THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
12/02/05 -- Vol. 24, No. 23, Whole Number 1311
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:
A Martian Oddity (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Google and the Winds of Change (Part 2) (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
A. E. Van Vogt and Wile E. Coyote (letter of comment
by Charles S. Harris and comment by Mark R. Leeper)
HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE (film review
by Mark R. Leeper)
DUNE by Frank Herbert (book review by Joe Karpierz)
MRS. PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT (film review
by Mark R. Leeper)
GRIZZLY MAN (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
TRANSAMERICA (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (INTRODUCING MIND & BRAIN,
BRING THE JUBILEE, BRAVE NEW WORLD,
THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: A Martian Oddity (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
"Well, it was all a bit of a cock-up, really. We have these
deferred-deployment tripod thingees we were burying just in case
we needed them. We were installing on one of those northern
islands. We were digging down and all of a sudden this column of
light in the shape of the seed race popped up. Scared the
screelugs out of me, I'll tell you."
"I mean someone really needs to check these things out. They
should tell us where the seed ships are. It's all a case of the
third pod not knowing what the first pod is doing. We probably
shouldn't have seeded the planet in the first place."
[If you don't get the joke, don't worry about it. -mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Google and the Winds of Change (Part 2) (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
Last week I was discussing how the Internet was really hurting
the newspaper business.
A friend's father was talking to me and asked what newspaper I
get. "I don't get a newspaper," I told him. "Well, then where
do you get your news?" "I get it off the PC." "Do you think it
is a good idea to get all your news from a single source?" He
obviously still thought of the PC and the Internet as basically
competitive with a local newspaper.
Actually it is not much of a competition. Yes, I get nearly all
my news off the PC. In a single day I will get my news from CNN,
the BBC, Yahoo news, and a few others. Each week I also stop by
the right-wing newspapers, left-wing newspapers, Jerusalem Post,
Arabs Against Discrimination, to name just a few. They all want
me to know about the news as they see it, and to consider their
opinions. No single newspaper can match that global outlook. Not
only can I get a global outlook; I can fine-tune it to my
interests. And certainly they cannot match the price. That is
bad for the newspapers. Actually I used to get my global outlook
from a magazine called "World Press Review." It is now defunct
and I assume the reason is that it could not compete with the
global view most people can get free on a PC.
The fact is that there is little that the newspapers or the
newsmagazines can offer that is not available better, faster, and
cheaper on-line. Newspapers and the Internet obviously conflict
and are going to conflict more in the future. And the smart
money is not betting on the newspapers. One advantage newspapers
have is that they have editors and fact-checking facilities.
That is useful--you want to know the writers you are reading have
had their facts checked--but even the New York Times has been
racked by scandals in recent years that its reporters were
inventing rather than reporting news. Credibility is less of an
issue than it used to be because even newspapers are no longer
able to provide it. Google and its news search capability is a
big part of my choice of PC news rather than a newspaper. I can
find what many different newspapers say about a given situation.
I have talked to people who work for newspapers and they
frequently see themselves as being in a dead-end industry. And
it may just be that they are.
There are other people whom you would not think would be worried
by Google but who really are. The New York Times reported
recently that Wal-Mart fears not so much K-Mart or Target but
Google. Why should a store chain that deals only in goods fear a
company that does not sell any goods? For the simple reason that
Google provided information that allows people to comparison
shop. The fact is that in spite of Americans' reputation as
Yankee traders, people have traditionally found it inconvenient
to do much comparison-shopping. Once again the price information
is out there free to anyone who wants it, but it is a lot of work
to compare. Most people might like to do more comparison-
shopping. But it traditionally has been a big and time-consuming
project. Break down the communication barrier and prices will
become a lot more competitive.
Even with their famous/notorious low prices, Wal-Mart benefits
from communications barriers to comparison shopping. Wal-Mart is
worried about the day that Google will be telling people that that
new television that is really cheap at Wal-Mart is even cheaper at
the electronics store at the other end of town. And Google is
definitely getting into the business of providing comparison-
shopping data. It has a related service called Froogle, with a
link on their query page that allows buyers to comparison shop at
the click of a mouse. Right now it is not the leading comparison
shopping site--my guess is that it would be MySimon--but it is
reasonably good. So Google will have a very big impact on
Wal-Mart, America's biggest retail giant. There is a lot of power
in that information.
Real estate is another industry that Google could potentially hit
hard. Real estate is a giant industry in this country. And how
does real estate make its money? In large part because your
realtor is the channel of communication between people selling
real estate and people buying real estate. If you want to find a
property that meets your needs you go to a realtor, or several
realtors, and they are the repositories of information of what
property is currently available. Realtors collect and supply to
their customers information about what property is obtainable.
That is not a whole lot different from what Froogle does right
now. And Google has GoogleMaps in the bargain to show where each
property is listed. There is a natural synergy there. By using
electronics rather than people-power, Google has it in their power
to be at once the cheapest and most powerful and most profitable
realtor in the country.
Next week I will look at what Google and the Internet are doing
to the automobile industry. [-mr]
[This article was inspired by and drew upon, "Just Googling: It Is
Striking Fear Into Companies" by Steve Lohr, New York Times,
November 6, 2005]
===================================================================
TOPIC: A. E. Van Vogt and Wile E. Coyote (letter of comment by
Charles S. Harris and comment by Mark R. Leeper)
In the 11/25/05 issue of the MT VOID, Evelyn included the
quotation, "[A. E. Van Vogt] was the Wile E. Coyote of SF. He
ran off the cliff in 1939 and looked down sometime in the 1950s."
[John Boston, quoted by Rich Horton]
Charles S. Harris wrote, "Explanation, please (of the Van Vogt
part)."
Mark responds:
"Well, it's like this. I provide Evelyn with sets of ten quotes
every ten weeks and she puts them in the notice. But she also
has the privilege to put in quotes of her own. I try to choose
mine as ideas I would want to think about. We rarely get
people who do not understand the quotes I pick. Evelyn has her
own criteria for choosing quotes. This quote has keywords
'A. E. Van Vogt' and 'Wile E. Coyote.' Both will be familiar to
the readers so the quote will have interest value. Certainly the
juxtaposition of the two names in a single quote has great
interest value.
I too was puzzled by what Boston was saying. I did not feel it
was worth pressing the point. After I got your mail I asked
Evelyn what she thought it meant. She thought maybe it meant
that in 1939 A. E. Van Vogt's writing became less hard science
fiction and more speculative and in the 1950s he realized he was
not writing hard science fiction. I asked her what novels Boston
was referring to and she was not exactly sure, but thought THE
WORLD OF NULL A might be one. But it still does mention
A. E. Van Vogt and Wile E. Coyote.
Next week (which is this week) I think we will return to my
selections and my taste runs more toward meaning-focused quotes.
(Is it possible that he is suggesting that A. E. Van Vogt was
the egg man and that Wile E. Coyote was actually the walrus?)"
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE (film review by Mark
R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Harry Potter's fourth outing has enough stylistic
changes to keep the series interesting. There is a new style
with less sports, less frivolous humor, and a little more
darkness. There is even a little romance as Harry, his friends,
and the series matures. Rating: +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10
It is a remarkable thing to watch the maturing process, to see a
child become an adult. Cinema has shown many characters go from
children to adults, but few have been able to look at the actual
maturing process since it is difficult to capture gradual aging
over years in a live-action film. Probably the best attempt at
this is Michael Apted's 7-UP series. But the Harry Potter series
shows us a character who matures before our eyes and whom we see
at intervals of a year or two. And as the character matures, so
does the style of the series. The Andy Hardy films shows Mickey
Rooney at several different ages, but the studio was obviously
trying to keep the character very much the same from one film to
the next. Harry Potter has no such restriction. Followers of
the series will find a more mature Harry and a more mature style,
less sugary but not actually drier than the previous films.
Mike Newell dispenses with some of the cuteness of the previous
outings. There is no John Cleese playing funny ghosts and no
stairways shifting under characters. Paintings still seem to be
alive and move. This is one cute touch still there--and time so
does a stained glass window--but otherwise the film very much
seems to stick with its major characters and the plot, not cute
trimmings. For once Quiddich does not sap too much of the screen
time. Harry does not even play. Nor do Muggles come into the
film much. The film does not start with Harry home with Muggles
and Harry is not persecuted and getting revenge on his Muggle
family. Also this time the plot is less a detective mystery and
more the story of a struggle. Another change is that Harry and
friends are taking more interest in the opposite sex, though here
the plotting is more mundane and less original. Perhaps the
dating adds identification value for the characters, but one does
not have to go to a wizard school to find kids with much the same
dating woes that Harry and his friends have. Harry may be more
like a Muggle than the writers want to admit. Whoever it is who
thought that what Harry Potter films needed was a rock band and a
rave dance sequence sees the style of Potter films very
differently than I do. Also an irritating vocal to the tune of
electric guitars is pushed to the last of the end credits where
it can do the least harm.
The story revolves around three plots. The Tri-Wizard tournament
in which three (sorry, make that four) wizards compete. There is
a ball not a whole lot different from a Junior Prom. And there
is a plot by the Dark Wizard Voldemort who is becoming more
tangible and visible than he had been in the past. The film
starts with a blood-and-thunder opening, getting right into the
dark style, which is lathered onto the film in gloomy nights and
rainy days.
Problems with the story include that Harry is wrongly accused of
a faux pas and almost immediately his best friends desert him.
One even starts an insult campaign against Potter. This is an
overwrought and unconvincing piece of plotting. Harry is still
being bullied in spite of the fact that he is a hero and a sports
star at Hogwarts and is anything but the sort of student who gets
bullied. The so-called "goblet of fire" is very simply misnamed.
Anything that size can hardly be called a goblet. Somewhere
between J. K. Rowling's choice of the title and the making of the
film somebody replaced the goblet with a large goblet-shaped urn.
Another piece of poor writing, by no means unique to this series,
is that Harry's worst foes capture Harry and then tell him
everything he needs to know assuming that he cannot possibly
escape them. Of course he does escape. The talkative villain is
a time-honored tradition in James Bond films, but it seems more
and more ridiculous the more it is used in film. THE INCREDIBLES
does a nice riff on "soliloquizing." Also as far as I could tell
one of Harry's challenges in the Tri-Wizard Tournament he wins
only by luck. (Luck is also a feeble plot device overused in
adventures like the Bond films.) Overuse of luck is not really
playing fair with the viewer. I am not sure author
J. K. Rowling's propensity to invent plot devices on the spot and
then say they are a four-hundred-year tradition.
Much of the film is kept dark and rainy and director Mike Newell
keeps stoking fire with more and more fantastic images, almost in
a Terry Gilliam style. A very nice fight with a dragon seems an
homage to the now classic film DRAGONSLAYER. The light, twinkly
musical scores by John Williams have given way to a darker,
deeper score by Patrick Doyle.
Characters that do not seem to have a payoff include Alan
Rickman's Red Herring in Black and Miranda Richardson playing an
unpleasant gossip columnist who seems to be from another movie.
Voldemort is at last seen corporeal as a demon with no nose. (No
nose? How does he smell? Probably awful.) He is played by
Ralph Fiennes, who like Gary Oldman was in the film but totally
unrecognizable. (Oldman was a face in a fire.) Delightfully
recognizable was comic actress Francis de la Tour. Brendan
Gleeson plays a new teacher with a roving eye.
The team who make the Harry Potter films know enough to keep
varying the style so that they can call on the previous films
without exploiting them. Arguably it is the most creative and
unified fiction film series ever. If one discounts THE LORD OF
THE RINGS, which was not really a series but one very long film,
and STAR WARS, which was attempting to be one very long film even
if it failed, there is very little competition for a film that
shows one character's maturation. After four films, each film in
the series has been satisfying and this fourth film rates a +2 on
the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: DUNE by Frank Herbert (copyright 1965 by Frank Herbert,
first Putnam edition 1984, ISBN 0-399-12896-4, 520pp) (book review
by Joe Karpierz)
I haven't read DUNE in more than twenty years, but, as you know,
with the impending completion of the "Dune" saga by Frank
Herbert's son Brian Herbert and prolific SF writer Kevin J.
Anderson, I wanted to reread all six original "Dune" novels
before the first of two upcoming novels, HUNTERS OF DUNE, arrives
in 2006.
You know what? This novel is pretty good. I've been kind of
poking around the net over the last few weeks looking for
information about Dune and the Dune universe. I've seen several
places where DUNE is listed as "the greatest science fiction
novel of all time" (see http://tinyurl.com/awncy, for example).
That's really a tough statement to make--not because it's not a
great book, but because there are so many great books out there
that can make the same claim. Look at that list and pick out a
few and ask yourself if one of those isn't better than DUNE. Of
course, that list could spawn a whole topic of discussion all by
itself, so I'll leave the topic by saying that DUNE is a
tremendous novel, and rates in my top five favorites of all time.
Quick story synopsis for the uninitiated: the time is the far,
far future, somewhere in the neighborhood of at least 15,000
years in the future (yeah, I know, that's not exact, but if you
figure that the Butlerian Jihad took place more than 10,000 years
before DUNE, and then there was the time of the oppression of the
Thinking Machines, and the long human empire before that, it's
got to be in the neighborhood of 15,000 years). House Atreides,
led by Duke Leto and his men, are being put in charge of Arrakis,
an arid desert world which is the home of spice production for
all the known universe. Spice, or melange, pretty much drives
everything, but most important of all it drives space travel.
The Spacing Guild Navigators need the spice to "fold space" and
allow nearly instantaneous space travel. The spice is the source
of wealth in the empire. Anyway, the Atreides are being given
Arrakis by the cousin of Leto, Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV.
Arrakis's prior caretaker is the House Harkonnen, bitter enemy of
the House Atreides headed by the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen.
Leto has a son, Paul, by his bound concubine the Lady Jessica of
the Bene Gesserit. The Bene Gesserit subscribe to a special
school of physical and mental training and are primarily female.
The Bene Gesserit, in secret, have had a breeding program going
on for thousands of years in an effort to produce the Kwisatz
Haderach, the all-powerful male Bene Gesserit who can do things
the females can't, and who they want to be able to control to do
their bidding. Anyway, Leto, Jessica, Paul, and others arrive on
Arrakis and discover that there is a prophecy of anoutworlder
coming to Arrakis to lead the Fremen (nomad-like desert folk) out
from under the repression of the Galactic Empire.
I think you can see where this just might be leading.
Herbert tells a masterful tale of intrigue and suspense, one
where the coming of a messiah is foretold and that prophecy comes
true in the form of Paul "Muad'Dib" Atreides. This story is
wonderfully complex without making your head hurt too much.
There are "plots within plots", "plans within plans", and nothing
is as it seems. Herbert has also done a terrific job of world
building, creating a rich and complex social system that rivals
the best of them.
While I was reading DUNE, I was interested in seeing the novel
held up over time, which is one of the marks of a great SF novel.
It was written forty years ago, so the potential for it to fall
apart was there--but it didn't. It holds up extremely well,
although there are some points which might be updated based on
recent scientific discovery (on another discussion group I'm
involved with, there was a thread about just what one would have
to do internally to produce a boy or girl at will, but I find
that a small point). The reason it holds up is that the
technology is not the point. All the trappings of SF are there,
but they are a background to the true story. That's why it holds
up as well as it does.
If you've never read DUNE, I encourage you to do so. If you
haven't read it in a while, I encourage you to go back and read
it again. You will not have wasted your time. [-jak]
===================================================================
TOPIC: MRS. PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT (film review by Mark
R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Dan Ireland gives us a bittersweet story of a May-
December platonic relationship. An aging and lonely woman takes
up residence in the sort of London hotel where all the residents
see each other every night at dinner. After telling the others
that her grandson will visit her, and the grandson ignores her,
she meets a young writer who is willing to play the charade that
he is the grandson. Joan Plowright stars in what might be the
best role of her career. Rupert Friend (Mr. Wickham in the
current PRIDE AND PREJUDICE) plays the ersatz grandson. Rating:
+2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10
Based on novel by Elizabeth Taylor (no, not *that* Elizabeth
Taylor!) and adapted by Ruth Sacks, MRS. PALFREY AT THE CLAREMONT
is the story of an unlikely friendship. Joan Plowright was
married to Laurence Olivier, and is an excellent actress, though
not really known for lead roles in motion pictures. Here she is
a study of loneliness and British pluck. She plays Mrs. Palfrey,
an elderly and lonely woman who comes to London and moves into a
dilapidated residence hotel. She wishes to be near a grandson
who is too busy even to return her calls. Her room is tiny and
there is no elevator, but what really drags her spirits down are
the looks she gets from the other tenants over dinner as her
grandson ignores her. She wants to be part of life, but life
seems not to be taking much of an interest in her.
One day while shopping she falls on the street in front of a
basement apartment. Out bounds Ludovic Meyer (Rupert Friend),
who as a gentleman invites her into his apartment to dress her
injury and to offer her a cup of tea. In spite of the large age
difference, they find that they like each other. Ludo is a
busker by day, playing music on the street, but also an aspiring
writer and he finds much to write about in his friendship.
Mrs. Palfrey enjoys the attention and friendship she is getting.
But can she ask this new friend to participate in a charade and
pretend to be the grandson that the other Claremont residents are
expecting to see?
The film gives the feel of taking place in the 1950s and when
there are some artifacts of the 21st century in the film they are
a little jarring. In fact, the novel was set in the 1950s, but
the story loses little with a contemporary setting and it saved
on production budget. The background characters are well
developed, and it is always a pleasure to see actors like Anna
Massey. Director Dan Ireland, who directed THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD,
gives us some nice warm characters and gives us the feel we are
in a novel, perhaps the very novel that Ludo is writing. The
first thing we hear as the film begins are his taps at a
typewriter--perhaps unusual for the contemporary setting.
Ireland has a good eye for observing people and catching facial
expression. He uses it whenever possible to tell his story.
The timing of the release of this film is perhaps fortuitous. We
do not often get film portraits of aging widows and their efforts
to put together lives of their own. In fact, this film makes a
very nice companion piece to MRS. HENDERSON PRESENTS, which is
being released within weeks of the release of this film. Both
are women worth getting to know. I rate MRS. PALFREY AT THE
CLAREMONT a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale and a 7/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: GRIZZLY MAN (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Timothy Treadwell was a self-styled nature expert and
defender of grizzly bears who, together with his girlfriend, was
eventually violently killed by bears. Werner Herzog takes
Treadwell's own video footage and makes a documentary about a
disturbed man and the disaster he brought on himself. Rating: +2
(-4 to +4) or 7/10
I saw a thriller film in which people were stalked by a live
cobra loose with in their house. Afterward a friend said the
film was absurd. Why was it absurd? "Well, why would a cobra
bite someone who was not attacking it? Snakes just don't do
that." It seemed like a logical argument. Snakebites are, after
all, a defense mechanism. A cobra who is not threatened does not
need to defend itself. Therefore, cobras are not a threat,
right? My friend lives nowhere near rattlesnake country or she
would never have doubted that a rattlesnake or a cobra in the
house is a very real and dangerous threat. I think my friend
made much the same mistake that Timothy Treadwell did. Treadwell
styled himself a defender of bears and as an expert on their
behavior. He knew the bears were dangerous but assumed he could
handle that danger if he were a friend to the bears.
Treadwell allowed his fervent love for the bears to overcome his
common sense and to convince himself that his impressions of
bears were true. He saw himself as a sort of cross between Jane
Goodall and the Crocodile Hunter. Werner Herzog has made GRIZZLY
MAN, a documentary about the life and death of Treadwell. A
great deal of the film is composed of Treadwell's own video
footage of him in nature and frequently illegally close to the
bears. Herzog looks at who the man was and at what led to his
death.
So who was this Timothy Treadwell, this funky naturalist in long
blond hair and perpetual sunglasses? His real name was Timothy
Dexter, though he preferred the less bland Treadwell, which had
been a family name. He was a recovered alcoholic, subject to
extreme mood swings, who used his love of animals to salvage his
life temporarily until that also consumed him. He knew a great
deal about the bears from his thirteen summers visiting an
Alaskan wildlife preserve and videotaping himself. He was
reasonably certain he could handle any situation that arises and
did not worry about the danger because he felt that even if he
were killed he would have died a martyr to the bears. He called
himself the "kind warrior" who if endangered becomes a Samurai.
The kind warrior made himself famous taking the material he
collected and showing it without charge at schools and public
gatherings. He appeared on the David Letterman show and enjoyed
his moment of fame. The Turner and Disney corporations each also
apparently considered using this frequently likable and goofy
nature expert for nature programs, but they found he was
impossible to work with. Most of the video footage he took is
laced with language inappropriate for schools and broadcast. It
obvious from the beginning of GRIZZLY MAN that the film is in
large part about Treadwell's death. Herzog tells us almost
immediately that Treadwell died at the very "claws and paws" that
at times Treadwell claims will never kill him.
Treadwell believed himself to be an expert, but his supposed
knowledge of the bears and their situation may have been heavily
laced with wishful thinking. One fairly basic misconception was
that the bears he was protecting actually need guarding. He was
in an area not known for bear poachers and in a preserve where
the bears are legally protected and rarely harassed. And
actually there are no grizzlies in that area. His were coastal
brown bears. Grizzlies are another subset of brown bear and are
found further inland. But "grizzly" sounds more dramatic than
"brown bear." So his so-called "endangered grizzlies" were
neither endangered nor grizzlies. But he apparently met with
fiery hostility any attempts to correct his misimpressions.
Herzog unfolds the story of Treadwell saying he was nearly banned
from the park for getting too close to the bears and for using
food containers that were not bear-resistant. In general
Treadwell's presence habituated the bears to humans, which made
them more not less vulnerable to poachers. He believed with
unshakable faith in himself that he was doing the right thing for
what he considered his bears whom he loved. He had an emotional
need for the bears to need him, but in the film we know of only
one bear that ever benefited from his presence and that was by
Treadwell's death. Treadwell was fulfilling his own need with
the bears. He needed to be a crusader for their cause whether
they had one or not.
In most years this film would be a strong contender for Best
Documentary. However, this year a nature film about penguins
that risk death for the best of reasons will probably outshine
this film about a man whose death was so senseless, though both
films have moving tragedy. I would rate GRIZZLY MAN a +2 on the
-4 to +4 scale or 7/10. (Much of the same material is covered in
more depth in the book THE GRIZZLY MAZE by Nick Jans.) [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: TRANSAMERICA (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: A transsexual discovers he has a son he never knew he
had. He bails his son out of jail and lets him come on a road
trip across country without telling the son that this woman is
his father. This is a very human story and not nearly as pat as
it might have been. Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10
The film stars Felicity Huffman of TV's "Desperate Housewives."
(Ah, that was why there was a crowd around her at the screening.
I have never seen the show. Apparently this is a different role
from the suburban housewife she plays in that program.) She
plays Stanley "Bree" Osbourne, a man who has had problems with
his sexual identity all his life. He sees himself as feminine;
nature sees him as masculine. He has experimented with the male
sexual role but was never comfortable with it. In a week things
are going to get better. An operation is going to render Bree a
woman. He is already dressing and identifying as a woman and is
looking forward to changing gender. But just when things seem to
be getting better Bree gets a phone call from the police. Toby,
a seventeen-year-old (played by Kevin Zegers), has been arrested
for prostitution and claims to have a father he has never met.
That father is Bree. He is just as happy to have Toby think he
is a female church social worker, but plans to bail his son out
and take the boy to his stepfather. Bree tells this to his
therapist (Elizabeth Pena) and she refuses to sign the form to
allow Bree to have the operation until he deals with his past.
That means telling the boy that the woman he sees in front of him
is his real father. Thus begins a tension-filled cross-country
road trip. Toby just wants to run away and get his freedom back
so he can return to the life he has been leading.
Duncan Tucker on his premier outing directs his own screenplay
with the expected pain and humor. There really is not much in
this film that is surprising. Bree tries to reform the son,
while being something of an outsider herself. As one would
expect Toby is more than a handful for Bree. We meet people
along the way on the road trip including an easy-going native
rancher (Graham Greene) and some hippies who are anything but
easy-going. Bree and Toby come to understand each other through
long conversations, as one would expect on a road trip. There
are a few surprises, particularly toward the end. The script
includes a whimsical analysis as to why THE LORD OF THE RINGS is
actually a gay story (which would come as something of a surprise
to J. R. R. Tolkien). Actually, I was expecting some film
allusion to the revelation in the film THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK,
but that never materialized. Huffman and Tucker, both veterans,
give strong performances as two different kinds of lonely people.
A Latin American music motif seems an odd style choice. It is a
low-budget independent film. Even the film stock seems a little
faded. William H. Macy, real-life husband to Felicity Huffman,
gets an executive producer credit. I rate the film a low +2 on
the -4 to +4 scale or 7/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
In INTRODUCING MIND & BRAIN by Angus Gallaty and Oscar Zarate
(ISBN 1-840-46084-9), Gallaty makes the same mistake that so many
others do. He talks about experiments in electrotherapy or
galvanism, and then says that this research "was given expression
by Mary Shelley . . . in her novel FRANKENSTEIN in 1818." More
accurately, it was given expression by Kenneth Strickfadden in
his set design for the 1931 Universal film FRANKENSTEIN, a still
of which serves as the illustration for this page. Shelley barely
mentioned electricity, and never connected it with giving the
monster life.
BRING THE JUBILEE by Ward Moore (ISBN 0-345-40502-1, but more
readily available in THE BEST ALTERNATE HISTORY STORIES OF THE
20TH CENTURY, edited by Harry Turtledove, ISBN 0-345-43990-2) is
a classic alternate history story, and one of the first. Yes,
there were quite a few before it, but considering that the field
took off only in the last fifteen years, something from fifty
years ago qualifies as a seminal story. Unfortunately, the
alternate history aspect does not seem to be the main focus of
the story; Moore seemed to be more interested in the utopian
society that was set up, and in Barbara's personality (which none
of us in the discussion group could quite understand).
I re-read BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley (ISBN 0-060-92987-1)
because I was sure that a line from the film STUNT MAN ("a stick
of gum will make you hum") was from it. It wasn't, though lines
with similar rhythms do show up, and there is "sex gum" in the
book as well. What struck me was that if you look at this and
the only other science fiction considered respectable enough for
school book reports when I was growing up, George Orwell's 1984,
1984 has overshadowed BRAVE NEW WORLD, but BRAVE NEW WORLD is the
more topical, with its subliminal teaching and advertising, class
structure, reproductive technology, and emphasis on sex as
separate from love. People seem to re-read 1984 every once in a
while, but BRAVE NEW WORLD is ignored. So next time, re-read
that one.
Mark got for me the three-volume THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK
HOLMES by Arthur Conan Doyle with annotations by Leslie
S. Klinger (ISBNs 0-393-05916-2 and 0-393-05800-X), so I'll be
tied up reading that for quite a while (interspersed with other
books, of course). It is published by the same publisher as THE
ANNOTATED HUCKLEBERRY FINN, which I reviewed in the 09/23/05
issue, but has avoided what I considered the major problem with
that: the placement of the annotations. In THE ANNOTATED
HUCKLEBERRY FINN, when the text itself gets ahead of the
annotations, the annotations do not "catch up" until the end of
the chapter. In THE NEW ANNOTATED SHERLOCK HOLMES, when the text
gets ahead of the annotations, there will be a page (or two)
where both columns are annotations, just so they can get into
sync again. Klinger's notes are very informative, certainly more
interesting than those of the Oxford annotated version, but not
as quirky or charming as William Baring-Gould's. Still, if you
have re-read Baring-Gould's a half dozen times, this is certainly
worth switching to for a different view. It is, however pricey:
list price for the three volumes is $145. (Luckily, it is often
discounted.) [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
The most dangerous man, to any government,
is the man who is able to think things out
for himself, without regard to the prevailing
superstitions and taboos. Almost invariably
he comes to the conclusion that the government
he lives under is dishonest, insane and
intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he
tries to change it. And if he is not romantic
personally, he is apt to spread discontent
among those who are.
-- H.L. Mencken