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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 09/24/99 -- Vol. 18, No. 13
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/Athens/4824
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. Two weeks ago I wrote a somewhat elliptic piece about the
resurgence of tyranny in East Timor. Member John MacLeod points
out http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/Timor/chomskybar.htm, a radio
interview containing a summary by Noam Chomsky of events in East
Timor. I will say that on the past issues Chomsky's facts have
occasionally been called into question. So while not endorsing his
viewpoint, his article is fairly useful for getting up to speed on
what the issues are. There is also a decent FAQ at
http://www.zmag.org/ZNETTOPnoanimation.html. [-mrl]
===================================================================
2. Someone in my workgroup sent around mail saying she was selling
year 2000 entertainment books. What kind of deal do you find in a
Y2K entertainment book?
Half price! Only two rifle bullets for a can of peaches in syrup.
Recently found 8 oz. cans of peaches good as new. Some without
labels. Usual price, four rifle bullets. Most standard gauges
accepted. [-mrl]
===================================================================
3. When I was a kid growing up my father worked for Monsanto
Chemical. Every year as a perk to their employees they would rent
out the local amusement and have the Monsanto Picnic. All the
rides were free. But part of the fun was the Penny Arcade. They
had a bunch of different minor concessions. They had a vending
machine which for five cents would dispense pictures of aircraft
like the Bell X-1. There probably were pinball machines, but I
rarely played those. One game I did like was a sort of anti-
aircraft gun. It was a green metal tube about a foot in diameter.
It had handles with triggers and a sight at one end. You looked
through the sight and you would see a scene of sky and ocean. Not
very convincing looking aircraft would fly over the ocean and if
you were aimed reasonably close to being aimed at the aircraft when
you pulled the trigger the sky would flash red about as credibly as
a red light bulb could make it. That was how you got points. I
guess I liked playing the game at the time. Electronic games is
one technology that has changed a great deal.
We passed by a video game parlor in Melbourne recently. It
probably is no different from video parlor here in the US. We
watched someone playing an EMPIRE STRIKES BACK game. The imagery
was a lot more advanced. It really looked like this guy was in the
movie. This guy playing the game was flying around wiping out
these huge lumbering Imperial Walkers and these flying thingees and
freeing friends and generally having a high old time. The 3-D
effects look really good. That supposedly makes this game what
they call "realistic." But I asked myself, what's wrong with this
picture?
This is not what battle is all about. It cannot possibly be this
easy. If there were two fliers on the same side for whom it was
this easy that would be enough to wipe out the entire army of the
other side. If there was only one guy for whom it was this easy on
the other side it would not have been this easy for this guy. A
more realistic view of what it really would be like to be in battle
would be you would put in your fifty cents. Your speeder starts
up, you fly thirty feet, there is a big red flash; the enemy got
you; game over. But nobody would drop the next fifty cents in to
try again.
This is not real war. This is the myth of war that the WWII movies
wanted to present. And not just WWII movies have used this myth.
From the beginning of time governments have wanted to convince the
common people that war is great fun. You just go out there and you
knock down those enemy soldiers one, two, three. And you win
valuable hero points as you go. Maybe you even win medals. Oh
boy. And people go out and they get killed. Before the Civil War
the attitude of many people toward the war made it seem like a
big-scale football game would to us. People thought it was a big
fun game, and they would go out and teach the other side a lesson
and come home with glory. It was not far into the war when both
sides realized that it was going to be pretty nasty.
A more realistic view of what war is or can be like is what you see
in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. It is a nightmare worse than most
nightmares you could imagine. It think THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
video games have much more market potential than SAVING PRIVATE
RYAN video games would. That is true even though PRIVATE RYAN
games have even more potential to be realistic.
And the irony is that it really was the Vietnam generation who made
video war games take off. These were people who went and fought
and knew it was hell, or people who did not want to go because they
knew it would be hell. But fake and easy war games got popular
just as people were getting a serious lesson that real war is
horrible.
Now don't get me wrong. I am not being as anti-war as I may sound
here. I definitely believe that there are causes that are worth
fighting for. And there are causes worth dying for, unfortunately.
War is bad for the people who have to do the fighting, but it is
not all by itself evil. Or if it is it can be a necessary evil.
But we probably should stop fooling ourselves that it is great
sport to fly through the legs of an Imperial Walker taking out
enemy aircraft. Really these games are adjusted to feed the
player's ego. If the player sneezes four of the enemy fall down
dead. The game is made up of responses that are to battle what
canned laughter is to humor. [-mrl]
===================================================================
4. MICKEY BLUE EYES (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: A callow young auctioneer finds out
that the father of the woman he wants to marry
is a mobster and he is marrying into a crime
family. Hugh Grant is developing into a very
uninteresting actor incapable of putting any
depth into his characters. This film starts
with a rudimentary plot and then just fills
time until it has enough to make this a feature
film length. Rating: 4 (0 to 10), 0 (-4 to +4)
Michael Felgate (played by Hugh Grant) is Manhattan art auctioneer
with a mild, non-assertive personality. He lets the truckers he
deals with walk all over him. He wants to marry Gina (Jean
Tripplehorn) and she seems to love him, but she is strangely
reticent to marry for reasons she will not say. When Michael goes
to her father's bar and restaurant he finds out part of the reason
why. Her father (James Caan) and her uncles make up a dangerous
crime family. Gina is sure that if Michael marries into the family
he will be pulled into the criminal activity. Mike is just as
certain that there is no reason that he would do that. But almost
immediately he is asked as a favor to use his auction house to
auction off a garish painting created by one of the crime family
members. This starts an escalating chain of reluctant favors and
counter-favors and a chain of events that pull Mike into the
whirlpool associating him closer and closer to organized crime.
The problem with this film is that it seems to have been written by
formula. It started with a skeleton of a cliched plot and then
apparently the writers started hanging jokes on it like ornaments
on a Christmas tree. The jokes all have little to do with each
other. The most that they have in common is that they use of
screen time. One can almost see the writers sitting there saying,
"Okay, now we have a 45-minute story. Let's throw in a comic FBI
agent. Now we are up to 50 minutes...." Even then the central
plot builds to a very predictable ending. Anyone surprised by the
surprise ending is probably new to 1990s cinema.
Hugh Grant was charming early in his career with his boyish smile
and youthful charm. But he seems incapable of stretching himself
as an actor or leaving his comfort zone. In this film we care for
his character about to the extent that we want to cuddle and
protect a small child. Listening to him try to talk like a
gangster is like watching a child trying to sound like an adult in
a school play. It is cute but it is not really entertaining and
shows very little accomplishment. Here we are not pulled into the
plot or the irony of the situation and the jokes are not
particularly perceptive. And worst of all they are rarely funny.
The views we have of crime figures are largely cliched. That is
part of the joke, that they are instantly recognizable as crime
figures. That worked in THE FRESHMAN, but that film had a much
better story behind it. James Caan provides the only interesting
role interpretation and even he can not make things click.
This comedy overall seems tired with far too few jokes that hit
home. It is for fans of Hugh Grant and nobody else. I give it a 4
on the 0 to 10 scale and a +0 on the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
Mark Leeper
HO 1K-644 732-817-5619
mleeper@lucent.com
Did you ever walk into a room and forget why you walked in? I think that's how dogs spend
their lives.
-- Sue Murphy