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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 05/05/00 -- Vol. 18, No. 45
Chair/Librarian: Mark Leeper, 732-817-5619, mleeper@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper, 732-332-6218, eleeper@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist: Rob Mitchell, robmitchell@lucent.com
HO Chair Emeritus: John Jetzt, jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian Emeritus: Nick Sauer, njs@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-447-3652 for details. The Denver Area Science Fiction
Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of every month at
Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
===================================================================
1. Last week I was explaining the reasons that I do not hold the
high regard for Hitchcock that most writers about do. Mostly I was
talking about his relationship with the lovely Grace Kelly.
However earlier and apparently in the best traditions of VERTIGO
Hitchcock decided to make a Grace Kelly of his own. Finding a
fashion model who had played just one bit part, and that as a
child, he tried to turn Tippi Hedren into his own Grace Kelly.
Just what his final aim in doing this, is now debated. Like
Pygmalion he certainly became fixated on his own creation. Hedren
claims that he would stare endlessly at her on the set of MARNIE
and that he propositioned her. At some point she apparently
rebuffed him rudely, making fun of his weight problem. That was
the end of her career in Hitchcock films.
But even Hitchcock's films, certainly very beautifully polished as
they are, are not the paragons of perfection people think they are.
If one looks at his films many seem to have serious logic flaws.
Certainly they have unanswered questions. Some spoilers may
follow, by the way. Let us take what most people think of as
Hitchcock's most profound film, VERTIGO. We can ignore the fact
that it is really hard to make up someone you know so that you do
not know them at all. Any birthmark or beauty-mark would give it
away. It would take a great deal of makeup to hide that it was the
same person, and she was not wearing that much.
But even the murder scene so central to the story is poorly thought
out. Let me ask a specific question. What I want to know is how
long were Gavin and Madeleine Elster standing where they were just
before the murder? This is not an idle question. Madeleine could
not be suspicious that they were doing anything but an average
sightseeing day. Gavin could not tell his wife, "Let's climb the
tower and stand around for an hour. The reason I want to do that
will become clear later." Gavin could not know that Scotty and
company would even appear that day. In fact for Scottie to be
there at all he would have had to recognize a unique Spanish
mission from a vague description from a supposed dream. Then he
had to drive there. Gavin would not have known when or even if
Scottie would arrive at the mission. There is no way he could have
timed himself to be in the tower just with Madeleine just at the
right moment. This was, after all, well before the age of cellular
phones. It is just a detail that Hitchcock never worked out and a
gaping hole that was left in the plot.
REAR WINDOW is another film that works very nicely, but requires
some incredible coincidences of layout. The James Stewart
character can see clearly into several apartments and even a piece
on the far side. It might be possible to see into this many
apartments in a large building at some distance, given sufficient
magnification. For a little apartment house like this it is just
too much coincidence. The entire setting of REAR WINDOW is
contrived.
Nor are Hitchcock's ideas so original. He frequently stole from
himself. Consider how much of NORTH BY NORTHWEST is really just
resetting his own THE 39 STEPS to take place in the United States.
Hitchcock's real talent is not in telling good stories but in
packaging them so nicely we suspend our objections and go along for
the ride. Even the best of Hitchcock's films are flawed
masterpieces. [-mrl]
===================================================================
2. FREQUENCY (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: An unusual solar phenomenon allows a
1999 police detective to talk to his father
back in 1969, just days before the father's
death. Can the past be changed and if so what
will it do to the present. James Caviezel and
Dennis Quaid star in a fast-paced and tense
science fiction film that is strongly
reminiscent of TIME AFTER TIME. The film is
gripping, but the use of ideas do not bear
close scrutiny. Rating: 7 (0 to 10), low +2
(-4 to +4)
One of the best science fiction films of the 1970s was Nicholas
Meyer's TIME AFTER TIME. The rather fantastic and dubious premise
of this film was that H. G. Wells was not only an unknowing friend
of Jack the Ripper, he also had built a real, functioning time
machine. The Ripper escapes the police by taking the time machine
to 1979 and Wells has to follow and try to capture the Ripper. One
would think that a time machine and the ability to retrieve
knowledge from the future might be useful in capturing a serial
killer, but Wells finds that it is a mixed blessing. These same
ideas are revisited in FREQUENCY, albeit without a time machine.
The film begins October 10, 1999, at a time of solar flares and
sunspot activity. (The real height of solar activity was April 7,
2000, just three weeks before the national release of FREQUENCY.
Ironically that would have not been good for the script, however,
which was contrived to take place during a World Series.)
Commentators talking about the solar activity point out that string
theory says that time is fluid. (What that has to do with sunspots
and solar flares in the commentators' minds is not clear. But it
does set the stage for the story.)
John Sullivan's life has been overshadowed by the loss of his
beloved father when John was only six years old. Frank Sullivan
(played by Dennis Quaid) was a heroic firefighter, a great baseball
fan, and above all a very loving father. Two nights before the
30th anniversary of his father's death, John (James Caviezel), now
a detective, pulls out his father's ham radio and starts a
conversation with another ham. What he does not realize at first
is that a freak solar phenomenon has provided him a radio channel
across almost no distance, but across thirty years. He is speaking
to his father sitting at the same desk exactly thirty years
earlier. The two discuss the 1969 World Series, not realizing that
it was for one an imminent occurrence, for the other a fond but
distant memory. When John realizes what is happening and what he
can now do, he gives his skeptical father the information that he
will need to avoid being killed. But John will quickly figure out
what science fiction fans have known all along, that tampering with
the past is risky business. In a nifty Rube Goldbergism of time,
saving Frank's life has allowed a serial killer to avoid a
termination of his criminal career. And for reasons less
coincidental than they first appear this particular serial killer
is going to strike very near home. John has to try to manipulate
the past through his father and then see how the world has changed
in thirty years as a result of those changes.
The time warp that allows a series of conversations between father
and son is acceptable as a reasonable premise for a science fiction
film. For dramatic effect they have added that one is aware of the
change if and only if one was involved in bringing it about. This
is total bunkum. The physical universe does not care whose idea a
change in the past was. Either everybody would remember the change
or--much more likely--nobody would. But the first would completely
change the plot and the second would rob the film of drama because
John could not know of his own victories in changing the past.
Towards the end even this rule breaks down and in the final scene
John seems to remember the past he has changed out of, but not the
new past he has brought about. Everyone else in the world
remembers only the new past. The ideas need a little
reconsidering. And then once the ideas are straightened out, put
them in a movie with a more original plot than stopping a serial
killer. To compound the credibility problem John is put onto a
case with which he would be expected to be emotionally closely
involved. It is an invitation to conflicts of interest and abuse
of power. It is highly unlikely the police would allow that.
There is more than a little social comment in the interfacing of
1969 and 1999. In 1969 the elder Sullivan had a storybook, rose-
covered-cottage sort of existence. He has the most totally
functional family we have seen on the screen for a long time. Two
parents and a child love the heck out of each other. The family
gives the father strength to go out and risk his life for others
with the complete support of his loved ones. Thirty years later
John is separated from a woman to whom he never committed. He
still lives in his parents' house. His life seems a mess. Of
course, losing a father may have contributed to that, but it seems
he should be emotionally further advanced.
One final complaint. I am less than thrilled to see the
photography of scenes set in my sophomore year in college tinted a
sepia tone as if to indicate great antiquity. 1969 was just not
that long ago. FREQUENCY is better than most science fiction we see
these days. It has ideas and good pacing. I give FREQUENCY a 7 on
the 0 to 10 scale and a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
===================================================================
3. ME MYSELF I (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: In one world Pamela Drury chose not to
marry the man in her life and instead to have a
serious career. In a parallel world the
decision went the other way. Just when Pamela
is getting desperate to find a husband she
finds herself thrust into the other world and
having to be the other version of herself.
This gives her an opportunity to explore the
good and bad aspects of her decision. Rachel
Griffiths stars in this emotional Australian
fantasy. There are logic flaws but the film
remains entertaining. Rating: 6 (0 to 10),
high +1 (-4 to +4)
Pamela Drury (played by Rachel Griffiths) is an award-winning
journalist. Thirteen years earlier she nearly married Robert
Dickson (David Roberts), but decided that her career was more
important. She now looks with envious eyes on her married friends'
lives and she wishes she had made the other decision. These days
she just finds the dating scene to be depressing and the market
just is not very good any more. She tries to salve her ego putting
up little index cards that tell her things like "I love and approve
of myself." On her 30-something birthday she is ready to commit
suicide, but fate seems to step in and stop her at the last moment.
The following day in a moment of carelessness she is hit by a car a
literally knocked into another world. She is not in heaven or
hell, but a parallel world where she did marry Robert. There
Pamela meets-well, call her Pamela-2 (also played by Rachel
Griffiths). Pamela-2 has been married for thirteen years to Robert
and has a daughter and two sons by him. Pamela-2 regrets her
decision to marry and to turn her back on her career. She gives
Pamela the slip and goes to take her place in the world of the
career-Pamela. Pamela decides to try out the life she spurned.
Filling in for Pamela-2 is more of a job than Pamela was expecting,
but far easier than it would be in the real world. There one must
remember what must be hundreds of thousands of bits of information
just so that people are not tipped off that you are no longer the
person you once were. Pamela finds that as feminists have been
telling us for years, there is a lot of effort and skill involved
in being a housewife. It would be easy for this film to turn at
this point into a feminist tract, leaving Pamela in awe of how
competent and savvy a housewife really is. However the script is a
little more even-handed than that. Being a housewife has its
positive and its negative sides, Pamela finds. It is full of
moments that just fill Pamela with disgust. The worst of which is
to clean up after her youngest who is neither toilet trained, nor
able to wipe himself. Having been in need of sex well back into
her previous life, she is disappointed to realize that the passion
is gone from Pamela-2's marriage and Robert has very little
interest in rekindling it. But her attitudes about her husband and
herself are due for some radical changes.
ME MYSELF I is written and directed by Philippa "Pip" Karmel, set
in Sydney, Australia and filmed on a minimal budget which seems to
more than adequately support the script. Rachel Griffiths has an
extremely expressive face which projects emotions very effectively,
particularly her bewilderment at her situation. Karmel's style
changes as the film proceeds. Popular music is played loudly over
the soundtrack in the first part of the film, but much less so once
Pamela has made the transition.
Some people tend to assume that in fantasy anything can happen and
there are few rules that need to be followed. Actually just about
the opposite is true. In the real world the apparently impossible
happens frequently. In fiction authors are bound to be at least
believable, and fantasy writers have the strictest set of rules of
all. Karmel has failed to observe the logic of her own world.
Pamela discovers that there is no way to get back to her own world
from the world she was knocked into. Even the street where she
lived does not exist in the new world. Yet Pamela-2 seems to be
able to move between the two worlds without trouble. Pamela's
replacement of Pamela-2 seems all too easy. After a day or two she
seems to be able to function in the new world without suspicion
being raised. There would be years of Pamela-2's experience that
would be a complete blank to Pamela. People whom Pamela-2 would
know, Pamela would have never seen. Even a tutored double can not
long stand in for the original without detection. The self-
replacement theme was much better handled in the science fiction
film QUEST FOR LOVE or Akira Kurosawa's historical film KAGEMUSHA.
In the end, Karmel seems to be telling us that whatever alternative
we have chosen, we will get some advantage and some disadvantage.
Contrary to Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, the choices we
have made have not all been for the best and the world is not
necessarily better for the choices we have made. It is merely
different. Karmel is telling us to stop regretting the past and to
make the best of what decisions we have made. It is something of a
platitude, but there also is some truth there. I would give ME
MYSELF I a 6 on the 0 to 10 scale and a high +1 on the -4 to +4
scale. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
HO 1K-644 732-817-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
It is not necessary to understand things to argue
about them.
-- Caron de Beaumarchais