THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
11/23/12 -- Vol. 31, No. 21, Whole Number 1729
Turkey: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Stuffing: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
History of Cinema on One Graphic Chart (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
The Truth Comes Out (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
Watch Horror Films, Keep America Strong (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
Storm Diary, Part 3 (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
LINCOLN (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
This Week's Reading ("A Wind Is Rising" and THE ENGINES OF
NIGHT) (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: History of Cinema on One Graphic Chart (comments by Mark
R. Leeper)
This is pretty cool. It is a history of the titles of all the
major films by category across a hundred years of cinema history.
You can zoom in on the graphic and see the major films by year. It
seems to have the British titles of the films.
http://tinyurl.com/mrl-history-cinema
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: The Truth Comes Out (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
We are arranging a trip to Costa Rica. The tour company sends out
literature that talks about butterfly forests and live volcanoes.
It sounds really good. So we signed up and once they have us their
tone changes entirely. Now they are sending out fine-print
brochures with paragraphs titled "Emergency Evacuation",
"Repatriation of Remains", and "Accidental Death and
Dismemberment"--"or" would be bad enough. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Watch Horror Films, Keep America Strong (comments by Mark R.
Leeper)
Back in the 1970s Bob Wilkins was the horror film host in the San
Francisco area. He displayed a sign that said "Watch Horror Films,
Keep America Strong." Sadly he did not live long enough to learn
that there really are health benefits to watching horror films. It
can counter a high-calorie diet.
http://tinyurl.com/healthy-horror
If you think about it, it makes perfect sense. Some of our
prehistoric ancestors had a taste for horror stories sitting around
the fire. Others got scared and ran away to hide in the cave until
the stories were over. The fire sitters got little educations in
what the night boogies could do to you and had thought about how to
avoid them. The cave quaverers were unprepared and the night
boogies got them. The horror fans lived to pass their genes on to
the next generation. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Storm Diary, Part 3 (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
[Continued from last week, written in the present tense, but by the
time you read this, we have had power restored, etc.]
As I write this, we are still trapped in our house with no refuge
after sundown. During the day we can go to restaurants, some of
which have opened. But at night we return to a cold and dark
house.
Late Wednesday, 10/31/12
With no power there is no heat. The house ranges between 60 and 62
degrees. It probably will get colder with time. Even around the
house I wear a scarf around my neck. I am wearing regular
underwear, thermal underwear, a pair of pants, a shirt, two
pullover wool sweaters, and a pair of jeans over the pants. Going
to the bathroom is like digging for gold.
We did some exploration by car. There are a lot of damaged trees.
No restaurants are open that we saw but two local grocery stores,
Shoprite and Stop & Shop have tentatively opened. It is unclear
for how long, but they want to sell their current stock. They lost
a lot of money in spoiled food after Hurricane Irene and they
probably install generators just so they could preserve what they
had on hand for sale.
The roads are a little hard to drive. There is no power for traffic
lights. Some intersections have been made ad hoc four-way
stops. In other places orange traffic cones block some streets and
send people on detours. Some of these detours are not well
thought-out. They tell you where you cannot go but not how to get
where you want to go. It is not always obvious.
We told several neighbors that the grocery was open. How long that
will be the case is not obvious. Here we are Paul Revere and Mrs.
Revere. One guy said that he had been to Shop-Rite and there was a
big bin of AA and AAA batteries. We informed him the bin was now
an empty box.
Lunch is restaurant leftovers from before the storm. The food is
not great, but we are not going hungry. We were fairly well
prepared for the storm. We are using a lot of AA batteries, but we
had just bought a 48-pack from Costco and we have needed about six
so far. We have a lot of canned goods that can be eaten as they
come out of the can. We also have more than 150 candles and they
last about four hours. And we have ten or fifteen flashlights of
various kinds.
It is useful to have a flashlight with a flat bottom that you can
stand vertically. If you stand it up pointing at the ceiling it
lights the whole room like a lantern. For us that is most useful
in the bathroom. That room is completely enclosed and if you close
the door--as it is my habit to do--it is nearly pitch black. A
lantern that lights up the room keeps it smelling fresh. I don't
want it to smell like Green Lantern's bathroom. (For those who did
not read the comic, Green Lantern was a superhero who had no
control over anything that was yellow.)
Afternoon is working on a letter, this log, some listening to
cassettes from a Walkman. Two friends who were headed to New York
City told us they passed restaurants open on Route 9. Baby steps,
but things are getting better slowly. Now we can get one hot meal
every day.
But we don't want to do too much driving. We filled our tank
before the storm, but now it is very hard to get gasoline with
three-hour waits in mile-long queues. There are queues of cars
waiting to fill their tanks as you approach the gas station, then
in the other direction there are queues of people with gas cans.
These lines are not as long, but they also have wait times measured
in hours.
Some gas stations are serving only emergency vehicles. Some need
the electrical power to be restored to run their pumps. Others
have gasoline-powered generators, but that is a very bad idea. In
SCARFACE with Al Pacino, the guy's big downfall was when he stopped
just selling cocaine and started using it himself. Similarly the
gas station owners want to just sell gasoline and not dip into
their own supplies.
It still feels cold.
At 6:30 PM we have snacks. Evelyn has Chocolate Mousse. I have
Key Lime Mousse. When ice cream whipped with air thaws it goes
through a stage when it has the consistency of mousse. It is
almost as good as ice cream. This is about as good as home food
gets when the power has been out for days.
After dark our biggest enemies are boredom and uncertainty. But
the chilly temperature is coming up on the rail.
Happy Halloween.
11/01/12
It is a new month. We rarely see so much bird and squirrel
activity in our back yard. They seem to love running around the
tree limb. It is like a playground for them.
It was nice to have a warm shower. We have a gas water heater. I
have to make it a fast shower, since there is a shortage of water
with pumps, etc. running from emergency generators. Another
advantage we that have is that we have a landline telephone. That
is the old fashioned kind with a copper cable to the wall. Any
other kind either depends on cell phone towers or cordless stands
that plug in to current. We have no power and still the phone
works (as family and friends appreciate).
Things are starting to come back. Today we may have our first hot
meal since we lost power. I will continue from here two issues
from now. (Next week is my article on TCM picks in December.)
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: LINCOLN (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: With very interesting release timing and with considerable
historical accuracy, Stephen Spielberg tells the history of the two
great conflicting goals Abraham Lincoln had toward the end of the
Civil War. He wanted both to free the slaves and to end the war.
Spielberg does not simplify the issues. Much of the film is talk.
Spielberg respects his audience's intelligence enough to tell the
complex story and maintain a great deal of historical accuracy.
The film even looks very accurate to the period. The viewer may
have to work hard, but the work is worth the effort. This is a
film for an intelligent audience. Rating: low +3 (-4 to +4) or
8/10
During the United States Civil War the Union had hundreds of
thousands of men in the field fighting (whether some realized it or
not) for the rights of others. But in the last year a parallel war
was being waged in the Union's Congress to determine if that
government would emancipate the slaves. That war was fought just
as dirty and with nearly as much fury. Steven Spielberg's LINCOLN
is a paean to the people who fought for justice for the Southern
slaves, a war that was headed, just as the battlefield war was, by
Abraham Lincoln.
One can read in high school history books that under Lincoln the
13th Amendment was ratified. One rarely reads about what a hard-
fought battle getting it approved was against both the Democrats
and members of his own Republican party. Based on a script by Tony
Kushner, Spielberg tells with some tension of Lincoln's quest for
the twenty additional votes he needed to get the amendment ratified
by the House of Representatives. (Curiously, little is made of the
fact that it had already been passed by the Senate with what must
have been much of the same political wrangling.) Lincoln finds
himself in the peculiar position of desperately wanting to end the
war, but knowing that if it ends too soon the House of
Representatives will never ratify the 13th Amendment. He has to
extend a war that he greatly hates. He must balance ending the war
with ending slavery. His slow and complex efforts to get the
additional votes draw on the same sort of tension that TWELVE ANGRY
MEN had. The final count is reminiscent of the film 1776.
Frequently when I review a historical film I will have a paragraph
or so after the main review telling where the film got the history
wrong. All the research I have seen has said that LINCOLN gets the
facts fairly close to recorded history.
The look of LINCOLN gives a good impression of what living in 1863
would be like. This means a lot of the film is dimly lit in a
manner we expect from film noir, often with the shadow on a face
fading into the background. Do not expect bright, saturated
colors. Many of the officers in the armies had very big bushy
beards that are generally portrayed in films much shorter.
Spielberg works hard for great accuracy, and we see some really
large beards. This is a smart film but not really a pretty one.
Do not expect it to just wash over you like a James Bond chase. It
is hard work to follow what is going on. Be ready at the beginning
of each scene to listen carefully to what is being said in this
dialog-heavy film. And I hope you have a better memory for names
than I have. (Don't worry, that would not be difficult.)
Spielberg populates LINCOLN with a very large cast of many popular
actors. Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln leads the cast. He is not the
sort of Lincoln that Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, or Raymond Massey
played (and certainly not the Lincoln who was on STAR TREK). This
Lincoln fills his conversation with anecdotes and jokes, to the
point that he made exchanges with him a little trying. Lincoln
scholar Harold Holzer says that Lincoln's voice was probably a
little shriller and higher than it has been played. Day-Lewis
plays him as a man who could have his mind on several tracks at the
same time, hence the self-interruption and his propensity for the
quick quip. The film also suggests that his arguments with Mary
Todd Lincoln (played by Sally Field) could be fiery and loud.
LINCOLN is based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's accounts of the
emancipation in her book TEAM OF RIVALS: THE POLITICAL GENIUS OF
ABRAHAM LINCOLN. I imagine that on third or fourth viewing much
more of it will be clear. I rate LINCOLN a low +3 on the -4 to +4
scale or 8/10.
Spielberg gives us an account of a lame duck Congress being coerced
to work on bi-partisan lines to act for the good of the country.
It was released a little too late to affect the voting in the
United States election, but it is an account of an embattled
Congress eventually doing the right thing. It would be great if
our own Congress would do the same thing. LINCOLN is a distant
mirror of our own times and politics.
This does seem to be Abraham Lincoln's year of being a hero in the
movies with this film following as it does close on the heels of
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, VAMPIRE HUNTER.
Film Credits: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443272/
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lincoln_2011/
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
I haven't done as much reading lately, catching up with a lot of
post-Sandy stuff instead. I did re-read Robert Sheckley's "A Wind
Is Rising", a short story from 1957 which has been reprinted a few
times, in Sheckley collections and THE THIRD GALAXY READER. It was
also dramatized as an episode of "X Minus One".) The story takes
place on Carella I, where a wind of 82 miles an hour is a light
breeze, so you can see why I decided to read it after Sandy came
through.
I also read THE ENGINES OF NIGHT by Barry N. Malzberg (ISBN 0-312-
94141-2). This is a collection of essays written in the late 1970s
and early 1980s as a commentary on the state of science fiction and
publishing at the time. One of the interesting things is to notice
what has changed. For example, Malzberg bemoans the fact that
James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" had appeared only
in one anthology and one collection, both out of print at the time
of his writing. It now has appeared in the United States in
another anthology and another collection, both in print. Indeed,
we seem to be in a Golden Age for collections of classic science
fiction authors, with the Sheckley story also appearing in
collections of his work currently in print.
This is not to say that everything in THE ENGINE OF NIGHT is
outdated. The low esteem in which science fiction is held has not
changed, and before you point to George R. R. Martin and J. K.
Rowling, let me say that there is a difference between science
fiction and fantasy. [-ecl]
[You are right; the mainstream does not appreciate science fiction.
"The New Yorker" has not had a science fiction issue since May.
-mrl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
This world is gradually becoming a place
Where I do not care to be any more.
--John Berryman