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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 07/28/00 -- Vol. 19, No. 4
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. We have been talking about aspects of restaurants and people who
accept and reject unfamiliar food experiences.
Of course that brings up the issue of "the food chain." No chain
of restaurants ever found success by giving the public really
authentic ethnic food. The simple fact is that you are more likely
to be successful with a menu that appeals to rejecters and hoping
to get some accepters than aiming at the accepters and hoping to
get rejecters. The way to be successful with a restaurant chain is
to have food that nobody could find offensive and then make sure it
is the same from one of your units to the next.
In this realm you find the inoffensive Burger King Whopper. The
Arby's roast beef sandwich is inoffensive to most non-vegetarians.
If you get any experimentation at all it will be with things like
the McDonalds Fried Cherry Pie. They had this for years because in
addition to being edible, albeit barely, it could be prepared just
like the McDonalds Tasteless Fish Sandwich, but without the bread
and the mayonnaise. Eventually McDonalds discovered that soft ice
cream was even less offensive so that replaced the fried pie.
Fish itself is an interesting study in rejection. It is, in fact,
somewhat surprising that the McDonalds Tasteless Fish Sandwich is
still around. American rejecters are very iffy on fish. The
British are much more likely to be accepters of fish. In Britain
the most popular junk food restaurants that are NOT international
chains are chippers, places that sell fish and chips. There are
few rejecters in Britain who reject very crispy fried fish doused
in malt vinegar. (From my point of view that is very
understandable.) Here that sort of food is frequently considered
exotic and is rejected as such, but there it is almost as common
and inoffensive as the Whopper is for us. But is what is
inoffensive to Britons inoffensive to Yanks? Kentucky Fried
Chicken tried a chain of fish and chips shops in the US back in the
1970s, H. Salt Fish and Chips. But American rejecters frequently
do not like fish. In desperation an ad campaign was written where
a family discovers excitedly that H. Salt Fish and Chips does not
taste "fishy." That ad was the poison pill that killed the
restaurant chain. Imagine if their Kentucky Fried Chicken branch
ran TV ads in which a family is thrilled to discover that Kentucky
Fried Chicken does not really taste like chicken. (!) But they
could have stressed the crunchiness or some good flavor. You
cannot sell fish on the basis of how it doesn't taste.
Particularly not by saying it does not taste like you expect.
We can judge the lure of lowest common denominator inoffensive
foods by looking at what are the successful chains of restaurants.
We have the chains of restaurants spawned by General Mills--that is
Olive Garden and Red Lobster. PepsiCo created at least three
chains: Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken (now KFC), and Taco Bell.
Each represents an inoffensive, neutered version of what is good
food elsewhere.
Japanese restaurants actually seem to run in two modes at the same
time. You have the sushi bar which is not exactly like what one
might find in Japan, but it is actually one of the most authentic
foreign food experiences available here and it is a prime target
for rejection. I mean raw fish? Some rejecters call sushi that
"fish bait." It never occurs to them that fish go out for seafood
every night of the week and may know seafood better than they do.
However sushi is rising in popularity and you are now seeing
Koreans and Taiwanese moving into this preserve. But still there
are not enough accepters to keep a Japanese restaurant going so
they also offer the grills. The Japanese grill is a total
invention. They may now have a few in Japan, but they are for
Americans. You have a Japanese chef come out and do a cutlery
flamenco over some meat and vegetables. The result is what
Americans think the Japanese eat. (Side note: Sukiyaki was
invented as what the Japanese think Americans eat. It is a toss up
which is more accurate.) At these grills you get a fairly
expensive stew fried on a flat wok. And it makes rejecters think
they are eating Japanese.
Next week I will talk about some other cuisines. [-mrl]
===================================================================
2. X-MEN (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: Very nice to look at but startlingly
unoriginal, X-MEN is a short feature film
consisting mostly of borrowings from other
films. It is based on the popular graphic
novel series X-MEN and features two good
actors. Still the production offers us little
we have not seen elsewhere. The film works but
rarely impresses the viewer. Rating: 6 (0 to
10), +1 (-4 to +4)
There is a war going on. The battlefield is all around us, but we
normal people do not see it being fought. We will, but not yet.
There are around us mutants with special powers far superior to us
humans. But the war is not yet between them and us. Right now it
is between two factions of mutants. And we humans are just
bystanders whose fate may depend on the outcome of that conflict.
This is the plot of David Cronenberg's 1981 film, SCANNERS. It was
indeed a very original and atmospheric film. However that same
plot also describes X-MEN made almost two decades later. Now it
may well be that SCANNERS could have taken some inspiration from
the X-MEN, but Cronenberg did the in film first. Even if the
Marvel Comics X-MEN preceded the film SCANNERS, it is an idea that
has already been explored in film and probably more intelligently
in a previous film. Most of anything is good about X-MEN has been
done better elsewhere.
The film opens at an unnamed concentration camp. A young Jewish
boy is separated by force from his mother. Trying to follow her he
is restrained by four guards and in his grief somehow causes two
metal gates to bend. (There are two things wrong with this scene.
The Jews they show are in a condition too good. They probably
would not be brought to the camp without already having been
through much rougher treatment than implied. Also a Jew causing
this much trouble would simply have been shot.) We see that the
boy, Eric Lehnsherr, obtains his powers from his own mental anguish
and that he has good reason for mistrusting and hating human
nature. Perhaps understanding this is why Dr. Xavier (Patrick
Stewart) and he remain lifelong friends. One would expect them to
be enemies. Each leads one of two opposed factions of mutants.
This friendship of adversaries is probably the most remarkable and
unexpected twist of the script. Lehnsherr (now played by Ian
McKellan) leads a faction of militant and ugly mutants, preparing
them for war against humans. Xavier trains his attractive mutants
to co-exist with the normal humans. Invited to join the fold are
two new mutants: the nihilistic Logan, known as Wolverine (Hugh
Jackman), and the very confused Marie, called Rogue (Anna Pacquin).
Xavier runs a school for mutants not unlike the one in Brian De
Palma's THE FURY. The school is complete with a huge spherical
chamber the design for which seems to come from Terry Gilliam's
BRAZIL. To this school he invites the new mutants Rogue and
creature of rage Wolverine, a creature who likely was inspired by
the animal ferocity of Lawrence Talbot in THE WOLF MAN.
David Hayter wrote the screenplay based on a story by director
Bryan Singer of THE USUAL SUSPECTS and by Tom DeSanto.
Occasionally the lines are unintentionally humorous. The first
line of the film says that mutation has allowed us to evolve from
one-celled creatures to the dominant life form on this planet. Of
course when there was only one-celled creatures, that WAS the
dominant life form. Occasionally the writers overstate their
point. At one place we anti-mutant people hanging "Mr. Mutant" in
effigy. This is a little heavy handed. I think discrimination
these days would take more subtle forms after this sort of
expression has been so obviously associated with racism.
The art direction and set design give this film a nice look down to
detail like X-MAN symbol shows up as the wheels of Xavier's
wheelchair. They have not given in to satire or levity. Instead
this is a nice dark story that wants to be taken seriously.
Unfortunately when the fight scenes play fast and loose with
Newton's Laws the feel drops to the level of a bad martial arts
film. The film has a lot to see, but not much to think about. It
all builds to a large fight out in the interior of the Statue of
Liberty, perhaps a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock.
That makes it all the more surprising that it attracted the acting
talent that it did. Patrick Stewart, Formerly of the Starship
Enterprise and currently of the cast of Arthur Miller's "The Ride
Down Mt. Morgan" plays the lead. Ian McKellen is one of the finest
actors living, but the role of a super-villain in a costume may
stretch his talents. Anna Paquin of THE PIANO is reasonable as the
troubled Rogue. Bruce Davison who was touching in LONGTIME
CONPANION and on Broadway as THE ELEPHANT MAN has not much to do as
a United States Senator bigoted against mutants. This is hardly
one of his better roles. Famke Janssen who played Xenia Onatopp in
GOLDENEYE is on-hand, apparently as Xavier's assistant.
Stylish but redundant, I give this film a 6 on the 0 to 10 scale
and a +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
===================================================================
3. THE PERFECT STORM (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: Like his DAS BOAT, Wolfgang Petersen's
THE PERFECT STORM is a story of men in danger
on the sea. Gloucester fishermen face three
hurricanes colliding to create the most
terrifying possible combination of sea weather.
The personal stories are cliches, but the ride
is awesome. Rating: 6 (0 to 10), high +1 (-4
to +4)
Different films have different functions. One of the possible
functions of film is to take the viewer someplace where he has
never been before to see something he has not seen before.
Wolfgang Petersen did this with his DAS BOOT. Watching it, the
viewer spends three hours on a German U-boat from the Second World
War. The unforgettable ride was so scary and at the same time so
authentic that DAS BOOT became an instant classic of the war film.
Petersen brings many of the same virtues to directing THE PERFECT
STORM, but because the characters are more familiar types, they
seem more cliches.
You have to love fishing to be a Gloucester fisherman. The work is
hard and dangerous. We are told that since 1623, 10,000 Gloucester
fishermen have been killed fishing. The pay can be decent if the
catches are good, but in October 1991, the Andrea Gail has not been
getting the good catches. The fishing grounds in the Grand Banks
are nearly fished out, and somehow the crew of the Gail has just
not been fishing where the fish are. Captain Billy Tyne (played by
George Clooney) and his crew of five are all strapped for cash.
Bob Brown (Michael Ironside) who owns the boat is looking to
replace Tyne. After a particularly bad haul Tyne decides to go
back out and get the one good haul he needs. But first the crew
takes what relaxation they can get at the local bar, the center of
the town's social life. We learn a little about the private life
of each member of the crew. Meanwhile Tyne takes on a sixth crew
member, Sully (William Fichtner). Sully takes an immediate dislike
to crew member Murph (John C. Reilly). (At this point I asked
myself, what is the script going to do with this subplot of two men
who hate each other. I got it in one.)
Tyne is pretty sure he knows how to get a big take of fish. He is
going to take his boat out to the distant and dangerous Flemish
Cap, a part of the ocean not yet fished out. He just has to risk
threats of bad weather. But the bad weather coming is not just any
October storm. Two hurricanes and a third developing storm are
going to collide in a weather condition never seen before. The
collision is going to be right in the small boat's path.
Others have criticized the film for not developing its characters
well. I do not think that is really a fair criticism beyond the
predictability of some of the subplots. I think these are, in
fact, fuller characters than were in DAS BOOT. Perhaps we expect
more if there is not a language barrier. Some time is spent on the
characters. We are watching the film for a good thirty minutes
before the first mention of bad weather. But it is in the nature
of the film that once the action starts the viewer stops caring
about any motivation but survival. When people are being blown
around like confetti in the wind it becomes less important who was
the guy with the new girlfriend and which one was separated from
his wife. Where Petersen lost an opportunity was that he could
have shown us a little more of the craft of fishing. That audience
would have liked to be shown just how a fisherman does take in the
big hauls. We see a little more of the financial end, who gets
what percentage of the profits, but that is not nearly as visual as
the actual craft of fishing.
It is a little hard to empathize with Tyne who is part of a
business that has over-fished the Grand Banks. Now he is taking
his crew to waters that would have been over-fished if they were
not so dangerous. He makes a string of bad command decisions and
then has to pay the price. Clooney is acceptable as this down-on-
his-luck fisherman, but he brings little to the role that anybody
else could not have. Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as a more
successful fishing captain seems to be in this film only as a
sounding board and as someone to worry about Tyne. The rounded
features of her early days in acting are gone and she is fast
becoming more interesting as a gaunt character actress. Also
underused is Michael Ironside as the owner of the Andrea Gail,
putting pressure on Tyne to deliver fish. Somehow it would have
been a more interesting film had Mastrantonio and Ironside traded
roles and each acted against type.
The visuals of the churning ocean are fairly effective with waves
towering at all angles. The editing could have shown these scenes
off to better advantage, however. A little less convincing are the
storm cloud effects which somehow looked computer generated.
Certainly one comes to a film like this to see the power of nature
and undeniably this film shows that. Still, overall it is not a
fully satisfying experience. I rate it 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
There is no passion like the functionary for his function.
-- Georges Clemenceau