THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
10/29/04 -- Vol. 23, No. 18
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:
Leeperhouse Film Festival: SPIRITED AWAY
Universal Legacy Packs (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Happy 6000th, Whenever It Was (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
RAHTREE: FLOWER OF THE NIGHT (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
DOUBLE DARE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (STRANGE CARGO, REMARKABLE READS, and
THE ALCHEMIST) (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Leeperhouse Film Festival: SPIRITED AWAY
On Wednesday, November 3, at 7 PM we will be showing at the
Leeperhouse Hayao Miyazaki's SPIRITED AWAY. While there is room,
all are invited, but please let us know beforehand if you are
coming. (We need to be sure there are enough chairs, etc.).
Hayao Miyazaki, Japan's premier anime director, created magical
worlds (mostly) of his own in children's fantasies like MY
NEIGHBOR TOTORO, KIKI'S DELIVERY SERVICE, and PRINCESS MONONOKE.
SPIRITED AWAY is an uninspired title for a long but terrifically
imaginative fantasy. SPIRITED incorporates elements of Lewis
Carroll, L. Frank Baum, Japanese folklore, and Miyazaki's own
strange imagination, all whipped together in an enchanting
souffle.
Chihiro is moving to a new house and school with her parents. She
has some natural worries about what it and her school will be
like. But on the way her parents get lost on a drive through
nearby woods and find some odd buildings of strange architecture.
Exploring them they find a gateway to a strange empty set of
strange buildings, perhaps a theme park. Soon Chihiro's parents
have gotten themselves into trouble that even they do not realize
and Chihiro is on her own to explore this strange and wondrous new
world that they have inadvertently passed into. From this point
the story gets stranger and more complex. It involves Japanese
spirits, strange food, a guide frog, a real spider-man, and a
castle full of wonders in a sort of Disneyland of the spirits.
This world is as mystifying and with its own strange logic as
Alice's Wonderland. Miyazaki seems to have an inexhaustible
supply of ideas to fill the screen and to fill screen time. To
get everything in he has made this a longish film for children,
but one where they will not be bored. There is always something
new and strange being introduced.
SPIRITED AWAY is a complex fantasy that should appeal to adults in
much the same way Carroll's Alice stories do. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Universal Legacy Packs (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Universal's "Legacy Packs" of classic horror movies have an
external slip-case with a transparent window which has a translucent
image at the bottom--pyramids for the "Mummy" films, a lagoon for
"The Creature from the Black Lagoon" films, and so on, leading Mark
to say: "I love the packaging. You intentionally put the boxes in
the wrong slip-cases and play mix-and-match with monsters and
settings. See the Invisible Man towering over the pyramids of
Egypt! See the Frankenstein Monster in an Amazonian grotto!
Hours of fun, even after you have seen all the movies." [-ecl]
[I didn't think this comment was all that funny out of context.
But if Evelyn liked it, maybe it is worth putting in. --mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Happy 6000th, Whenever It Was (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
I don't hold out a lot of hope for the future of geology in
England. Well, the rocks will still be there, but I don't hold
out a lot of hope that the rocks are going to be really well
understood. It seems that the Geological Society of London
recently had a sort of a social event. The society was
celebrating the 6000th anniversary of planet Earth. On October 22
this month, old Mother Earth supposedly was 6000 years old.
Where does that figure come from? It was computed by James
Ussher. Well, I don't know if people these days know about
Ussher. You might know the name if you have seen the classic film
INHERIT THE WIND. In that film the character Matthew Harrison
Brady gives the age of the Earth to be about 6000 years. He cites
Bishop Ussher as the source. So who was Bishop Ussher? Ussher
was the Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, and Vice-
Chancellor of Trinity College in Dublin in the 17th century. It
seems the good bishop wanted to know the age of the planet and
looked in the Bible for the information. After all where better
than the Good Book for a bishop to find the age of planet earth?
If God wanted us to know, that is where he would have put the
information, or so Bishop Ussher reasoned. Taking the book of
Genesis he started adding up the ages of the Patriarchs. Coming
up with a figure and counting backwards he came up with the date
and time of 6PM, October 22, 4004 BC. Religious people have taken
the word of Bishop as, well, Gospel. Now originally he put the
date on October 23, but then realized that in biblical times the
day went from sundown to sundown, not midnight to midnight. So
really the first day of the world must have started at sundown.
Or rather at when sundown would be when God later created the sun.
See
http://mmcconeghy.com/students/supsomescienceguys.html#ussher
for more information about Ussher.
I think that Bishop Ussher and his methods are a bit of a joke
with the Geological Society of London. His methods were probably
less than perfectly scientific. So they noted the date and
planned a jeering sort celebration at 6 PM, October 22, 2004.
Actually it was the capper of a conference of fakes, frauds,
hoaxes and other misinformation. Of course, what Ussher came up
with was not a fake, a fraud or a hoax. But it was not the best
way to derive the age of the earth. We have good evidence now
that 6000 years is just peanuts to the real age of the Earth.
There is, of course, one teensy-weensy problem with choosing 6 PM,
October 22, 2004 for the time of the celebration. Perhaps you
have already noted it. That is not 6000 years. 4003 and a
fraction years from the BC portion of the calendar and 2003 and a
fraction years from the AD portion adds up to 6007 years.
If that is confusing think of it this way. From October 22, 1 BC
to October 22, 1 AD is one year. You add up the two year-figures
and subtract 1.
1 + 1 - 1 = 1
AD-year + BC-year - 1 = Total-years
AD-year = Total-years - BC-year + 1
AD-year = 6000 - 4004 + 1 = 1997
Hence the 1000 year anniversary was 6 PM on October 22, 1997. Of
course, that would have put the conference on a Wednesday instead
of a Saturday. Perhaps after a day of looking at wrong
information, they decided to end the day with a piece of wrong
information about a piece of wrong information. Apparently, being
scientists they could figure out it was the wrong date, but they
still wanted to excuse for the conference. It was like some
niteries had big celebrations of the new century and millenium on
December 31, 1999 even though they knew full well that the century
did not end for another 12 months. The customers thought that the
end of 1999 was the end of the century, and the customer is always
right. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: RAHTREE: FLOWER OF THE NIGHT (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: This ghost story goes in eight different directions at
once, from tragic social message to slapstick comedy. Some scenes
are chilling, but the film is unfocused. Rating: +1 (-4 to +4) or
6/10
RAHTREE: FLOWER OF THE NIGHT is an extremely uneven ghost story
from Thailand mixing love story, social content, horror, slapstick
comedy, and satire. Writer and director Yuthlert Sippapak seems
too anxious to entertain and to fill the film out to a reasonable
length. He seems not to have been able to resist the temptation
to use any idea that came to mind. The result is something of a
hodge-podge.
Ake Dunrongsgup is a student fascinated by a young woman in his
class--but out of his class. Attractive Buppah Rahtree never
acknowledges his existence and never even smiles. Eventually his
persistence pays off and the two become friends and quickly
lovers. But then he betrays her in multiple ways. Pregnant with
his child, she gets an abortion the day before he leaves the
country for school in England.
In pain from the operation she takes an apartment in a local
apartment complex. Later she is found in the bathroom having bled
to death. (Hey, did I mention this was a comedy?) As the police
are trying to remove the body it starts moving on its own. Very
soon it is clear there is a terrifying ghost in room 609 that
nobody wants to deal with. (*This* is the funny part.)
Sippapak throws in a strange take-off on THE EXORCIST. There is a
lot of comedy that was constructed ad hoc around a boy with Down
syndrome who happened to be convenient. Much of the comedy verges
on the slapstick, particularly with two very obese Thai women who
run a beauty parlor in the apartment building. The comic and even
slapstick elements frequently conflict with the horror elements,
making the film a lot less frightening than it might be. Sippapak
should have either toned down the comedy and concentrated on the
tragedy and horror or vice versa.
Sippapak announced at the showing that there are at least two
sequels planned. He certainly has enough ideas, but he should
decide which ones really go well together. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: DOUBLE DARE (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: With this documentary director Amanda Micheli follows the
lives of two film stuntwomen. She covers their professional and
personal lives as well as telling a little about the history of
the profession. Rating: +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
The subject is women stunt performers and particularly Zoe Bell
(who doubled for Lucy Lawless on "Xena: the Warrior Princess") and
Jeannie Epper (who doubled for Lynda Carter on "Wonder Woman").
Stuntwomen form a very small community, but it is a community. In
her sixties Epper is still in the business, being in films as
recent as 2 FAST 2 FURIOUS, but her best-known roles were decades
ago. Most of her family is in the business. Her father was a
prominent stunt person who doubled for actors as far back as the
1936 CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE. Jeannie Epper has done stunts
in well over a hundred films. Bell and Epper are great friends.
Amanda Micheli shows us their lives, and not just their
professional lives.
Epper talks about getting older, but her greatest fears are for
her daughter Eurlyne. At the time of this filming Eurlyne was a
stuntwoman also but only in a limited way, after a seriously wrong
fall led to a neck injury limited her ability to work. After a
second major surgery failed she quit the business, though that
happened after the filming of this documentary.
Micheli takes her camera to show these two women on set and off.
Epper notes wryly that while you would think stunt athletics
require youth, she is one of the older people working in her
films. As the stunt people age, the producers seem younger and
younger. They are replaced, but the stunt people stay around.
Jeanie is a good friend of the actor Ken Howard. When Howard
needed a kidney transplant and it turned out it could not come
from Howard's wife, Jeanie gave her kidney for her friend.
The film examines the newly created annual award for stunt work.
It looks at the controversy over whether there should be a
separate award for woman stunt doubles, an issue about which even
Epper is ambivalent. Men dominate the industry in both numbers
and the complexities of stunt they are given. The issue is should
women be given awards for less complex stunts because they are
women?
The camera is present when Zoe lands an important and prestigious
job. She will go to China and be the stunt double for Uma Thurman
on the KILL BILL films.
DOUBLE DARE is documentary filmmaking in its purest form. It is
not intended to present a point of view. It documents the lives
of its subjects and allows the viewer to see the life style.
[-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
STRANGE CARGO (ISBN 0-441-01160-8) is Jeffrey E. Barlough's third
novel, all of which are set in some strange not-quite-our-world
which has mammoths and saber-toothed tigers, Lovecraftian
creatures, Wellsian inventions, and a cast of characters (and a
plot) right out of Charles Dickens. In STRANGE CARGO Frederick
Cargo is trying to find a Mr. Jerrold Squailes named as an heir in
Frederick's grandfather's will, while Mr. Threadneedle and Tim
Christmas (now there is an obvious nod to Dickens!) are busy
tinkering at something, and Miss Wastefield has a terrible secret.
We also meet the Rev. Giddeus Pinches and his sister Griselda
Pinches, Mr. Moldwort, Mr. Jobberly, Mr. Kix, and Mr. Lovibund.
The background world does not bear close inspection. The blurb
describes it as "set in a world where the Ice Age never ended and
only a narrow coastline of civilization survives," but it is clear
that this world's history is the same of ours--without Ice Age--
through at least Classical times, and there is at least some basis
for assuming it is the same considerably later. One character
claims the situation arose about two hundred years earlier due to
the impact of a lost spaceship--but that hardly accounts for the
existence of the mammoths and saber-tooths. The only solution is
just to "go with the flow" and do not try to analyze it too
closely. I love Barlough's books for their atmosphere and
settings, and recommend them to anyone who likes Dickens.
(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.)
REMARKABLE READS (edited by J. Peter Zane, ISBN 0-393-32540-7) is
a collection of essays by various authors on "the most something-
est book I read". For example, Denise Gess writes about "The Most
Important Book I Read" (Albert Camus's THE STRANGER), and Nasdijj
writes about "The Saddest Book I Read" (Louis L'Amour's TO TAME A
LAND). Some essays are more interesting than others, of course,
so you will probably want to pick and choose. As such, it is
probably better to get this from the library than to buy it.
We read Paulo Coehlo's THE ALCHEMIST (ISBN 0-062-50218-2) for our
library discussion group. It seemed a very simplistic fable with
the moral that one should work for one's dreams because the
universe/God will help you if you do. The book was extremely
popular for a while (and may still be), and generated a lot of
discussion. but I cannot recommend it. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
Benford's Modified Clarke Law: Any technology
that does not appear magical is insufficiently
advanced.