THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
10/16/09 -- Vol. 28, No. 16, Whole Number 1567
C3PO: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
R2D2: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Acknowledgement (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Science Fiction Discussion Groups
Puzzle Answer (puzzle answer by Evelyn C. Leeper)
Internet in 2012? (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I Saw It Coming (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The Future of Horror May be True Horror (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
MARY AND MAX (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
GUNS ON THE CLACKAMAS: A DOCUMENTARY (film review
by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (ANCHORWICK and THE CITY OF DREAMING
BOOKS) (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: Acknowledgement (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
This week's MT VOID is brought to you by the Pre-Owned-Humvee
Owners Exchange. Buy a used Humvee today. Look mean. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Science Fiction Discussion Groups
October 22: selected Edgar Allan Poe stories, Old Bridge (NJ)
Public Library, 7PM
November 12: TBD, Middletown (NJ) Public Library, film at 5:30PM,
discussion of film and book after film
==================================================================
TOPIC: Puzzle Answer (puzzle by Evelyn C. Leeper)
The puzzle was:
Take a famous person's name. Add one letter to the last name and
you get that person's occupation. Remove one letter from the first
name, re-arrange the letters, and you get what that person makes
others do.
The answer is "Edgar Allan Poe". [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Internet in 2012? (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Just an idea. In 2010 the World Science Fiction Convention will be
in Australia. That is a long way away. Particularly in the
current economy there will not be a lot of fans attending from
North America. There will be more in 2011 when the convention is
in Reno. But it still will be a distance for the Australians and
Europeans to come and even the fans from the East Coast fans. The
problem is that so much of fandom is so widely dispersed. Maybe it
is time to consider having conventions, even Worldcons, on the
Internet. Just about everything that happens at a convention could
be put on-line. I suppose there is some question about the
masquerade and, of course, the restaurant-going. But we science
fiction fans are supposed to be forward-looking people. Maybe we
should start to consider digital science fiction conventions.
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: I Saw It Coming (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Apparently there is more sameness to the universe than had
previously been thought. The universe has much more entropy that
had previously been calculated.
http://tinyurl.com/entropy-greater
I didn't know it, but I knew it, if you know what I mean. If in
the summertime you go to a movie and look at the "Coming
Attractions" you know there will be one film in which someone was
wrongfully killed and is coming back with some prop like a shoehorn
or something and killing everybody who was involved. There will be
one film in which the dead return to eat brains. That sort of
thing. The entropy had to be a lot higher than people thought.
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: The Future of Horror May Be True Horror (comments by Mark R.
Leeper)
Last week I talked about how I got interested in science fiction in
the first place. Part of the point was that I was young and it was
a long time ago. I grew up loving horror films as much as science
fiction. Even before my parents wanted me to see them I was
anxious to see all the great (?) monsters. Who knows where I first
heard about Frankenstein, but I somehow knew that it was a monster
(well, at least they called the monster "Frankenstein") even though
I had never seen a film. I think I knew about Shelley's creation
when I was six or seven. I know that by the time I was nine I
understood references to the monster in MAD magazine. And I know I
saw my first Frankenstein film Saturday night, October 31, 1959,
when I was visiting my grandmother in Akron, Ohio. There was a
triple feature of SON OF FRANKENSTEIN, THE MUMMY'S GHOST, and MAN-
MADE MONSTER on the local television. (Ah, sweet memories. Though
I was allowed only to stay up for the first two.)
This is all really going to say that while I had saw horror films
(whenever I could) relatively early most of what I saw was
comparatively wholesome and non-threatening horror. I did not
really believe there was a Frankenstein monster that could come for
me. This sort of movie, and the "Captain Midnight" episodes I
talked about last issue were in reasonably good taste. Today young
horror fans seem to have grown up on the likes of Michael and Jason
going around decapitating fornicating teenagers. Then there is
Freddy Kruger with his razor gloves. Delightful. So there are
teens and twenty-somethings who grew up thinking the soul of horror
is stalkers and sharp metal. We are both fans of horror films, but
not the same sort. So when I went to the world science fiction
convention, I wanted to see the panel on "The Future of Horror". I
did not know what I was going to see. I was hoping I would find
out that today's kids were getting smarter and liking fare more
intelligent than the horror films we have been seeing of late. Do
the Buffy-ites have somehow better taste in film? Are all the fans
devotees of books like TWILIGHT? Is their idea of horror the
"Looking for Mr. Goodbite" variety? I didn't know. But I expected
that the people attending would be as interesting as the films they
were discussing.
There was a panel of three women, seemingly in their 20s. Okay.
The first thing they said is that the horror films have not been
very good of late. (Right on!) The people making the films are
not giving us much that is original. (You said it!) We are
getting far too many new remakes of older horror films. (Right
on!) There is no reason to remake a horror film that was made in
color. (Absolutely ri... Wait. What was that?)
Now why do I think that nearly all the best horror films were in
black and white? The old Universal horror films were all
monochrome. Films like FRANKENSTEIN and THE BLACK CAT were all
made in monochrome. They don't need to be remade as far as I am
concerned. They are great as they are. Color would ruin the mood.
Even in the 1950s when there was color, many of the best horror
films like THE NIGHT OF THE DEMON (a.k.a. THE CURSE OF THE DEMON)
and THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON were in black and white.
Hammer Films was experimenting with color and doing very nicely,
but black and white was still a very viable medium. Would it help
today, as Dan Kimmel suggests (in jest), to colorize UN CHIEN
ANDALOU?
I was hoping that the audience would rise in protest and complain
about the panel's disinterest in monochrome. Well, they did
disagree, but not as I was hoping they would. Someone complained
you couldn't ask teens to see a 25-year-old film. No? Let's see.
I was a teen about 1965. A 24-year-old film would have been, say,
THE WOLF MAN. THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN would have been about 30.
But as a teen I wanted to see silent horror films too. Not just
black and white, but silent! NOSFERATU from 1922 was 43 years old.
M was 34. DER GOLEM and THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI were 45. What
kind of a horror fan does not like old horror films?
I was hoping the audience would say what they found wrong with 25-
year-old films. They did. The guy in the audience explained if a
film is 25 years old the characters all have such bad clothing and
such bad haircuts. You look at them and say that would never be
you.
That at least gives me something to think about. Why do I get a
chill when I see Nosferatu come through the doorway? I don't look
like Hutter (the Jonathan Harker character) or have a haircut like
Hutter. That could never be me. But the images still affect me.
And more importantly I can put myself in Hutter's place, even if he
has a different haircut. But this scares me more than the horror
film. This kid, and apparently his whole generation, cannot feel
horror for someone who dresses differently. If he cannot feel
horror for another teenager who just does not wear the right
clothing, how will he ever feel horror for someone like a Rwandan
Tutsi who is at the mercy of a Hutu with a machete? Is the kid so
self-absorbed that he can only empathize with someone who looks and
dresses just like him? So it would seem.
The panel also complained about the sort of horror film in which
the hero is a good person (in these films that generally means
physically attractive) and follows all the rules and so should be
safe at the end, but ends up dead anyway. Once or twice a film
with that touch might be okay, the panelist said, but you should be
able to follow the rules and survive. (No the real horror is that
not having a nice, simple formula to survive. True horror is
having nothing you can do. Unfortunately, not having fool-proof
formulae to survive is all too real in this world.)
So I do not expect much from the next generation of horror films,
but I expect much less of the next generation of horror film fans.
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: MARY AND MAX (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Witty animation tells this story in just about the only
way it could be told pleasantly. A lonely Melbourne eight-year-old
picks a random name from a New York City phonebook and begins what
will become a correspondence of many years. At the other end is a
New York City man suffering from Asperger's syndrome. From
opposite ends of the world the two can say anything to each other,
and the clay animation lets us see what their minds' eyes are
seeing. The story is wise and funny in ways it could not be in
live action. Oscar-winner Adam Elliot directs while almost
unrecognizably Toni Collette and Philip Seymour Hoffman voice the
two main roles. Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4) or 7/10
This could be the golden age of animated films, but nearly always
the films are have frothy, silly themes. Hamburgers fall from the
sky or balloons pull a house up into it. Very rarely does a
director with a serious theme use animation and give us a GRAVE OF
THE FIREFLIES or a WALTZ WITH BASHIR. Adam Elliot, who won the
Best Short Animated Film Oscar in 2003 for "Harvie Krumpet" gives
us the bittersweet epistolary relationship between Mary Daisy
Dinkle and Max Jerry Horovitz. And it is all rendered in clay.
Mary (voiced by Bethany Whitmore as a child, Toni Collette as an
adult) is at the beginning an eight-year-old living a lower-class
life in a suburb of Melbourne in 1976. Her mother seems to live on
nipping sherry and stealing from the grocers. With a silly
question about where babies come from she picks a random name, Max
Jerry Horovitz, from a New York telephone book and writes to Max to
find where babies come from in the United States. Max is, it turns
out, a morbidly obese New York Jewish man who suffers from
Asperger's syndrome. The unlikely couple forms a relationship that
lasts for two decades. Each has bizarre viewpoints on the real
world and the way the world is, and Elliot renders their minds' eye
visions in animation. Their relationship is by turns comical and
painful.
We look at Max's lonely life ruled by frequently pointless order.
He is almost devoid of human companionship and happy to strike up a
friendship with this young Australian. Director Elliot uses a
style of a black-and-while world with just one or two objects in
the picture in color. Mary gets to live in a color world, but one
that is not very pleasant. The film does not clean up the rough
edges of life; it glories in them. And Max's life is almost all
rough edges. But by keeping the telling simple, as it is in the
letters, we are not dragged into the tragedy with full impact of
Max's or Mary's situations. With time Mary is able to transcend
her environment and even turn what she learned from her
relationship with Max into her career. Max never has that strength
and the real tragedy is his.
This is not the sort of 3-D animated film we have seen of late.
The Claymation is perfect, but it always allows us to feel for the
characters, never to minimize them. They never get into fights or
have to race anywhere. These are simple characters rendered more
likable by the comic distortion of the clay artwork. There is
little real plot to this film but the characters are foremost.
While the film tells us that it is based on a true story--and it is
a story that Adam Elliot should know well--there was no Mary. The
film is based on Elliot's own correspondence with an Asberger's
sufferer in the United States. Elliot is telling his own story
with wit and charm.
This original film took five years to make. There is a lot of
wisdom to it and it covers a great deal in a deceptively simple-
seeming package. I rate MARY AND MAX a low +2 on the -4 to +4
scale or 7/10.
Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0978762/
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/10010721-mary_and_max/
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: GUNS ON THE CLACKAMAS: A DOCUMENTARY (film review by Mark
R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: This is an over-the-top mock documentary. GUNS ON THE
CLACKAMAS: A DOCUMENTARY covers the making of an epic western
film. It is being made in spite of the bad luck of having several
actors die before the film is complete while the director has to
work around the problem. Co-written and directed by animator Bill
Plympton, this film is uneven both in its humor and in its appeal.
Rating: low +1 (-4 to +4) or 5/10
Bill Plympton is in a class by himself with his imaginative,
anarchic animation. He will show people going through
transformations that can best be described as "topological".
People's smiles will turn them inside out or a woman's breasts
will transform into hot-air balloons and carry her off into the
sky. His films are visually creative and rarely have a lot of
story. That makes it ironic that he would try his hand at a live-
action film that limits him mostly to verbal humor. He did,
however, attempt crossing over in 1995 when he co-wrote and
directed his second live-action comedy. To be more specific, GUNS
ON THE CLACKAMAS is a mockumentary following the problems
encountered in trying to make an epic western called GUNS ON THE
CLACKAMAS. There have been some very good comedies about
Hollywood and film production. Among them are DAY FOR NIGHT,
HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD, and LIVING IN OBLIVION. Plympton has a lot
of competition and does not really come off a winner.
In the film we follow an adoring British filmmaker following the
shooting of a new film by the "Producer/Genius" Holton P. Jeffers.
Of course, to the viewer Jeffers seems to be making every possible
mistake, including some mistakes nobody has ever made before. The
production of the film is plagued with the sort of bizarre problem
that one rarely thinks about with filmmaking. One actress talks
normally off-stage, but in front of the camera she is reduced to
severe stuttering. Sadly, she is the girlfriend of the executive
producer and cannot be fired. Another actor has breath bad enough
to fell the leading lady. The film has a barrage of problems that
would intimidate a Terry Gilliam.
Plympton's style is to show some odd feature of the story and just
keep shaking it in the viewer's face in the hopes that if it was
funny at first it will remain so, and if it was not funny it will
eventually seem funny. There are extended gags about an associate
producer who is in love with kitsch popular paintings of children
and animals with very large eyes. We see much more than we need
to of this art and the gag seems borrowed from Arthur Hiller's THE
IN-LAWS. We hear about the stuttering problem in clinical detail,
which does not make it any funnier.
The film is shot so it seems like a grainy, low-budget affair.
But what we are seeing is intended to be a cheap documentary with
a rather arrogant, pretentious narrator/host. The film might work
better if this narrator at least showed some surprise at the
incompetence of what he is seeing. But none of the characters in
the film are very believable and the film might have worked better
as a farce not quite so exaggerated.
Humor is, of course, very subjective. Judging from other reviews
of this comedy, some critics found GUNS ON THE CLACKAMAS hilarious
and some were on a completely different wavelength from the film.
I found some if the ideas amusing, though lacking in their
execution. They might have been better illustrated with
Plympton's surreal cartoons than with the flat performances
Plympton gets in live action. Particular fans of Plympton may
find the film more rewarding than the typical film fan. I rate
GUNS ON THE CLACKAMAS: A DOCUMENTARY a low +1 on the -4 to +4
scale or 5/10.
Film Credits: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0113239
What others are saying:
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0113239/externalreviews
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
ANCHORWICK by Jeffrey Barlough (ISBN-13 978-0-9787634-1-1) is the
fifth in Barlough's "Western Lights" series; the first four are
DARK SLEEPER, THE HOUSE IN THE HIGH WOOD, STRANGE CARGO, and
BERTRAM OF BUTTER CROSS. The premise of this series is two-fold:
the Ice Age never ended, and in 1839, the "sundering" happened.
What the sundering was is not clear: a meteor, a volcano, some
alien force? Whatever it was, it intensified the Ice Age. The
world remains at a Victorian level ("Dickensian" might be an even
better adjective), and mammoths roam the earth. Barlough says,
"The series title is derived from the sundering. For since that
dread event the sole place on earth where lights still shine at
night is in the west." One sticking point is that although
everything seems very English, various statements made by Barlough
and his publishers seem to indicate that everything in the books is
taking place on America's west coast. Another is that it is clear
that this world's history is the same of ours--without an extended
Ice Age--through at least Classical times, and there is at least
some basis for assuming it is the same considerably later.
And with ANCHORWICK, Barlough introduces even more fantastical
elements. There is a doorway to a world where time stands still,
there seem to be (for lack of a better term) ghosts and
supernatural goings on in one character's ancestral village, and in
general we have drifted far afield from the "change-one-thing" rule
that is usually applied to speculative fiction.
But I don't care. The writing style, the names, and the atmosphere
are worth the willing suspension of disbelief required.
(I noted in my review of STRANGE CARGO that Barlough seems to be
part of the movement called by Frederick John Kleffel "The New
Victoriana", which includes books by such authors as Tim Powers,
Neal Stephenson, and Susanna Clarke. See
http://trashotron.com/agony/columns/2004/09-03-04.htm for more on
this movement.)
I seem to be in a stretch of literary books. The writing style was
critical in China Miéville's THE CITY & THE CITY, Jeffrey
Barlough's ANCHORWICK, and now THE CITY OF DREAMING BOOKS by Walter
Moers (translated by John Brownjohn) (ISBN-13 978-1-58567-899-0,
ISBN-10 1-58567-899-6). And perhaps the style was even enhanced by
the fact that I read the last third by candlelight because the
electricity was out.
ANCHORWICK could be called Dickensian, but THE CITY OF DREAMING
BOOKS, like THE CITY & THE CITY, is more Borgesian. The notion of
Bookholm, a "book-obsessed metropolis," is more widespread (one
might point to Jasper Fforde's "Thursday Next" series as an
example), but it is the books themselves that fascinate. There are
the Hazardous Books--the Toxicotimes, the hollowed-out book traps,
the Analphabetic Terrortimes, books that can fly, books that can
strangle. All that is missing seems to be the book of an infinite
number of pages from Borges's "The Book of Sand".
There also seems to be a nod to Ray Bradbury in the Booklings,
creatures each of whom dedicates himself to the memorization of the
works of a single author and takes that author's name. As an
example of the wordplay Moers indulges in, three of them are Doylan
Cone (author of SIR GINEL), Aleisha Wimpersleake, and Wamilli
Swordthrow. And one of the creatures--"the Darkman"--seems very
much patterned after the Golem. Created by the Bookemists to
defend Bookholm against its enemies, the Darkman was made of books,
printer's ink, and herbs, and came to life when they "performed
various rituals." After the Darkman came to life, he ran amuck but
was eventually destroyed. (The running amuck is not in the
original Golem legend, but got added later to the legend.) Even
the illustration on page 96 looks like the original Czech depiction
of the Golem ("a blast furnace with fists," to use Mark's phrase).
The only problem with THE CITY OF DREAMING BOOKS is that it is so
dense with ideas, images, and wordplay that one needs to read more
slowly than usual to appreciate it all. It also has marvelous
black-and-white illustrations by Moers that deserve study. Perhaps
in an homage to the CODEX SERAPHINIANUS, it has numbered its
chapters using "alien" numerals. Unlike the CODEX, though, the
numbering is quite decipherable. (Hint: see the illustration on
page 37.) [-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
What you don't see with your eyes, don't invent
with your mouth.
-- Yiddish proverb