.htm.
It is also at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mtvoid/files/tiff2005.htm, but one
must be a subscriber to the MT VOID *and* a member of yahoogroups
to access it. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Your Horoscope (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
(Due to economy concerns we cannot provide complete horoscopes.
Your cooperation is appreciated.)
Leos: I have been reliably informed that converting you from
Sagittarious is just not on. Last week's conversion is no longer
operative. You are all Sagittarious and I have to just figure out
how to spell that.
Everyone else: Just stick with your current sign until that we
have this whole mess cleared up. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: My Brush with the Classics (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I have found out that someone I know is actually very famous and
I had never known it. Lax has been a friend for many years since
he was at Rutgers as a graduate student. He is very much into
film and into film music and we used to write to each other and I
had him over to the house several times to watch film together.
Lax is a real go-getter. He has a very strong personality. After
he got a Masters degree from Rutgers he went to work for Lucent,
and though he lived an hour's drive away we would still get
together every month or so. He went back to India to find a
wife. Aparna (pronounced "Upurna") was actually an actress and
some years ago had made three movies that were well known in
India. Lax said that people on the street would see her and know
who she was. They got married in India and they had a reception
here as well as there. We attended the local reception. The
four of us would get together occasionally, either at his place
or ours, though we were a fair distance apart. Aparna was quiet,
but shared our interest in movies.
Aparna was a very quiet woman but quite nice. She was involved
with classical Indian dance, we were told. Lax wanted me to go to
one of her dance concerts before, but we could not make it. Lax
eventually quit Lucent and went to Chicago for business school. A
month or so ago Lax said Aparna would be giving another
performance in this area and wanted us to go. This time we did
have the time. So I did some studying up on the dance form.
Classical dancers have a sort of debut dance, I had been told. I
had answers.com to learn a little and friends I could ask. One
friend suggested a question I could ask. Indian Classical dancers
have a premier performance that certifies they can dance
publicly. It is called a Ranga Pravesham or Arangetram. It is
sort of what a dissertation defense is for an advanced degree. I
asked Lax if that was this performance. No, she did that a long
time ago. (In retrospect, I think it was like asking Perry Mason
if he was getting ready his bar exams. So much for trying to
impress him with my knowledge.) We went to the Hindu Temple and
Cultural Center an hour's drive away (in heavy rain). While we
were waiting we realized there was sort of a whispered awe we
heard from other people that Aparna would be performing there.
She was apparently very much a celebrity. "Has Aparna arrived?"
"No, Aparna is not here yet." When we sat down I looked around
the auditorium. In an auditorium full there were only about ten
"gringos." (I don't know what the right word is. Lax claims that
there is no Hindi equivalent to "gringo," "gwai-lo," or "goy." I
let him claim that, but I don't necessarily believe him. I wonder
if it starts with a "G"?)
This was to be a form called Bharat Natyam, which is a sort of
dance essay and celebration of the five rivers of India.
"Bharata" is a name for India and Natyam is Tamil for dance-drama.
Each of five major dancers does a different dance in sequence with
what I believe are movements as pre-determined as the movements of
ballet or the notes of a symphony. I take it there is room for
personal expression in facial expression but not a lot in the
precise movement of the body. Aparna had the starring role as
the Ganga. There are five rivers, the Ganga (or Ganges), the
Cauvery, the Godavari, the Yamuna, and the Narmada. There are
five major dancers, one for each river. Each comes out and
dances for fifteen minutes or so in very precise ways so that the
posture of their hand and their bodies and their faces all convey
nuances of meaning. Then there is a last part where all five
dance together, I guess symbolizing the intermingling of the
rivers as they go to the ocean. They had a Dr. Somebody-or-
other--I didn't get his name--to explain each dance. That was
somewhat useless for Evelyn and me. He had a thick Indian accent
as well as what sounded like a lisp. We agreed that for some of
what he was saying it was clear that he was speaking English, but
what he was actually saying remained a mystery of the East.
I cannot explain much of the dance itself. It really has to be
seen. The timing was ironic because part of the performance is an
invocation for rain. As it happens we were having one of the
rainiest days I ever remember having in New Jersey. It had
rained all day and at times--many times--with the strength of a
heavy Florida storm. Part of the meaning of the performance was
asking for more rain, and I think the audience was actually hoping
for a little less. None of the dancers expressed the idea of a
rushing river quite as effectively as the parking lot did after
the performance.
Anyway, I had gotten the impression from the way the audience
reacted to Aparna that she was a prestigious dancer. When I got
to a computer I found a web site announcing a 2004 performance
she had given at a Merchant-Ivory Foundation benefit that
referred to her as "Aparna Vaidyanathan, the great Bharata Natyam
South Indian dancer." It continued, "Aparna Vaidyanathan hails
from Bangalore, India. She completed her Ranga Pravesham and
secured high distinction in Vidwath. She has rendered stellar
dance performances in several countries around the world and has
also received several accolades as an actress in her critical and
commercial hit Sundara Kaanda." I haven't the foggiest idea what
most of that means, but it sounds impressive and if it impresses
the Merchant-Ivory Foundation, it probably is a high accolade.
(Readers might know that the Merchant and Ivory was a team of
filmmakers who made a number of very high-quality films, most
notably adaptations of the novels of E. M. Forster. At this
foundation event Aparna was apparently the primary attraction.
That site had several pictures that are recognizably she. Another
site mentions that she was from a family that has been
entertaining in South India five hundred years.
http://www.merchantivoryfoundation.com/gala2004.html
So did I understand the dance as I was seeing it? Probably not.
It was from a very different culture entirely. I could tell that
it was done very precisely and extremely skillfully. It is like
hearing Japanese folk songs. The result is pleasing, but someone
who knows the language could appreciate it a lot more than I
could. But ability transcends the language barrier. I could tell
she was very good, but the nuances that made her great is
something I was not well enough educated to appreciate.
We had said earlier that we would talk to Lax and Aparna after
the show, but Aparna was being photographed and we did not have
much opportunity. She saw us at the back of the auditorium and
waved. We talked to Lax. He had visited us the day before at
our place and we watched a movie together. I thought that was as
much contact as we would get this trip. But the next night
Aparna called us from the airport. She wanted to say hello. So
we had an internationally known Bharata Natyam South Indian dancer
from a family famous for five hundred years call us to talk to
us. She is a very nice person. We had been hobnobbing with a
great without even knowing it.
So anyway, that was our weekend. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Talking to Onesself (comments by Tom Russell)
This is in response to Mark's excellent article in the August 5,
2005, MT VOID about "self-talk." He speaks silently to himself--
in English. He wonders if everyone does it, if deaf people have
another form of self talk, and if animals might have yet another,
and "What is the function of self-talk?" And more.
I have pondered similar questions, not at 4AM as Mark does, but
when I'm raking leaves or at other quiet times when I have a
chance to think--that is, to have a conversation with myself.
Here are a few thoughts, in English, from someone who has no
particular credentials to offer them.
Some evidence that everyone does this: In "What Women Want" Mel
Gibson could hear women self-talking; Garfield does it
(cartoonists have a different bubble shape for talking to oneself
than for speaking aloud); and "The music was so loud I couldn't
hear myself think." (All music which isn't instrumental or sung
in a language you don't know is distracting, perhaps even
temporarily "brain washing." Did you ever get a song stuck in
your head?)
Roger Penrose once asked if anyone in the lecture hall would
venture an idea on how vision works. "It's like you have a
little television set inside your head," someone said. Penrose
replied, "But who is watching the TV?"
So, similarly, when you talk--or sing--to yourself, who is
listening? (Mark asks, "Does part of my mind know something that
another part doesn't know and must be informed of?")
Or: Who is speaking? Did you ever wonder how it is we can speak
in full sentences? We are only "conscious" of the individual
words of the sentence as we hear ourselves say each one. We're
not conscious of words not yet spoken. That's because we're only
conscious of the present instant of time. Something "below" our
consciousness creates each complete sentence and directs us to
speak the sentence, word-by-word, as if we were puppets. We only
become aware of what we are saying when our brain somehow does
the audio equivalent to Penrose's "Who's watching the TV?"
question.
We might say our consciousness is "self-listening" to our
subconscious. Or perhaps self-listening IS consciousness.
If we are puppets to some subconscious selves, we (that is, the
conscious we) can take solace in recalling how we learned to ride
a bicycle. It took a great conscious effort to learn to ride a
bicycle. "Learning" is programming our subconscious to do what
we (the conscious we) want it to do.
So we can train our subconscious selves to tell our conscious
selves "Next boil the water" when we get to that step in the
process, as Mark experiences. Or we can consciously give
ourselves "pep talks" when we need them. That seems to be self-
talk of a different type than the self-talk that Mel Gibson is
eavesdropping on in the movie: he hears women "thinking."
Or is that type of self-talking the same as thinking? If it is
then we develop our ability to think as we learn to talk. As our
vocabulary grows, so does our thinking capability.
"Say a word seven times and it's yours forever." That's yet
another type of self-talk. But if you don't remember the word
until the seventh time you say it, how do you know this is the
seventh time? What must be really happening is that our
subconscious mind remembers everything, but only reveals certain
of those memories to our conscious selves. By "saying something
seven times" the conscious self is instructing the subconscious
to make that information available to it.
Certainly we don't want to clutter our minds with all those
telephone numbers we've looked up. We only want to remember them
long enough to dial the phone. So our subconscious deletes
memories all the time--at least from our present-instant
consciousness.
But not from our memory altogether. . . . Last summer I saw a TV
commercial for a thirst-quencher drink. Two bathing-suit-clad
guys sat in beach chairs in front of their summer cottage. It
was really hot; they were sweating up a storm. Then something
unbelievable happened because it was so super hot. I called to
my wife to look, but by then a whole series of super-heat-caused
events were happening. I completely forgot what it was that had
first caused me to take notice. Gone. Lost. Pound my head
against the wall forgotten. For weeks I kept waiting for the
commercial to reappear but I never saw it again. In time I
forgot the whole thing. Then months later we were going out to
dinner over at Jake-a-Bob's in Union Beach and rode by a house
with a lot of ornamental do-dads in the front yard. Bam, it came
back: The guys' pink flamingoes were melting!
Memories may just disappear and reappear or may "fade away" but
we can't intentionally make them go away. Wouldn't it be good if
we could temporarily forget how to read when we're out on
highways that are cluttered with advertising billboards? We'd
see only the scenery and meaningless "abstract art" painted on
big rectangular boards. Nothing to distract our thoughts (our
self-talk). "Officer, I didn't mean to drive right by that red
octagon without stopping." Oops.
Suppose our subconscious mind has a "consciousness engine" which
consists of a set of rules to create consciousness, and "data"
upon which to use those rules. The data are primarily our
experiences in life, recorded as memories. Memories are either
tagged as available to our conscious self, or not available--
unless triggered by some unexpected event such as a plastic
flamingo. Our subconscious starts the "consciousness engine"
when IT hears the alarm go off in the morning. Who we are is
undefined until the engine starts processing the data. We are
tricked into thinking we were the same person yesterday that we
are this morning.
Disease, booze and cosmic rays kill off or change neurons every
night. Maybe the subconscious has a fantastic parity-
checking/error-correction scheme? How much of your memory needs
to be intact for you to still be yourself? How would you ever
know you've become someone else?
Now suppose in some far-off galaxy in the near-empty void there
are other beings with consciousness engines, and one of those
beings happens to have a set of memories close to your own?
Would you then wake up on some remote planet? How close to your
own would its memories have to be? Could you wake up as a
younger version of yourself? What prevents this from happening
all the time? How would you know if it is or isn't happening?
A few thoughts to talk to yourself about. [-tlr]
===================================================================
TOPIC: SERENITY and WALLACE & GROMIT (letter of comment by Joseph
T. Major)
[Regarding Mark's review of SERENITY in the 10/07/05 issue]
As a tossed off line in discussing SERENITY you say, "Well, maybe
'Star Trek' got better the last season." NextGen maybe. I do
appreciate your skepticism about the rampant Buffyism that seemed
to have taken over the minds of many seemingly normal fen, like
Titanian mind-slugs." [-jtm]
Mark responds, "I thought 'Enterprise' was a little more
enterprising in its last season. Who am I to argue with your
imagery on 'Buffy'? I have expressed my objection to Buffy
earlier in the 10/04/02 issue, available at
http://fanac.org/fanzines/MT_Void/MT_Void-2114.html. [-mrl]
[Regarding Mark's review of WALLACE & GROMIT in the 10/07/05
issue]
Given the setting and origin, shouldn't it be "Wallace is the
creator of absurd inventions--many with a Heath Robinson accent"?
Of course, then you would have to explain who the British Rube
Goldberg was. Expand your mind. [-jtm]
Mark responds, "Actually the Wallace inventions are closer to
Heath Robinson's. I have seen a lot more of Goldberg's cartoons
than Robinson's, but it seems to me that Goldberg is an order of
magnitude more complex, intricate, and, importantly,
failure-prone. You can understand a Robinson machine in just a
few seconds. I did not think of Robinson when I was writing the
review and if I had I would have assumed the name was too
obscure." [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: WHERE THE TRUTH LIES (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Independent filmmaker Atom Egoyan adapts Rupert Holmes's
novel about a mystery surrounding a very popular 1950s comedy
team. The duo of Collins and Morris broke up around the time a
nude woman was found dead in their bathtub. The death remains a
mystery. The film rushes forward and back in time, solving the
mystery. WHERE THE TRUTH LIES is satisfying but not as
compelling as some of Egoyan's earlier work. Rating: low +2 (-4
to +4) or 7/10
It is not hard to guess whom the comedy team of Vince Collins and
Lanny Morris is supposed to be. They were supposed to be a very
popular comic duo in the 1950s and they used to do telethons for
polio. Some time around that time they split up for reasons that
were never made public. There was apparently a hushed-up scandal
involving a naked woman who was found in their bathtub, dead of a
drug overdose. Lanny Morris (played by Kevin Bacon) is a no-
holds-barred wacky comedian whose forte is improvisational
misbehavior in front of the camera--any camera. Vince Collins
(Colin Firth) is his handsome straight man whose amiable exterior
hides a temper like Tony Soprano. But Lanny has his darker side
also. When he takes a fancy to someone from the audience, he has
the thug-like valet Reuben (David Hayman) get her, occasionally
over the objections of her husband. The two split up at the
height of their popularity and continued with separate careers.
Fifteen years later Karen O'Connor (Alison Lohman), who as a
child idolized the two comics, is trying to do a book of
investigative reporting on why the two split up and what the
story behind the body in the bathtub. She has a big book
contract and with it is hoping to exonerate the two comics of the
whispered blame for the incident. While she is well-intentioned
toward the two men, they are less than happy about her coming
around trying to dig up the past. They would prefer that the
fifteen-year-old questions just continue to be unanswered.
The story moves back and forth between incidents in the last
1950s and O'Connor's investigations in the 1970s as pieces of the
puzzle fall into place. Egoyan is good at the jigsaw puzzle sort
of plot. One of his best films is EXOTICA, a story that does not
present to the viewer its full picture until the final scene.
Egoyan wrote the screenplay here as in did in that film. But
then he was doing an original story. Here he is basing his film
on the book by Rupert Holmes and he has a little less freedom.
While the story is good, the film is just not as compelling as
EXOTICA.
There has been a good deal of discussion about a strong sex scene
and the problems that Egoyan was having getting the rating he
wanted. This is a case where the explicit scene is central and
anything but gratuitous. Egoyan probably could not cut the scene
and still hope to have the same film. In addition, there is a
point-of-view problem with too many pieces of narration being
added by too many different people. Egoyan does use context
well. As the story progresses scenes that seemed to have one
meaning when first seen take on entirely different meaning. Our
expectations and assumptions about the characters get pushed
aside and altered. We discover there were hints and clues that
we just did not pick up on. To that extent the script is good.
This may be Egoyan's glossiest film to date, but it is not as
compelling as his earlier work. I rate WHERE THE TRUTH LIES a
low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: GEUDDAE GEUSARAMDEUL (THE PRESIDENT'S LAST BANG) (film
review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: This is a fictional story of the day that South Korea's
tyrannical president Park Chung Hee was assassinated in 1979.
Sang-soo Im writes and directs a black comedic look at the
government at that time and the politics that led to the
shooting. One feels, however, that only part of what happens in
this film successfully crosses the language barrier.
Nevertheless what we see is riveting and occasionally cynical and
funny. Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10
In 1961 Park Chung Hee was took part in a successful military
coup to seize the government of South Korea and then led the
government. In 1963--under pressure from the United States--he
held democratic elections and was officially elected president
and then re-elected four years later. He then amended the Korean
constitution to allow himself a third term and was elected again
in 1971. While he improved the average person's income by a
factor of ten, he was unpopular and became more and more
tyrannical. In 1972 he declared martial law and gave himself
unrestricted power to crush his enemies and to control the
people. Not surprisingly, Park became very unpopular with the
people and in particular the Korean youth. On Friday, October
26, 1979, he was assassinated in a plot led by the chief of the
Korean Central Intelligence Agency. That action is still
shrouded in secrecy, but THE PRESIDENT'S LAST BANG is a
speculative black comedy suggesting what might have occurred on
October 26. This film's humor might make it South Korea's
DR. STRANGELOVE.
Jae-ho Song plays the dictator Park Chung Hee as a corrupt leader
exploiting his office and being callous to his people. While the
real Park had a reputation for austerity, this man is a playboy
living the good life in a beautiful mansion, the Blue House. He
uses the Korean CIA (KCIA) to procure for him the companionship
for the evening of two very pricey hookers, one a popular singer
and one a college student. Park meanwhile is planning his own
crackdown on youth dissidents and calmly considers the cost that
a few thousand deaths is not bad compared to other world events.
The KCIA secretly has great contempt for Park. Finally KCIA
Director Kim decides that the time right to act.
For some of what is going on it is useful to know a little about
Park's background. The relationship with the Japanese, for
example, is referred to in the film, but not explained for those
who do not already know. Part of what is causing the bitterness
is Park's willingness to deal with the Japanese. Park's military
education and career came from the Japanese. But the Korean
people still resented the Japanese from a history of abuse
culminating in very bad treatment during the Second World War.
President Park, nevertheless, recognized the Japanese in 1965
only stoking the fires of hatred.
The production values of THE PRESIDENT'S LAST BANG are high. The
photography is sharp and the colors are rich. Frequently it uses
a lighting style reminiscent of THE GODFATHER with total darkness
punctuation with dark wood tones. At this point violence is a
considered a positive at the box office. The scenes of the
assassination and chaos that follows are very bloody, intense,
and again reminiscent of THE GODFATHER.
This film is a fictional supposition and not fact. The director
intended that it use real newsreel footage of Park's career and
the aftermath of his assassination. The Korean government
decided that that would be would too much of an implication that
the non-documented events in the film are actually true. They
censored the used of actual newsreels. Rather than simply
removing the footage, Sang-soo Im treats the censorship as a mark
of pride and leaves the screen black where the footage would have
gone.
This is a good film but I would expect that Koreans could pick up
a little more of who the characters are and what is really going
on. There is a lot of value in THE PRESIDENT'S LAST BANG, though
Western viewers will have to work a little to make this film pay
off. I rate THE PRESIDENT'S LAST BANG a low +2 on the -4 to +4
scale or 7/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: ELIZABETHTOWN (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst star in Cameron Crowe's
ELIZABETHTOWN. This is a film that seems to have potential at
the beginning of being a strange comedy, but it peters out into
not very much of very much. The film rides on the charm of Dunst
and the dubious charm of Orlando Bloom, and rides a bit too far
on them. Rating: high 0 (-4 to +4) or 5/10 (The film has been
re-edited and shortened since I saw it.)
Let me say at the outset that I am not much of a fan of Cameron
Crowe. I liked his SAY ANYTHING. I am not enough of a sports
fan to have appreciated JERRY MAGUIRE. I am not enough of a rock
music fan to have appreciated ALMOST FAMOUS. I can value the
ideas in VANILLA SKY, but not the direction. The style was
creative but not enjoyable. It was taken very much from the
original production of the story, ABRE LOS OJOS. Also, I should
note that I am basing this review on the cut that ran at the
Toronto International Film Festival. The theatrical release is
reportedly twelve minutes shorter than the slow and rambling
version that I saw.
Orlando Bloom stars as Drew Baylor, who as the film opens is
musing on the difference between a failure and a fiasco. Drew
knows the difference well. As an industrial engineer he designed
a new running shoe for his company, and it failed in the
marketplace. The company lost 972 million dollars. And all the
blame seems to be falling on Drew. Drew just does not seem like
someone who would be making a near billion-dollar decision for
his company. Admittedly, an experience like this might befuddle
anybody to some extent, but still he just does not seem like the
sharpest cheddar in the cheese shop. His girl friend leaves him
looking for more promising material which at this point is just
about anybody. As he is managing the transition from messiah to
pariah he gets more bad news, this time from his mother (Susan
Sarandon). A father that he only vaguely remembers has died in
Kentucky and he is expected to go to Elizabethtown and manage the
family affairs. He reluctantly flies to Kentucky to fulfill his
family responsibilities before he finds some way to do away with
himself. On the plane he meets somewhat wacky stewardess Claire
Colburn (Kirsten Dunst). And, by gosh, she just happens to hail
from Elizabethtown herself. What are the chances? Everybody in
Elizabethtown it turns out is a little off-center, but Claire
seems the distillation of all the town's weirdness wrapped up in
one person. As Drew the more Drew finds Claire, the more he
finds himself.
Drew finds Elizabethtown populated with the kind of weird and
wonderful, lovable people that MY COUSIN VINNY found in Alabama,
that DOC HOLLYWOOD found in South Carolina, and that the LOCAL
HERO found in Scotland. (Don't worry. There are no eccentric
Southern locals like were found in TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE.)
This is script with entirely too much cute nothings and pointless
conversation. A film like this will work or fail depending on
the charm of the lead couple. Admittedly, Kirsten Dunst does
have charm, at least for me. Orlando Bloom's charm still eludes
me. And Dunst can not carry this film on her own. There are too
many long segments with the two engaging in conversation that
seems to be present only to extend the film. Meanwhile the plot
refuses to move forward. There is nothing very amusing about
lines like "Welcome to annual meeting of . . . people who meet
annually." Then there are marathon cellular phone conversations
between Drew and Claire. Toward the end of the film Claire
manages a surprise for Drew that by rights would have taken
months to prepare and seems to imply that Claire is short for
Clairvoyant. The script is just not as clever or entertaining as
it thinks it is or as it needs to be. And I will not even go
into the long dull stage performance from Sarandon. Presumably
through all this Drew is finding himself and discovering he is
just a small town boy who got lost in the big city.
As love stories go, there are better films out there. (The best
I have seen this year is Raymond De Felitta's 2000 film TWO
FAMILY HOUSE.) I rate ELIZABETHTOWN a high 0 on the -4 to +4
scale or 5/10.
HOWEVER: I have seen only the Toronto version. Roger Ebert says
in his review, "I've seen Cameron Crowe's 'Elizabethtown' twice,
and remarkable is the difference between the two versions.
Critics were warned before seeing the Toronto film festival
version that it was not the final cut, and was it ever not. The
new version is 18 minutes shorter, and more than 18 percent
better, and wisely eliminates the question of why anyone would
want to wear a pair of shoes that whistled." On the other side,
James Berardinelli says, "Having seen both versions, I can state
that the elimination of 13 minutes does not address the film's
chief flaws. At best, it's a cosmetic fix." [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: BEHIND THE IRON MASK (theater review by Mark R. Leeper)
As I told my wife as I left the theater, the really amazing thing
about this play is that in spite of several very obvious flaws,
it is still going stong seven days after it opened. I was much
looking forward to seeing a play about one of history's more
intriguing mysteries. That could have made for an intriguing
play. Sadly, this is not the story *of* the Man in the Iron
Mask, it is a story *with* the Man in the Iron Mask. Of who the
man was and why he might have been imprisoned, the play tells us
nearly nothing. The play was written by Colin Scott and Melinda
Walker based on an idea by John Robinson who also wrote the
lyrics and music with little concession to melody.
What is the history of this famous mystery? From 1669 to 1703 a
man was held in custody, though in great luxury, by the French
government under the rule of Louis XIV. The prisoner's identity
was kept a state secret. When he was transported he wore a cloth
mask so as not to be recognized. (He probably never literally
wore an iron mask. But the visual image has intrigued many. His
iron mask was probably of the same stuff as the Iron Curtain.)
In the whole time he was held prisoner the minimum possible
number of people knew he even existed and fewer saw his face.
There has been much speculation as to who the man was, but all
that is left is speculation. Alexandre Dumas wrote one of his
Musketeers sequels about the mystery. The character has appeared
in films going back to the 1929 THE IRON MASK with Douglas
Fairbanks. This play is the latest dramatic representation.
After a quick scene of the man's kidnapping we flash many years
forward in time toward the end of the man's imprisonment. The
play has five characters in all and two of those are on stage
less than a minute. Almost all of the play involves only the
man, his jailer, and a gypsy woman who has discovered the
prisoner exists.
The title charactor played by Robert Fardell is simply called The
Prisoner in the dialog. The other two characters are The Jailer
and the Gypsy (Mark McArcher and Shiela Ferguson). Instead the
play concerns itself with just the fact that there is a prisoner
for whom learning of his existence is death. The jailer also is
not allowed to see anyone any more than his prisoner is. One day
he accidentally meets a fugitive woman and in spite of the rules
takes her into his prison with one jailer and one prisoner. The
gypsy plays off of the two men. There is also a subplot of some
stolen pearls.
The staging is simple, with all but two scenes taking place in a
set which is half cell and half antechamber. The cell door going
only from the rear to center of the stage to give the impression
that half of the stage is cell. Under Tony Craven's direction
actors do not always follow the rule that going from one side of
the stage to the other they have to use the cell door. The play
seems to borrow dramatic moments from other plays. Having
everybody on stage turn and sing at the audience is powerful in
LES MISERABLES. Here with just three people it is not so
effective. In FIDDLER ON THE ROOF when Tevye asks his wife of
many years "Do you love me?" it is touching. When a jailer asks
the same of his prisoner of many years, the play is in serious
trouble.
I cannot comment in depth about the acting. To me the actors
seemed sufficient to the material. However, when one
accidentally drops on the floor a valuable pearl they have the
choice of ignoring it or improvising what the characters might
do. The cast chose to ignore the incident and hope nobody
noticed.
In producing Lloyd Webber's play THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA it was
decided to use a half-mask covering only one side of the face to
allow the actor to emote. That solution would not have been
possible here, so the problem of acting through a mask remains.
Speaking of PHANTOM, this play may have been suggested by the
tropes it shares with THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. It has after all
a romantic, masked man whose behavior and existence is a mystery.
This production, however, is far from being as compelling. [-mrl]
[BEHIND THE IRON MASK started previews July 30 and officially
opened August 2, with a scheduled run through November. But on
August 4, the producers announced they were closing August 20.]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
I sing the inter-library loan electronic. Okay, Walt Whitman has
nothing to worry about. But our new on-line library catalog
finally allows one to make an inter-library loan request without
having to fill out (by hand) a special card which needed ISBN's,
years, etc. Now when I look up a title and find it somewhere in
the system, a single click requests it. Hot diggitity dog!
So what have I requested? Well, the first book was A. Edward
Newton's THIS BOOK-COLLECTING GAME. This was published by
Little, Brown in 1928 (hence no ISBN), and the volume I got may
well have not been checked out in decades. Its Dewey Decimal
label is one of those octagonal, hand-inked ones of days gone by.
I love it. A. Edward Newton is one of the great bibliophile
writers (I reviewed his classic THE AMENITIES OF BOOK-COLLECTING
AND KINDRED AFFECTIONS in the 04/18/03 issue of the MT VOID). and
this is another of his gems. It begins, "Book-collecting. It's
a great game. Anybody with ordinary intelligence can play it:
there are, indeed, people who think that it takes no brains at
all; their opinion may be ignored. No great amount of money is
required, unless one becomes very ambitious. It can be played at
home or abroad, alone or in company: it can even be played by
correspondence. Everyone playing it can make his own rules--and
change them during the progress of the game. It is not
considered 'cricket' to do this in other games."
Newton goes on to talk about children's books, early books in
America, what to collect, and so on. Along the way he makes
various observations about the people as well as the books. Of
early New Englanders, he says, "But if our ancestors were
religious, they were also adventurous--they had not left England
for that country's good, as has been wittily said of the early
settlers of Australia, but to subdue a continent in which they
might worship God in their own way, with a bible in one hand and
an axe in another and a gun in another; and having suffered much
for conscience' sake at home, they sought a free country, and
immediately made it less free than the one they left behind them.
This is quite inexplicable--but then, most things are."
I should note that with this charm and wit also comes a
distressing "nativism", such as when he says, "Our Anglo-Saxon
ancestors were good substantial folk who brought to this country
sound minds in strong bodies and a fine sense of decency and
order. . . . [These] traditions gave intellectual color to a
hinterland of enormous extent, until finally it was washed out by
an influx of foreigners who know nothing of our literature or our
language and care less. We have, I am afraid, closed our doors
too late: the evil of a mixed population might, perhaps, have
been dealt with by an enlightened aristocracy, but by a
democracy--never." "Closing the doors" refers, no doubt, to the
Immigration Act of 1924. As for his fears that the wave of
"foreigners" did not care about English literature or language,
I'll just note that I am descended from grandparents who were
part of this wave, and look what I'm writing about. (None of
this is surprising, of course. I have commented several times
here about anti-Semitism in early twentieth-century writings.)
And as evidence that there is no new thing under the sun, Newton
describes all the faults of the modern trilogy--except he is
talking about the nineteenth century "three-decker". The
libraries of the time (particularly Mudie's Select Circulating
Library, run by Charles Edward Mudie) dictated that novels would
be three volumes and sell for 31 shillings 6 pence (very
expensive for the time), and even required that while there was
to be love, it should be in the upper classes and not the lower.
This stranglehold on format was finally broken by George Moore,
who in spite of pleas and threats by Mudie, published A MUMMER'S
WIFE in one volume for 6 shillings. As Newton says, "people were
glad to get a book which they could own and take their time over
and place on their shelves." There was nothing comparable, I
suspect, until the paperback book from Penguin (seventy years ago
this year).
Newton points out that the ground had been somewhat prepared:
publishers had been issuing cheap one-volume editions after the
sale of the expensive three-volume sets had lagged. Newton also
thinks this change greatly improved the novel: "When novels were
published in parts, they were infernally padded. . . . The
three-volume also was too long, too full of words masquerading as
ideas; with the one-volume novel a man--or a woman--said what he
had to say and quit. . . . Of course long novels still appear,
but they are tours de force, as it were; or, if they are very
long, they are broken up into sections or epochs, each complete
in itself, as in Galsworthy's FORSYTE SAGA." We have, in fantasy
anyway, cycled back to the "three-decker" with all its flaws, and
with its format and price dictated not by libraries but by the
bookstores.
THE FINAL SOLUTION by Michael Chabon (ISBN 0-06-076340-X) is a
novella, rather than a novel, at about 27,000 words (by my rough
estimation). It is a Sherlock Holmes murder mystery in which the
murder is not the only mystery. It is as much about Holmes in
his old age as about the mystery. This makes it somewhat similar
to Mitch Cullin's A SLIGHT TRICK OF THE MIND (reviewed in the
05/06/05 issue of the MT VOID), although Chabon's Holmes's
problems are as much physical as mental. (Well, contrary to
several of the Universal Studios Sherlock Holmes film, by the
1940s Holmes is almost ninety.) What Chabon manages is a story
in which everything is resolved for the reader, if not for the
characters in the story. (I would say that his method, involving
a rather odd point-of-view chapter, may strike some readers as
awkward.) Recommended but with reservations, and not as a
Sherlock Holmes story of the traditional sort. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
It is no coincidence that in no known
language does the phrase 'As pretty as
an Airport' appear.
-- Douglas Adams