THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
03/08/13 -- Vol. 31, No. 36, Whole Number 1744
Fred Astaire: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Ginger Rogers: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
Costa Rica Log Correction
My New Motto ... (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
The ARGO Dilemma (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
MT VOID Style Guide (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
GAME OF THRONES (Season II) (television review
by Dale L. Skran, Jr.)
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (film review
by Dale L. Skran, Jr.)
COLUMBIANA (film review by Dale L. Skran, Jr.)
THE ILLUSTRATED MAN by Ray Bradbury (audiobook review
by Joe Karpierz)
SCRATCH MONKEY by Charles Stross (book review
by Dale L. Skran, Jr.)
FROM UP ON POPPY HILL (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
Josh Billings (letter of comment by Kip Williams)
This Week's Reading (ERIC) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)
==================================================================
TOPIC: Costa Rica Log Correction
Last week we said that our Costa Rica Trip logs could be found at
http://leepers.us/CostaRicaLog.htm
http://leepers.us/evelyn/trips/costa.htm
Due to a slip-up those links were not working. They will work now.
(Note that the second one has changed slightly--a spurious
capitalization had crept in.) Sorry for the inconvenience. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: My New Motto ... (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
My new philosophy of life is "Carpe Diem." That's Latin for
"Complain today." [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: The ARGO Dilemma (comments by Mark R. Leeper)
When it first opened I gave a fairly favorable review to ARGO, the
film that eventually won the Best Picture Academy Award. It is not
that I consider that as counting for much. The fact that A gives
an award to B really tells you as much or more about A than it does
about B. My review is at http://leepers.us/argo.htm.
A correspondent wrote me and was indignant that I was as positive
on the film as I was. He said that the film had presented itself
as a historical account of the rescue of United States citizens in
Iran at the time of the Revolution. But in the third act ARGO
showed a hairbreadth escape that really had not happened at all.
In truth, the final escape went without a problem. As the writer
said, "The ending never happened. Why does this story need a James
Bond action finish? It's not in Tony [Mendez]'s book. There is
only one reason, to sell it to the public to make $$$ and not for
any artistic reasons."
Well, let me comment about that. I wrote my review in the first
days of the release before there was the controversy over the last
act being very much invented. If I were writing the review today I
would say more about how the facts were not to be depended upon.
However ...
Historical films are very rarely accurate throughout. BRAVEHEART
completely left the bridge out of the Battle of Stirling Bridge.
MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS had a climactic meeting between Elizabeth and
Mary that never happened. KINGDOM OF HEAVEN completely whitewashed
Saladin. The story of GLADIATOR was ludicrous and has been
compared to one in which an NFL player topples the US government.
ZERO DARK THIRTY said that THE CIA used torture to get intelligence
that led to the killing of Osama Bin Laden. The title character in
POCAHONTAS was about ten years old when she risked her life for
John Smith.
These inventions are not all of the same degree of seriousness.
Clearly ZERO DARK THIRTY does more to affect the current political
climate than does GLADIATOR.
For more interesting examples see
http://tinyurl.com/void-inaccurate.
But I think my friend's complaint is that the script had to invent.
If they told it the way it really was they would have had an
exciting opening and it would have just petered out at the end. It
is hard to make a dramatic ending in which everything is just okay.
One example is the film THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN. At the end of the
film the German High Command has decided that sending bombers over
England was a losing proposition so they simply stopped. Towards
the end there is a sequence with the British pilots sit waiting for
the phone call telling them to scramble, a phone call that they had
gotten every day, but the call just does not come. The filmmakers
had the problem of making something NOT happening seem dramatic.
There was a major event, but it was that the pilots were just
sitting around instead of air fighting. Making sitting around
dramatic just did not work really well in that film. In ARGO Ben
Affleck apparently did not want to have a similarly deceptively un-
eventful ending.
I suppose a filmmaker's first responsibility is to entertain the
public so I can understand why there was an action ending plastered
on to the events in ARGO.
Part of the fun of seeing a historical film is that afterward you
get to pick it apart and see what they got right and what they got
wrong.
And as for the making of "$$$", what dramatic films do you know of
that were not produced to make $$$? Sure, it was made to make
money. So were CITIZEN KANE and CURSE OF THE SWAMP CREATURE. The
question is what sort of film they were making to make money. Were
they making good films to be remembered or were they looking for a
fast buck? ARGO has gotten a lot of people more interested in
recent history and in US relations with Iran. A film that just
died in the last act likely would not have done that.
I cannot give a final answer on this one. It seems to me the
ending that was invented for ARGO actually says that the Iranians
were a more vigilant than they actually were, but our CIA was also
at the top of its game. It may have been a bit too flattering all
around. [-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: MT VOID Style Guide (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
We are getting enough [strongly appreciated -mrl] contributions to
the MT VOID these days that it is probably worthwhile (for me,
anyway) to publish an MT VOID style sheet. So here goes.
You have probably noticed that what you get in email is plain
ASCII. Almost everything in the style sheet is driven by that. I
can format submissions that do not follow these guidelines but it
takes more time and effort. So if you're sending something in that
was formatted to appear somewhere else fancy formatting is okay,
but please try to avoid it in general.
Please do not use "smart quotes" (or "smart hyphens" or anything
else Microsoft thinks needs to be made smarter). Also avoid accent
marks, slashed 'o's, and other non-ASCII characters.
Please do not use italics, bold, or other fancy fonts. Put titles
of books, movies, and television shows in all capital letters. Put
titles of short fiction, television *episodes*, and other short
works in quotation marks. Use asterisks to denote emphasis (see
previous sentence).
I have come to prefer the British style of combining periods and
commas with quotation marks: place the period or comma outside the
quotation marks if what is being quoted is a title that does not
include it. You do not have to follow this.
For book reviews, please include at least the title, the author,
and the ISBN (assuming it has one).
[Look on the book and you should see the ISBN. If you cannot find
it, you can find the book in Amazon and just search for the string
"ISBN". If they give two ISBNs, the preferred ISBN is the ISBN-13.
-mrl]
Spell out "OK" as "okay", "US" as "United States", and "UK" as
United Kingdom". (The last two are to avoid confusion between
them.)
In general, spell out small numbers (e.g., "one" instead of "1"
and "seventeen" instead of "17"). There are exceptions to this.
Paragraphs are your friend--use them. But represent them by a
double carriage-return, not indentations. Similarly, lists should
be manually numbered, or have the items manually marked with
hyphens or asterisked. If the items go more than one line, putting
blank lines between them may be desirable.
Make each paragraph a single line of text, that is, do not insert
carriage returns, line feeds, etc. I will wrap the lines as
necessary. [-ecl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: GAME OF THRONES (Season II) (television review by Dale
L. Skran, Jr.)
[Caution: There are probably spoilers in the following. I don't
know for sure, since I am trying to avoid reading spoilers. -mrl]
[The above statement is a spoiler warning and not a spoiler in and
of itself, since I do not know if there spoilers in the following
or not. If there are spoilers and the reader does not expect them,
just telling the reader that there are spoilers would constitute a
spoiler of the review though not one of the series. -mrl]
I'm a bit late out of the gate on this one, so I don't plan a long
review. I just received the GAME OF THRONES Season II DVD, and
watched it in pretty short order. Overall, the second season is
at least as good, and possibly better, than the first season.
Season II of GAME OF THRONES adapts the second book in the series,
A CLASH OF KINGS. Although it more or less follows the plot of
the book, a good bit of complexity and detail is lost. The story
of Arya Stark is considerably shortened and changed. In the
television show she is more a kid who aspires to kill, while in
the book by this point she has killed at least two people
directly, and possibly many more. Oddly, considerable screen time
is spent showing the nasty Orwellian tortures of the bad guys,
time that could have been spent developing the Arya story.
On the other hand, the tale of Denarys Targerian is much improved
in the screen version, and in particular the confrontation with
the warlock of Qarth, Pyat Pree, which seems padded and hard to
follow in the book, works a lot better visually. Overall, Season
II has excellent casting. I particularly like Stannis Baratheon,
Bronn (Tyrion's #1 henchman), Sandor Clegane (the Hound), Ser
Jorah Mormont (Denary's #2), Margaery Tyrell and her brother Ser
Loras, Osha, the wilding woman who helps Bran Stark, and Ygritte,
the wilding girl Jon Snow falls in love with, but these are just
the highlights. Although the plot events are sometimes changed
significantly, the characters are 95% the same as in the book.
Tyrion Lannister (played by Peter Dinklage) remains one of the
most interesting characters to watch.
Once character that seems a bit different in the television
version than in the book is Roose Bolton, Lord of the Dreadfort.
The television version seems cleaner and more refined than I
envisioned him from the book. A more major difference from the
book is that King Robb's love interest is no longer Jeyne
Westerling, but a completely new character, Talisa Maegyr, who
claims to be from Volantis. Talisa is a stronger and more
interesting character than Jeyne, and this change doesn't alter
the plot much.
There is a considerable amount of explicit sex and violence,
although the sex seems more important to the plot in Season II and
less pasted in. However, one S&M scene with Joeffrey Baratheon is
not in the book and seems to have been inserted just to remind the
viewer that Joeffrey is a completely loathsome lout (as though all
the other nasty things he did wouldn't give you a hint!). Most of
the sex scenes have a kind of clinical coldness that diminishes
any erotic effect. Be warned that the magical scenes with
Melisandre are sometimes quite disturbing.
Dan Kimmel is suggesting the "last" episode as a possible Hugo
nominee in short form drama, but I think he may have intended to
recommend the second-to-last episode, "Blackwater," which is in
many ways the conclusion of the season. The actual last episode,
"Valar Morghulis," is a good suggestion as well. "Blackwater" was
the only episode written by George R. R. Martin in the second
season. The entire second season is a good candidate for
nomination for the Hugo long form category.
GAME OF THRONES (Season II) is highly recommended for those who
like this sort of thing, but it is strictly for adults. [-dls]
==================================================================
TOPIC: THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (film review by Dale
L. Skran, Jr.)
A while back, I gave a pretty unfavorable review in these pages to
THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATOO. However, I received various
reports that the United State film version starring Daniel Craig
and Rooney Mara was decent, and so recently watched the DVD. I am
pleased to report that some of the worst features of the book are
lost in the conversion to this film version.
The book opens with a tedious fifty pages that tried my patience,
but these doldrums are compressed into about a minute of screen
time, a vast improvement! Another distinct improvement is that the
book's rambling screeds against "businessmen" and "big business"
are pretty much lost. The villains are instead presented as a
family of Nazi serial killers bent on killing Jews, and the rich
but nutty Vanger family comes over as a mixed bag, with some saints
and some sinners. Yorick van Wageningen, Lisbeth Salander's
sadistic legal guardian is presented more as a singular bad guy
than a representative of all men. The book often seemed to present
itself as a feminist tract while titillating the reader with
misogynistic porn. This is handled much better in the movie; no
one will ever confuse the fairly explicit rapes in the movie with
an attempt at exploitation. The actual serial murders are
presented as a series of old photographs and oral descriptions,
greatly reducing their impact.
Daniel Craig is surprisingly plausible as the crusading journalist,
Mikael Blomkvist. He has developed a set of "intellectual
reporter" tics and mannerisms that are quite unBond-like. As I
stated in my review of the book, casting Craig as Blomkvist goes a
long way toward explaining his Bond-like attraction to the women in
his life. In the book Blomkvist's amorous adventures come off as
mere wish fulfillment on the part of author Stieg Larsson.
Rooney Mara does an excellent job bringing Lisbeth Salander to
life. She perfectly captures the remoteness and utter focus of
Salander in the book. At first Salander's piercings and street
garb are simply off-putting, but as time goes on and we see
Salander take on various personas, we realize that her goth girl
look is a much as mask/shield as any of her other disguises.
Perhaps the face-blackened avenger who tortures Wageningen is the
"real" Lisbeth. Perhaps there is no "real" Salander, only a series
of faces she presents to the world to keep it at a distance.
When reading the book, I felt that Blomkvist was largely an
idealization/wish fulfillment version of Stieg Larsson. Seeing the
movie, I started to see Lisbeth as another version of the fantasy
"ideal investigative reporter." With her eidetic memory, vast
array of illegal hacking skills, closet full of disguises, and a
clinical detachment from her subjects, Salander is the wet dream of
any investigative reporter. Couple these characteristics with
utter fearlessness, sociopathic tendencies, and a ruthless
determination to win any fight, she is a one-woman Justice League,
both seeking out the truth, getting it into the public view, and
then meting out rough justice against the rich and powerful that
any super-hero vigilante would be proud of. Alas, Salander's
origin and training remain unspecified; how a state ward could have
acquired her vast array of skills seems at best implausible. One
positive note is that the movie spares us Stieg Larsson's tedious
and technically bogus attempts to explain Lisbeth's hacking
activities.
I'm rating the movie a high +1. Rated R for a reason, TGWTDT has
strong scenes of rape and torture, as well as relatively explicit
sexual encounters. Strictly for adults. [-dls]
==================================================================
TOPIC: COLUMBIANA (film review by Dale L. Skran, Jr.)
Writer/producer Luc Besson (THE PROFESSIONAL) brought out
COLUMBIANA in 2011, but I missed it in the theaters. In spite of
a tomato meter rating of 27%, I wanted to check out the latest
entry in the "chick revenge" sub-genre, and see Zoe Saldana in
something that was not Star Trek, so I recently watched it on DVD.
The movie works surprisingly well as a violent action adventure. I
particularly liked the opening where Marco and a mob of Don Luis'
henchmen attempt to hunt down and capture a young Cataleya (played
by Amandla Stenberg). It reminded me of the opening chase in the
first Daniel Craig Bond film, CASINO ROYALE. I also liked the
assassination where Cataleya gains access to a police station by
posing as a drunken prostitute in order to reach her target in a
jail cell. It works well as a "Mission Impossible" episode.
COLUMBIANA probably does not bear a close watching. I'm not going
to claim that every scene fit together or that the action was
perfectly thought out. It is never explained how Cataleya received
such excellent training, or how she gets state-of-the-art spy gear.
However, overall, this was a perfectly watchable movie with
professional acting. To make a comparison, COLUMBIANA is about
ten times more interesting to watch than HAYWIRE, another recent
entry in the butt-kicking heroine genre.
I was struck by the links between COLUMBIANA and ALIAS. Cataleya
Restrepo (Zoe Saldana)'s love interest Danny Delaney, is played by
none other than Michael Vartan, Sidney Bristow's love interest in
ALIAS. "Danny" is the name of Sindney Bristow's fiancΘe in ALIAS
who is murdered early in the first season. And to top it off,
Cataleya has told Danny that her name is "Jennifer" and of course
Jennifer Garner played Sidney Bristow in ALIAS. Although Cataleya
is not Sidney Bristow, they share the characteristics of being very
creative on the fly during operations, using a lot of advanced
technology to do their work, living a life of lies, and apparently
the mastery of virtually every martial skill and weapon in
existence. Of course, Cataleya is a stone-cold independent
assassin who has dedicated her life to revenge. On the other hand,
Sidney Bristow is someone who believed she was trained to be a CIA
agent, but on finding that she really worked for the bad guys,
dedicated her life to bringing them down, and who in the final
episode of the series kills her mother in hand-to-hand combat.
Well, maybe they are more alike than I realized!
Another set of parallels can be drawn to the character Arya Stark
in GAME OF THRONES. In both cases, the father of a young girl is
killed by an (evil king, evil drug lord), causing her to go on a
long journey. During this journey, the girl buys passage over the
sea to the land where she will be trained as an assassin with (a
special coin, a computer chip). Once arriving in the distant land
(Bravos, Chicago) she is trained by (The Faceless Men, Emilio
Restrepo, Cataleya's uncle and a crime lord himself). Both Arya
and Cataleya are stone cold killers from a very young age, long
before they are formally trained to be among the best assassins of
their time and place. Arya and Cataleya are both experts in
disguise and live under assumed names. I'm not sure that any of
this means anything, but there certainly seem to be a lot of
parallels here.
COLUMBIANA is rated R, and features a good bit of graphic violence.
The sexual content is not significant for an R-rated film. For
comparison, COLUMBIANA is less violent than KILL BILL. Some
critics felt that COLUMBIANA stereotyped Columbia in a negative
way. If anything, the Columbia in the movie is cleaner, safer, and
more picturesque than the real country, and the real Columbian drug
lords I've read about seem crazier and more violent than the
characters in the movie. In fact, very little of the movie takes
place in Columbia, so there isn't much opportunity to present it in
a negative way. The CIA, portrayed in COLUMBIANA as protecting evil
drug lords from justice, has more to complain about on the
stereotyping front. Recommended for fans of this sort of thing.
Older teens and adults only. [-dls]
==================================================================
TOPIC: THE ILLUSTRATED MAN by Ray Bradbury (copyright 1951,
audiobook copyright 2009, Blackstone Audio, 9 hours, 25 mintues,
narrated by Paul Michael Garcia) (audiobook review by Joe Karpierz)
So, I've not read a whole lot of Ray Bradbury. I'm not really sure
why that is, to be honest. I guess it's because there weren't many
of his books in our house when I was growing up. We had a copy of
DANDELION WINE, which to this day I've never read. I've read
FAHRENHEIT 451, but not THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES. Strange that. I
met him once, back in 1986 at ConFederation, the WorldCon in
Atlanta. A friend of mine and I were wandering through the
dealers' room not long after it had opened, and it was pretty
empty. We were looking around, and there he was, in that
traditional white outfit of his. My friend and I looked at each
other, said, "Well, what the heck?", and went over to meet him.
He was a nice guy--very friendly. Here come two fans out of the
blue to talk to him, and he took the time to speak to us for a few
minutes. Years later, that meeting bought me brownie points with
one of my daughter's middle school Language Arts teachers. "You
mean you met RAY BRADBURY??? Oh my God, what was he like?" That
was a very cool fangirl reaction. I actually had no use for the
brownie points, but it was cool that the short meeting I had with
Bradbury generated that kind of reaction.
So, *anyway*, I decided that I might as well give one of his other
famous books, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN, a try. I honestly didn't know
much about it. What I found out, of course, was that it's a book
of short stories, framed by a meeting between an unnamed narrator
and a man whose body is covered in tattoos. The tattoos were
allegedly created by a woman from the future, and each tattoo tells
a story.
There are eighteen stories in all, of mixed quality. My favorites
include "The Veldt", about a nursery (think holodeck) which is part
of an automated house a family bought, and how that nursery
contains a little more than meets the eye; "The Man", about a group
of space explorers who land on a planet which is inhabited by
people who are happy and living in a state of bliss, all because of
a man that the explorers believe to be the Christian Jesus; "The
Rocket Man", about an astronaut who spends most of his time in
space away from his family, coming home periodically to visit and
who misses home while he's in space and misses space while he's at
home (and is said to be the inspiration for Elton John's song
"Rocket Man"); "The Exiles", in which numerous works of speculative
literature involving imaginary beings are burned on earth, but the
characters themselves are alive on Mars and try to save themselves
when astronauts bearing the last remaining copies of the books
arrive on Mars; "The Concrete Mixer", about a Martian soldier
forced to take part in an invasion of earth, only to find the
earthlings aren't fighting back in a way that was expected; "Zero
Hour", about children all over the country playing a game called
invasion, which their parents think is cute until, well, it isn't
so cute any more; and "The Rocket", a story about a junkyard owner
who envisions taking his family on a journey to Mars.
There are a few themes that are prevalent in the book. Family is
important. Technology is not necessarily all it's cracked up to
be. And Mars. Oh, yes, Mars. The stories in this book continue
to show Bradbury's fascination with the red planet, which he most
famously wrote about in THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES.
The technology in these stories does not hold up well at all, and
Bradbury depicts Mars as having a breathable atmosphere. However,
the tech is not the point of the stories--the tech just helps
advance the narrative of each story to its logical conclusion. And
that's okay. The point is the story and the people, not the tech.
Still, if you're someone who wants his/her technology to be
accurately portrayed, then you will have a hard time with this
collection.
The one thing that does hold up is the storytelling. This is
straightforward prose, not something flowery and difficult to read.
Bradbury is trying to tell a story, not trying to make a literary
statement. *That* is why he is considered one of the masters of
our field. It's a shame we lost him last year. Many of our
current writers could learn more than a few things from him with
regard to telling a story. This is a good, not great, collection.
However, that makes it one of the best, compared to a lot of other
writers in the field.
Paul Michael Garcia does a serviceable job with the narration of
this book. His reading neither adds nor detracts from the
material, in my opinion. As a result, what he really does is get
out of the way of the story--and to me, that's a good thing.
[-jak]
==================================================================
TOPIC: SCRATCH MONKEY by Charles Stross (book review by Dale
L. Skran, Jr.)
While at Boskone recently, I found that Charles Stross was
autographing, so I decided to pick up an extra Stross book to
collect a new signature. I selected SCRATCH MONKEY, the 2011
Boskone book, with a cover by Gregory Manchess and two bonus
essays, "Scratching the Itch" and "Common Misconceptions about
Publishing". As described in "Scratching the Itch", SCRATCH MONKEY
was written by Stross in the 1990s but recently updated for
publication.
The universe of SCRATCH MONKEY is post-Singularity, but highly
dystopian. Speed-of-light limits rule, and there is no way to move
super-luminally around the galaxy. An ecology has developed, with
humans first building "Dreamtime" processors to store the uploads
of the dead, and then spreading these processors over the galaxy
using Von Neumann machines. Once a Dreamtime machine and a
"Gatecoder" are constructed in a solar system, humans arrive as
information streams and are loaded into newly created bodies.
Death is not permanent, since you can get a new body if you want
one. This all seems great, at first, but over time the
Superbrights evolve, transcended humans and AIs that want more and
more of the Dreamtime for their much larger and faster minds.
First the Superbrights consume the entire solar system to make more
Dreamtime processors, and then they exile the humans to take over
their Dreamtime space as well.
Over time the Superbrights realize that they crave the stimulation
of really new experiences, and start consuming the minds of
uploaded humans. Thus, the Superbrights have an incentive to keep
the Gatecoders running and people dying. Humans, not being
entirely stupid, get wise to this, and revolutions break out aimed
at destroying the Gatecoders or modifying humans so that they can't
be uploaded via their built-in enhancements. The Superbright are
not so happy with this eventuality since without the stimulation of
new minds they break down mentally. Thus, war rages in heaven.
The Superbrights create "Distant Intervention" to protect the
Gatecoder/Dreamtime system and suppress the rebellions. Our
heroine, Oshi Adjani, works for a Superbright known only as "The
Boss." Originally a blind beggar, she is re-built and trained as a
SCRATCH MONKEY--a useful but ultimately expendable agent of the
Superbrights. Over time, she discovers, rather like James Bond,
that she has a talent for violence, as she evolves from a mere
fighting grunt to a ruthless super-agent. The book covers her
adventures in suppressing various rebellions in Stross's patented
ultra-violent style.
Eventually Oshi discovers that there is big secret behind
everything. From the Superbrights have evolved the Ultrabrights,
entities as far above the Superbrights as the Supers are above
humans. The Ultrabrights need even *more* of Dreamtime, and are
systematically destroying both the Supers and the humans as they
expand across the galaxy. The Boss agrees to send Oshi on one
final mission, after which, if she both succeeds and survives, he
will release her from his service.
This mission proves to be quite difficult for Oshi. Alone on a
distant world, she must defeat a mad Superbright who styles himself
as the dog-headed Anubis and his army of genetically engineered
monsters. She must also survive the destructive other-dimensional
weapons used by a group of anti-Anubis rebels, and build a fleet to
defeat an incoming Ultrabright drone (drone does not imply small or
weak here!). This all proves a hard piece of work, even for Oshi,
but in the end she gets it mostly done, and the story concludes
with a final throw-down between Oshi and a body-jumping mini-
version of "The Boss." The final result is not a Hollywood ending.
SCRATCH MONKEY is not the most mature Stross, but it does have a
lot of interesting ideas and fast paced action. Oshi is a
character defined by a single trauma, but is certainly more real
than, say, James Bond. Even the once-human "Boss" has a
sympathetic background story. Theirs is a horrific future world,
full of the most brutal violence and endless conflict with no hope
of anything more than never-ending war. If you like Stross, you'll
like SCRATCH MONKEY. If violent stories and graphic horror offend
you, stay away. [-dls]
==================================================================
TOPIC: FROM UP ON POPPY HILL (film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: Goro Miyazaki, son of the famous animator Hayao Miyazaki,
makes his own animated film. This is a straight drama with none of
his father's fantasy touches. Instead it tells the story of a
lonely high school age girl without a father and with a mother
working in the United States. She finds her first love in
publisher of the school newspaper. But her father's past haunts
her new relationship. This may be an animated film, but its
touching story aims as much for an adult audience. Generally this
is a good story, but not a really memorable film. Rating: high +1
(-4 to +4) or 6/10
Goro Miyazaki, the son of world-famous Japanese animator Hayao
Miyazaki, resisted going into his father's profession. He became
instead a construction consultant. However, he did accept a job
from his father building the Studio Ghibli Museum and that brought
him closer to the business. At age 39 he agreed to helm an
animated film TALES FROM EARTHSEA. FROM UP ON POPPY HILL is his
second film. While it is from his father's studio and in his
father's medium, it is very different from a film his father would
have made. Most of his Hayao's films have been fast-paced
adventure or fantasy, and this is a touching drama of a teenage
girl unraveling a mystery about her father and about the very
Japanese theme of the responsibility to protect the past and of the
past's possibility of changing the present.
While there is no fantasy, the artistic style is much like the
Studio Ghibli standard. One can look at a picture of the main
character and immediately recognize in the artistic style that the
film was made by a Miyazaki.
FROM UP ON POPPY HILL is a textured and deliberately paced drama
looking deep into the character of sixteen-year-old Umi Matsuzaki
living in Yokahama. It is 1963, just prior to the Tokyo Olympics.
Umi is virtually an orphan. Her father died when his boat sank in
the Korean War. Her mother is a doctor studying in the United
States. Umi lives in a boarding house taking care of her family as
a surrogate mother. It is hard work. Umi dreams of having both
her parents return, but she knows that is impossible. Umi's house
overlooks the port of Yokohama. Every day she raises nautical
signal flags over her house saying she prays for safe voyages.
These flags will changer her life.
The local school newspaper prints a poem about the signal flags
that get flown each day. Umi goes to meet the poet by going to the
local clubhouse, a very old building, slated for destruction to
make way for a newer building. Umi builds a friendship with the
poet Shun Kazama. She also discovers that most of the people who
use the clubhouse love the old building and do not want it to be
destroyed. Umi works on her relationship with Shun and organizes
the eccentric clubs that meet in the building to try to get the
clubhouse building preserved.
Goro's father co-wrote the screenplay with Keiko Niwa. Taken from
a manga by Tetsuro Sayama and Chizuru Takahashi, the story leaves
some details a little hard to pick up, at least in the English
language version. For example, never spelled out is what is Umi's
relation to the other people living in her building. Some are
clearly family, but it seems to be a boarding house.
The affection between Umi and Shun develops slowly. The two
friends do not know their own families' histories, mysteriously
linked, and the past overshadows their relationship. Miyazaki
makes Yokohama seem a pleasant place to spend some 91 minutes. It
recreates the period nicely, even making effective use of the
Japanese international musical hit "Sukiyaki", a song that may be
familiar both sides of the Pacific.
The film has charm, but overall is a little slight. The plot is
pleasant, but bland. There is one very slightly shocking twist to
the story, but it is handled gracefully. In the end it is all
settled very quickly and in the end it is a little too pat. I
would rate FROM UP ON POPPY HILL a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or
6/10.
Film Credits: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798188/combined
What others are saying:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/from_up_on_poppy_hill/
[-mrl]
==================================================================
TOPIC: Josh Billings (letter of comment by Kip Williams)
In response to the quote in the 03/01/08 issue of the MT VOID ("A
dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than you love
yourself." --Josh Billings), Kip Williams writes:
Hmmmm. I don't doubt that Billings may have said something like
that, but having read his works in the past, I can't believe he'd
have said it like that. I'd expect something more like: "A dawgg
iz theee onely thing awn airth thet luvz yu moar then yu luvz yore
self," and then he'd spell his name some weird way while he was at
it. Just two or three weeks of exposure (I can't remember how long
the term of checkout was at that time) was enough to inoculate me
against the charms of wacky misspellings ever since, which
admittedly makes me a cranky old yank in a world of lolcats and
leetspeak. [-kw]
==================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
ERIC by Terry Pratchett (ISBN 978-0-380-82121-1) is the latest book
I have read in my "Discworld" odyssey. This is the ninth book in
the series, and it is oddly shorter than all the others. ERIC is
197 pages; the rest are 250 pages or more, and all but one of the
subsequent novels are at least 300 pages.) In fact, a quick word-
count estimate suggests that be Hugo rules, ERIC is not a novel,
but a novella. This is because it was originally published as a
large-format book illustrated by Josh Kirby. Now it is issued as a
regular paperback with no illustrations. (The title was originally
rendered as "Faust" crossed out followed with the name "Eric" hand-
printed. There are remnants of that but the title is basically
considered to be "Eric".)
Be that as it may, the shortness of ERIC means that the characters
and the situation are not quite as thoroughly developed as in other
novels. In particular, the title character has very little
characterization and seems to exist solely to kick off the plot,
which centers around Rincewind. Also, Pratchett relies on the
reader's knowledge of the Trojan War to fill in the necessary back
story rather than creating a new situation from scratch. [-ecl]
==================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
There are two novels that can change a bookish
fourteen-year old's life: THE LORD OF THE RINGS
and ATLAS SHRUGGED. One is a childish fantasy
that often engenders a lifelong obsession with
its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally
stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to
deal with the real world. The other, of course,
involves orcs.
--John Rogers