THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
09/28/07 -- Vol. 26, No. 13, Whole Number 1460
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Famous Last Word (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Top Ten Westerns (Part 1) (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Pluto (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS by J. K. Rowling
(book review by Joe Karpierz)
EASTERN PROMISES (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (reading backlogs, RICHARD III,
GHOSTS IN BAKER STREET, DEATH BY BLACK HOLE, and
the film IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON)
(book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Famous Last Word (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
French mime Marcel Marceau died September 22. His last words
apparently were for Mel Brooks to whom he said, "No!" [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Top Ten Westerns (Part 1) (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Last issue I reviewed the remake of 3:10 TO YUMA and referred to
the original as a classic. A friend took exception and said (I
am doing some paraphrasing) that he reserved the world "classic"
for superbly good films. He said that the 1957 version of 3:10
TO YUMA is not nearly a classic. Actually our argument comes
down to what is meant by the word classic. Is it a film of great
quality or is it a film that has been remembered and frequently
referenced? This led Evelyn to ask me what I considered to be
the really great Westerns. Might it not be interesting to make a
list of my ten best Westerns? (These are listed in chronological
order.)
HIGH NOON (1952)
This is the classic film of tension and confrontation. The film
runs fairly close to real time. In an hour the killer Frank
Miller sill arrive in town so his gang can kill Marshall Will
Kane. The Marshall finds nobody willing to commit to help him
save the town. Finally he finds he can only rely on himself.
Because the basic situation paralleled the position of people
called before the House Un-American Committee it has been adopted
as a film of liberal politics, but the message of self-reliance
and the unworthiness of the general public could almost have been
taken from Ayn Rand.
THE BIG COUNTRY (1958)
Of all the big, brash Westerns, this one may be the biggest and
brashest. It is a reasonably faithful adaptation of the novel by
Donald Hamilton, writer of the Matt Helm series. Gregory Peck
plays an ex-sea captain who comes out west to marry the woman he
loves, not realizing that this will put him in the middle of a
land war between his fiancee's cattle baron father (Charles
Bickford) and a crusty neighbor (Burl Ives in an Oscar-winning
performance). Charleton Heston wanted to turn down the non-lead
part as Bickford's ranch foreman but was convinced by others that
it was crazy to turn down a chance to work with director William
Wyler. Wyler's next film had Heston as the title character of
BEN HUR. The musical score by Jerome Moross is one of the
greatest of any Western film.
THE JAYHAWKERS (1959)
All of the above are acknowledged classics of the Western genre.
I would also like to choose a Western that is little remembered.
In pre-Civil War Kansas a man breaks out of prison to investigate
the death of his wife. He is recaptured but instead of going
back to prison he is offered a pardon by the governor if he will
just kill the man responsible for his wife's death. It seems the
man in question is Luke Darcy, a very charismatic and cultured
demagogue, a sort of prairie Napoleon who wants to carve his own
country out of Kansas. The would-be killer finds himself caught
up in Darcy's dream. The musical score by Jerome Moross became
familiar when it was reused for the television program "Wagon
Train."
THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960)
The remake of SEVEN SAMURAI--itself inspired by Westerns--as a
western may well be an improvement on a great film. This is
another film with suspense, but it is also a film with
characters. It is the characters that make this film work,
though in my opinion, like GONE WITH THE WIND, the first half is
much better than the second half. When the shooting starts this
film loses a lot of what it had going for it. Bu the sequences
of gathering the near-volunteer team to fight an idealistic
battle and the varying motives of each member make this a film to
watch repeatedly.
THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962)
The combination of director John Ford and actor John Wayne is one
of the most respected in Western movies. However, here John
Wayne is second to Jimmy Stewart. Stewart plays a bookish
Easterner come out west and finds himself in a deadly struggle
with the title desperado. Stewart gives the film more heart than
Wayne does in Ford's other films. (I am convinced that Ford
found that the script as it was intended was not filmable. A
close viewing of the film changes the meaning of the title from
what everyone thinks it means.)
[I will finish the list next week.]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Pluto (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
If scientists want people to use scientifically correct language,
then they should not go around changing the language so that what
had been correct usage becomes incorrect, e.g., deciding that
Pluto is no longer a planet. It could be that they had no idea
how strong public opinion would be against the change, but there
are a lot of people who will keep calling Pluto a planet. It's
like New York City deciding that it should be "the Avenue of the
Americas"--everyone still calls it Sixth Avenue. [-ecl]
[Not me. I still call it Pluto. -mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS by J. K. Rowling
(copyright 2007, Scholastic, 759pp, $34.99, ISBN 0-545-01022-5)
(book review by Joe Karpierz)
It's over. It's really over. We're done. No more late night
book release parties, no more anticipation of the next book in
the series, no more leaks to the Internet, no more speculation on
book titles. It's done.
And you know what? Rowling finally did it right. While not a
flawless book--what book is?--this book is right on target most
of the time.
I think this book works for several different reasons. It's
different in tone from the other books; my daughter said that it
was like it was a completely different series. It's dark. It
has to be, since it's dealing with a subject matter that by
definition is dark--after all, it's basically a war between good
and evil, where the evil guy does not shy away from killing the
good guys. Had Rowling chickened out and softened it up, I would
have felt cheated. The protagonist has tough decisions to make,
decisions that will not be popular with his friends and allies.
Characters we've come love have proven to have flaws, and
characters we intensely dislike turn out surprising us in
pleasant ways. It's good stuff.
The series started to get good, if I remember (wait, let me check
the review)--yep, with a couple of hundred pages left in Goblet
of Fire. At that point, it seems, it turned from a children's
story to something more adult. This makes sense, as Harry and
the rest of the gang at Hogwarts are indeed getting older, going
through through their teen years, and generally gaining a much
more grown up view of the world. DEATHLY HALLOWS is the ultimate
in this transformation, as Harry has to make life or death
decisions that will alter society, both Wizarding and Muggle, as
we know it. This is a grown up book, with grown-up themes and a
grown-up story--not to mention a wee bit of grown up language
(see if you drop the book like I almost did when Mrs. Weasley
let out with an impolite name for Bellatrix during the climactic
battle).
So, I guess I ought to actually talk about the book for a bit,
eh? Okay, you convinced me.
The one thing to notice is that the majority of this story does
not take place at Hogwarts. Oh, it took place during the school
year, but the thing is, Harry, Hermione, and Ron quit school to
run off on a fool's errand at the command of the late lamented
Albus Dumbledore--go off and destroy all of Voldemort's
Horcruxes. You remember those from HALF BLOOD PRINCE, I would
imagine--those magical items that contained pieces of Voldemort's
soul. They're all over the place, our heroes don't know where
they are, and Voldemort and his followers have taken over the
Ministry of Magic, Hogwarts, and all the rest of the British
wizarding world (you know all those schools that participated in
the Triwizard Tournament? I wonder if they had the equivalent of
a Voldemort running around, and if not, why couldn't they help
out with this mess in Britain?). Our heroes are also on the run,
looking for those pesky Horcruxes. Then, when visiting
Xenophilius Lovegood--Luna's father--they hear the story of The
Tale of the Three Brothers and the Deathly Hallows. It seems
that if you have possession of all three Hallows--a souped up
Invisibility Cloak, a super wand called the Elder Wand, and the
Resurrection Stone, you become the Master of Death. Well, by
gosh and by golly, guess Who's going after the Hallows?
So now Harry has a dilemma--does he go after the Horcruxes, or
does he go after the Hallows? And he'd better make his mind up
quick. If he decides to go after the Hallows too late, then
Voldemort will get them any *and* Harry won't have destroyed the
Horcruxes either. Harry eventually does make his decision to go
after the Horcruxes, but he needs the Sword of Gryffindor to help
destroy the darned things. And he doesn't have it. He does,
however, get help from the most unlikely person, the identity of
whom he doesn't find out until much later.
Oh, there's more, there's much, much more to talk about, but then
this review would be as long as the novel. Suffice it to say that
we eventually get to the aforementioned climactic battle between
good and evil, with Harry and Voldemort taking center stage, just
as we knew they would. And here I'd better stop for a spoiler
alert, since what I need to talk about is spoiler material.
SPOILER ALERT
For those 2.5 people in the world who haven't yet read the book
but intend to and don't want to know what happens, leave now. As
we know, good triumphs over evil in stories like this one--
always. So yes, Harry defeats Voldemort, as we always knew he
would, and Harry survives, as we weren't sure he would. I think
the whole wrap-up to this leaves a little to be desired. We
learn earlier in the novel that the Wand chooses the Wizard, and
wands can pass from one wizard to the next when, for instance,
one wizard bests another in combat. The Elder Wand is no
exception. The fact that the Elder Wand is currently in the
possession of Voldemort but is not *controlled* by Voldemort
because Harry actually disarmed it's previous owner of *a
different wand*, thus causing the Elder Wand to choose Harry,
doesn't work for me. And Harry not actually providing the
killing blow was a bit of a cop out as well, in my opinion.
Voldemort would have no trouble landing the killing blow on
Harry, so why not the other way around? There was no point in
Rowling trying to keep Harry innocent--he'd already been the
direct or indirect cause of a few other deaths in the book
anyway.
And speaking of those deaths, I wanted to see Rowling have the
guts to kill off one of the Big Three. A real war spares no one,
and even though people close to Harry, Ron, and Hermione died,
one of those three dying would have had a much greater dramatic
impact on the story.
Okay, you 2.5 people--you can come back now.
BIG SPOILER OVER, MINOR SPOILER AHEAD
I really enjoyed the ending epilogue, although I gather from
things that I've read that some people out there didn't care for
it. Yeah, it was a little too sweet and sugar coated, but big
stories of good versus evil need to have a "happily ever after"
ending, especially this overarching story spanning seven books.
After all that's said and done, the time honored happily ever
after is appropriate here.
MINOR SPOILER OVER
The novel is a fine and fitting end to the "Harry Potter" series.
As one of my co-workers put it the other day, the ending was
saying "I'm done, I'm not writing any more, don't ask me to".
And that's the way it should be. It's time to move on.
Okay, from one end of series novel to the next. When next we
meet, I'll review SANDWORMS of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J.
Anderson, the final novel in the series originally started by the
late Frank Herbert with the classic novel Dune. Until then....
[-jak]
===================================================================
TOPIC: EASTERN PROMISES (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: A London midwife is threatened by the actions of the
Russian Mafia in this new thriller from David Cronenberg.
Cronenberg brings back Viggo Mortensen from his last film into
another violent action part. Double-crosses, violent fights, and
secret plans make the film feel like a good episode of the
Sopranovs. This could well be Cronenberg's best film of this
decade, atmospheric and exciting. Rating: high +2 (-4 to +4) or
8/10
When an unidentified 14-year-old drug addict dies giving birth,
her midwife Anna (played by Naomi Watts) is left holding the
baby. Anna needs to identify the dead girl and to find the
baby's family. But she has only what was in the dead girl's
pockets to help her. The effects include a handwritten book,
probably a diary, which had been kept in Russian and a business
card from a local Russian restaurant. Anna's is half-Russian,
but she herself does not know the language so she needs help.
Her uncle reads Russian but is not willing to do the translation
when he finds the sort of terrible story that the diary tells.
Instead Anna goes to the restaurant on the card. There the owner
Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl) is only reluctantly willing to
translate the diary. But going to the restaurant brings Anna in
contact with Semyon's violent gangster son Kirill (Vincent
Cassel) and his very efficient lieutenant Nicolai (Viggo
Mortensen). The story spans the days between Christmas Eve and
New Years Eve.
David Cronenberg's last film with Viggo Mortensen, A HISTORY OF
VIOLENCE, was actually a redux of a plot from a 1950s Western (by
way of a graphic novel). This time he has made a first-class
thriller. Before that he did SPIDER, a downbeat character study
of an acute schizophrenic. One film was too heavy, the other a
bit too light. This time he balances action and atmosphere and
gets it just about right. Fans of "The Sopranos" will find the
sort of intra-family machinations and politics of a crime family.
Certainly part of the appeal of Sopranos, the education of how
the Mafia works, is here also with the revelations of the Russian
Mafia and specifically the baroque language of tattoos. The
tattoos on a Russian Mafioso tell you more about his past than
the medals on a five-star general tell you about his.
Armin Mueller-Stahl plays the Russian patriarch in whose
restaurant much of the story takes place. Ordinarily he is a
very good actor, but it was genuinely distracting to hear him
speak with a Germanic rather than Slavic accent. ("If she hahd
verked here...") I wondered was there some plot detail that I
missed that explained this anomaly? Mortensen did sound
sufficiently Russian, at least to me. But then he had spent
weeks travelling in Russia preparing for the role. He has the
raw-boned face that is magnetic.
After A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, viewers will expect that we will see
Viggo Mortensen in violent action scenes. Cronenberg has gone
from the bizarre graphic visuals of his early films to simply
extreme violence in his later films. While there appears to be
little gunplay in the Russian Mafia, there is a lot of knife-
play. There is a saying that being unprepared is bringing a
knife to a gunfight. In this film Mortensen's character takes it
a step further by bringing almost less than nothing to a knife
fight. (Okay, he wasn't expecting it.) But it was a scene that
somehow is much more exciting than a gunfight or martial arts
fight.
This is a suspenseful and brutal London crime drama to rank with
some of the better British-made London crime dramas like LAYER
CAKE. It is not the kind of thing we are used to from David
Cronenberg, but he comes off in fine style I rate it a high +2 on
the -4 to +4 scale or 8/10.
Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0765443/
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
When I retired in 2001, my "to-read" backlog was about a year. I
managed to get it down to three or four months by last year, but
it seems to be stuck there. True, I occasionally add books to
the list based on reviews and such, but that is not at that great
a rate. But I have finally figured out why the list does not
decrease. The reason is three-fold: I get a large number of
books to read for the Sidewise Award, I find entirely too many
books when I go to the library and look at the new books, and
whenever the stack diminishes, I find myself adding another half
dozen Agatha Christies to it to re-read.
Our book discussion this month was about RICHARD III by William
Shakespeare (ISBN-13 978-0-743-48284-4, ISBN-10 0-743-48284-0).
One problem I have with this play is that parts of it are just
unbelievable--in particular, Richard's (successful) wooing of
Lady Anne. I don't care how charming someone is, it is just not
credible that they could kill a woman's husband and father-in-
law, and then get her to fall in love with him at the funeral.
(Unless, of course, she is not in love with the husband--but that
is not the case here.)
[First, the husband and father were not murdered but fell in
battle, which is a little bit different. Also the fact that Anne
Neville was only 16 and was probably left unprotected might have
had something to do with it. (Thank you, answers.com.) By the
way, she does not fall in love with him in the play. In one scene
she goes from detesting him to merely disliking him. -mrl]
Of course, a lot of RICHARD III is not to be believed, not
because it is just unlikely, but because it is actually false.
Shakespeare based his characters on the histories written by
Thomas More and other Tudor supporters, and these histories were
written more to blacken Richard's name than to convey the truth.
For example, Clarence was actually disloyal to Edward, and was
killed because of that, in spite of Richard's attempts to save
him. One of the best expositions of the misrepresentations is
Josephine Tey's THE DAUGHTER OF TIME, which is our discussion
book *next* month.
However, parts of the play are spot-on even today, such as this
description from Act III, Scene 7:
Buckingham:
The mayor is here at hand: intend some fear;
Be not you spoke with, but by mighty suit:
And look you get a prayer-book in your hand,
And stand betwixt two churchmen, good my lord;
For on that ground I'll build a holy descant:
And be not easily won to our request:
Play the maid's part, still answer nay, and take it.
...
Lord Mayor:
See, where he stands between two clergymen!
Buckingham:
Two props of virtue for a Christian prince,
To stay him from the fall of vanity:
And, see, a book of prayer in his hand,
True ornaments to know a holy man.
Famous Plantagenet, most gracious prince,
Lend favourable ears to our request;
And pardon us the interruption
Of thy devotion and right Christian zeal.
Doesn't this sound like some of today's politicians?
GHOSTS IN BAKER STREET edited by Martin Harry Greenberg, Jon
Lellenberg, and Daniel Stashower (ISBN-13 978-0-786-71400-1,
ISBN-10 0-7867-1400-X) is the third in the "New Tales of Sherlock
Holmes" series. The first two are MURDER IN BAKER STREET and
MURDER, MY DEAR WATSON; this one is considerably shorter than
either of those, containing only ten stories and three essays.
The introduction by John H. Watson, M.D. says that of Holmes's
cases "a few ... seemed to defy rational explanation." Because
of Holmes's insistence that they must have had a rational
explanation, however, he says of the notes for these, "I locked
them away in my old dispatch box that I kept in the vaults of a
bank at Charing Cross." Overlooking that Watson writing this
must now be upwards of 150 years old--itself a fairly
supernatural situation--I figure that if one tallied up all the
notes for all the stories which claim to have been stored for
years in this dispatch box, one can only conclude that the
dispatch box itself has the supernatural property of being
considerably larger on the inside than on the outside (unless
there is a scientific explanation, such as that it is a mini-
TARDIS). But in any case, the real problem with the introduction
is that in fact, almost all the stories in this volume *do* have
a rational explanation at the end of them, with no hint that
there is anything more. Only two of the ten are clearly
supernatural, and two others have rational explanations with only
a hint of possible supernatural elements at the end. I suspect
when it came down to it, most of the authors respected Holmes
enough to feel it necessary to ground their stories firmly in
reality rather than the spirit world. (The SHADOWS OVER BAKER
STREET anthology combined Holmes with Lovecraftian themes, but
even these are really more science fictional than supernatural.)
(In passing, I have to wonder how theologically sound is the
notion that person A can grant or wager person B's soul to the
Devil. If the Devil could get souls that way, he would only have
to tempt one person in selling him everyone else's souls.)
DEATH BY BLACK HOLE: AND OTHER COSMIC QUANDRIES by Neil deGrasse
Tyson (ISBN-13 978-0-393-33016-8, ISBN-10 0-393-33016-8) is a
collection of "Universe" essays from the magazine NATURAL
HISTORY. (Tyson has recently been seen on the History Channel
series "Universe".) The essays vary in interest, but I do have
to take exception to a couple of Tyson's conclusions in "Fear of
Numbers". Tyson claims that people are afraid of negative
numbers, and gives some supposed examples of this. For example,
he says that "a mild case of this syndrome exists among car
dealers, where instead of saying they will subtract $1,000 from
the price of your car, they say you will receive $1,000 'cash
back.'" This is more psychological than mathematical: people
like getting cash back. Why else would people prefer to overpay
their taxes and then get a refund, than pay less throughout the
year? (And if they are getting a car loan, they really do end up
with more money in their pocket right away.)
Tyson also claims that this fear of the minus sign is why
accounting reports enclose negative amounts in parentheses rather
than use the minus sign. I think it is more likely that this is
done because it is easy to overlook a minus sign--it is fairly
small, after all--or to confuse it with a dash or just an ink
streak.
There is also an article, "Hollywood Nights", about how Hollywood
manages to get the night sky wrong so often. For example, James
Cameron spent a lot of time and money making sure that the dish
patterns were correct on the Titanic, but did not seem to care
that the stars in the night sky were all wrong. Directors also
have the moon waxing and waning in the wrong direction, or make
other astronomical mistakes.
Some of the astronomy complaints are a little unfair, though.
Tyson complains that one sees a full moon much more frequently
than the law of averages would indicate. But of course you do,
and for the same reason that people always find parking spaces
right where they need them--it serves the purpose of the film.
In films, you also never have a situation where two important
characters have the same first name, unless it is a plot point,
and you also never see anyone doing anything (such as going to
the dentist).that is not connected to the plot. As long as the
full moon is not actually impossible (such as lasting two weeks),
complaining about it on the basis of frequency hardly seems fair.
And some comments on a film rather than a book: We saw IN THE
SHADOW OF THE MOON recently, and a few things are worth mentioning:
The decision to change Apollo 8 from an earth orbital to a lunar
orbital mission was a last-minute one, made because it was
believed that the Russians were planning a lunar orbital mission.
As Jim Lovell said, "It was a bold move. It had some risky
aspects to it. But it was a time when we made bold moves."
Regarding Kennedy's famous speech. one of the astronauts said
that there was a clear and simple mission statement: "Where? The
moon. When? By the end of this decade." It would be nice if
all corporate mission statements could be this clear.
Today's miracle is tomorrow's commonplace.
Charles Duke said, "My father was born shortly after the Wright
brothers. He could barely believe that I went to the moon. But my
son Tom was 5--and he didn't think it was any big deal." It
sounds as though the astronauts' parents were amazed that twelve
men went to the moon; the astronauts' children, that *only*
twelve went.
As ABC News pointed out, of the 12 who walked on the moon's
surface, only nine are alive today, and the youngest is 71. The
astronauts who took part in this documentary were Buzz Aldrin,
Alan Bean, Eugene Cernan, Michael Collins (who circled the moon
but did not walk on it), Jim Lovell (who was on the Apollo 13
flight and hence did not walk on the moon either), Edgar D.
Mitchell, Harrison Schmitt, Dave Scott, and John Young.
Noticeably missing form the documentary was Neil Armstrong.
Three "moon-walkers"--Pete Conrad, James Irwin, and Alan Shepard-
-died before the film was made. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Customer: "How much is a large order of Fibonaccos?"
Cashier: "It's the price of a small order plus the
price of a medium order."
-- Henry G. Baker