THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
07/22/05 -- Vol. 24, No. 4, Whole Number 1292
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:
Correction
James Doohan, RIP (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Sobering Thoughts (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (film review
by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading (THE DA VINCI HOAX and CHARLIE & THE
CHOCOLATE FACTORY) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Correction
In my review of THE GREAT WATER I referred to Macedonia as "the
Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia." A Macedonian wrote me to
inform me that Macedonians view this reference as very
disrespectful. I didn't know. I was doing some research and the
site http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/mk.html
used that term and even made it an acronym:
conventional long form: Republic of Macedonia
conventional short form: Macedonia; note - the provisional
designation used by the UN, EU, and NATO is
Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM)"
I used the form that distinguished it from the Greek Macedonia,
which may have been a mistake. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: James Doohan, RIP (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Science fiction fans will miss James Doohan who played Phil
Mitchell in the 1953 TV series "Space Command" and who died the
morning of July 20, 2005. The cause of death was pneumonia and
Alzheimer's disease. Doohan was 33 when he created the role of
Mitchell and was rarely able to escape the science-fiction
type-casting from that point of his career on. Later he played in
such action films as the 1965 film SATAN BUG. The following year
he once again was involved with science fiction with a part in the
TV series "Star Trek." Several other action or science fiction
films followed, many of which were connected with the "Star Trek"
series. But to the real fans of the genre he will always be Phil
Mitchell. I just haven't been able to find many of them. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Sobering Thoughts (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
A correspondent asked me for my take on what the United States
policy should be toward terrorism. It won't come as much of a
surprise for VOID readers, but I wanted to say all this on one
place and I will not pad it out to standard editorial length. I
was writing this on the day of the London attack. I think most
of the pieces of what is to follow are generally accepted, but
people are not looking at the whole grim picture.
I will make this brief.
Why do I support a war in Iraq that I think we cannot hope to win
militarily? It is because Iraq is not the entire war. We face a
determined and aggressive global insurgency with no fixed
targets. There is no Berlin or Hanoi this war. This is not the
kind of conflict that seems to have a military solution.
Our enemy worldwide is relatively small, but grows every year and
it has a large sympathetic population to draw upon to replace its
losses and increase its size. Efforts to keep ever more powerful
weapons out of their hands are apparently failing. They can
strike anywhere and they currently are striking all over the
world, from the US to Europe to India. The enemy is aggressive,
it can be powerful, and it can choose its targets. And they
believe they are doing God's will.
There is no traditional way to win a war against such an enemy.
Military might by itself will not win it. Much of the world has
tried to ignore the problem and just treat it with tolerance. The
result of such a policy is slow capitulation. We have seen that
happening in places like the Netherlands and Spain and other
places in Europe and worldwide. Accommodation will not work
against opponents driven by an ideology. It only postpones.
For whatever reasons we got into the Iraq war, we have found a
weapon that has some effect, albeit slowly and weakly. The
weapon is the desire for Democracy in some of the same countries
that are the cradles of the insurgency. I think Democracy is the
right thing for these countries in principle anyway, but it may
be also a weapon to bring the conflict to an enemy that more
often than not we otherwise cannot find. The approach may be too
weak and too late, but it is battling an idea with an idea, which
is the only way strategy that can be effective.
That in a nutshell is how I see the situation. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (film review by Mark
R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: This is the high-sucrose story of a good little boy who,
along with four bad children, gets a much-coveted tour of a
mysterious candy factory. Roald Dahl's now-classic story is a
cheerfully hypocritical children's cautionary tale gone weird.
Tim Burton gives us his visually creative approach to the story
with effects that frequently do not deliver. Still, it is a tale
told with imagination and exuberance. Rating: low +2 (-4 to +4)
or 7/10
As pretty much everybody knows, this is the second filming of
Roald Dahl's strange children's story CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE
FACTORY. The previous version was WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE
FACTORY (1971), directed by Mel Stuart with Gene Wilder in the
role of Wonka. The story tells of five lucky children who win a
tour of a very famous and mysterious chocolate factory run by a
more mysterious candy genius. One after another the children's
bad traits come out and lead them to non-fatal but nasty fates.
Only sugary-good, family-loving Charlie is not tempted into
naughtiness by the factory and eventually he meets a sweet
ending. Director Tim Burton previously remade a well-liked film
with his PLANET OF THE APES and demonstrated the wrong way to
revise a classic. This time he does a much better job.
CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY is a story for children that
can be fully appreciated only by adults. It is a morality tale
that easily segues into all sorts of weirdness. One message it
carries is the importance of moderation in eating candy, yet it
tempts us with acres of chocolate and other sweets. Even the
grass supposedly tastes good to the greedy. But it would be
wrong to reduce this story simply to a cautionary tale. Its main
reason for existing is mostly to be a canvas to entertain kids
with strange ideas. Perhaps its real reason was to lampoon
morality tales for children. In any case, it is a reminder that
J. K. Rowling was not the first children's writer to use little
whimsical vulgarities. John August's screenplay broadens the
story by telling us a little more about who Wonka really is than
either the previous film or the book. In this film Wonka is less
fantastic and more Freudian. He has issues with his father. And
he runs a strange and mystical factory. We do not have factories
anything like this in the United States. For one thing, OSHA
restrictions would never permit it. Both film versions reveled
inside jokes and waggish allusions.
This is certainly the more impressively visual of the two
versions. One place where Burton falls down in this film is to
rely so frequently on digital effects when he could show us the
real thing. He gives us a whole digital factory making digital
chocolate. However, the problem with showing digital chocolate
is that it looks like it would taste like digital chocolate.
There is no substitute for showing the real thing. There is
nothing in this film that looks as tempting as the chocolate in
the original, or better still, in Lasse Hallström's 2000 film
CHOCOLAT (which also featured Johnny Depp). Nothing beats the
real thing. Burton also misses his mark with the chocolate
waterfall, repeating a mistake from the previous adaptation. It
should have looked like chocolate syrup. Instead he made the
falling fluid brown but thin as water. Instead of being tempting
it looks more like something unmentionable. And if the factory
is as hot as they say, why does nobody sweat?
Joseph Schindelman's illustrations for Dahl's book (as canonical
as John Tenniel's for ALICE IN WONDERLAND) show Wonka as a small
leprechaun-like figure. Neither film version chose to shrink
their lead star. Johnny Depp plays Willie Wonka as a full-sized
human who is very androgynous to the point of wearing lipstick
and who can behave like a child or an adult. The ambiguity adds
to his mystery but not nearly as much as the tiny stature would
have. The mystery is to just what his nature is. Is he well
meaning or is he a demonic tempter who is trapping naughty
children into nasty fates? Perhaps he is some of both. Depp may
not be right for the role, but nebbish Gene Wilder was out and
out wrong.
Stealing the show from Depp are Deep Roy and David Kelly. In
what is perhaps a record for playing multiple characters in a
single film, Deep Roy plays 165 different Oompa-Loompas. For
those who are curious as I was, Deep Roy is really Gordeep Roy,
who was born in Nigeria of Indian parents. Spry David Kelly will
be affectionately remembered from WAKING NED DEVINE. Of late if
you want to put a mature nasty in a major fantasy film the
obvious choice is Christopher Lee. Here he is Willy Wonka's
stern father. I am only saddened he could not be joined by his
friend Peter Cushing. (So probably is probably is Lee. And
Burton would probably endorse the sentiment.) Freddie Highmore,
who played young Peter in FINDING NEVERLAND is likeable as
Charlie.
Tim Burton gives us a bizarre and fun adaptation of a weird
story. It probably won't be a classic, but it is certainly an
improvement on the first film. I rate it a low +2 on the -4 to
+4 scale or 7/10. [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
I reviewed Dan Brown's THE DA VINCI CODE in the 01/07/05 issue of
the MT VOID, and Bart D. Ehrmann's TRUTH AND FICTION IN THE DA
VINCI CODE in the 07/01/05 issue. (Nice symmetry, that!) And
now this week, it's Carl E. Olsen and Sandra Miesel's THE DA
VINCI HOAX (ISBN 1-58617-034-1). But I have somewhat less to say
about this one, because I found it less convincing that Ehrmann's
book. While Ehrmann cites various documents and presents what
(to me, at least) is an impartial, objective refutation to
Brown's book, Olsen and Miesel alternate between objective
statements and statements which boil down to "Brown disagrees
with the whole basis of the Catholic Church, so he must be
wrong." For example, on page 105 they say, "Not only is there a
lack of evidence for a political alliance resulting from Jesus
and Mary Magdalene being married, there would have been no reason
for such an alliance. Jesus made it known on more than one
occasion that he had not come to establish an earthly kingdom or
to overthrow the local Roman government. His kingdom was not of
this world, and he came to conquer sin and death, not governments
and emperors." But this is begging the question, since this
refutation is based on the information in the gospels that Brown
claims have been tampered with. This recurring problem seriously
undercuts their overall credibility with me, though I suspect
others might react differently. Olsen and Miesel do point out
the very anti-Catholic bias of much of THE DA VINCI CODE, and
covers a few errors that Ehrmann missed (particularly in the area
of art works), but I think Ehrmann does a better job in detailing
the majority of the errors and false claims.
After seeing the new film CHARLIE & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, I went
home and re-watched the older WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE
FACTORY and read the book (which I had not read before) (ISBN
0-141-30115-5). The new movie takes the name of the book and
returns to some of the original ideas that the first movie
changed, but also incorporates ideas from the first movie not in
the book, and adds a lot of film references in general. One
change from the book is that Charlie's father is still alive--
maybe Burton thought that far too many children's movies had dead
parents. One restoration was that the songs in the new movie use
Dahl's words, rather than being entirely new songs as they were in
the older film version. I thought the new movie was much better
than the old one, but probably cannot fairly judge the book--I'm
well out of the target age group. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
If you live long enough, the venerability factor
creeps in; first, you get accused of things you
never did, and later, credited for virtues you
never had.
-- I. F. Stone