@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @@@@@@@ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @ @ @ @ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society 07/10/26 -- Vol. 45, No. 2, Whole Number 2440
Table of Contents
Mini Reviews, Part 20 (film reviews by Evelyn C. Leeper):
THE GREAT BUCK HOWARD (2009): This is a quirky film that played in only 55 theaters, and grossed under a million dollars worldwide, yet it has a certain charm. It also has a killer cast: John Malkovich, Colin Hanks, Emily Blunt, and Ricky Jay, with George Takei, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, and Tom Hanks in cameo roles. Malkovich plays the eponymous character, a mentalist who was once a regular on "The Tonight Show" ("with Johnny Carson", as he insists on including), but is now reduced to playing to partly filled auditoriums in places like Bakersfield, Wausau, and Willamette. Then suddenly things change--but is this a good thing? I highly recommend this movie.
DRACULA (1931): I watched this with the Steve Haberman commentary on the 75th Anniversary Edition, and I have to say I disagree with him a lot, not just in his constant denigration of the George Melford Spanish-language version, but in his inexplicable claim that the roughly torn piece of cardboard stuck to a lamp in a scene in Mina's bedroom was "set-dressing", even as he admitted it was to shield her face from light from the lamp. Is he claiming that Mina decided to leave the lamp on, but ripped off a piece of cardboard to block the light?
My opinion of Haberman is not improved by his repeated use of the term "Chinaman" to refer to a character in a (different) movie.
I also watched the "Monster Tracks" bonus feature--or tried to. This consists of text commentary in green lettering over the bottom of the picture. It is hard to read because it doesn't show up well against the picture itself; in fact, it was so unreadable at times that I gave up.
HAMNET (2025): I'm a fan of Shakespeare's plays in variations from traditional to re-imagined (e.g., the 1995 RICHARD III or Akira Kurosawa's THRONE OF BLOOD). And I even like films about Shakespeare (e.g., SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE). But this just fell flat with me. I don't understand what Chloe Zao was trying to do. And when in the commentary she talked about how she had the cast attend a tantric polarity workshop, I concluded I never would understand it.
One interesting bit of trivia: the actor playing Hamlet in the play within the movie is the older brother of the actor playing Shakespeare's young son Hamnet.
[-ecl]
Humble Bundle / John Scalzi Charity Sale (comments by Paul S. R. Chisholm):
Humble Bundle has a deal on 22 of John Scalzi's ebooks for $18. The deal runs through July 24, and includes:
This deal may only be available in the U.S.
Find the deal at:
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/john-scalzi-collection-old-mans-war-more-tor-books-books
Find all Humble Bundle book deals at:
https://www.humblebundle.com/books
[-psrc]
Evelyn adds:
Humble Bundle sells collections of books (and games) with a minimum price and with a portion of the price going towards charity and the rest split among the creators. As Paul noted, you get to juggle the percentages.
The formats supported are:
EPUB Widely supported by most e-readers, including Nook and
iPad. It allows for flexible text display.
PDF A universal format that can be viewed on almost any device,
though it lacks some adjustable features.
CBZ A comic book archive format designed for sequential viewing
of images, ideal for comic books.
Note that MOBI is not supported! Most Humble Bundle books are DRM-free so you can probably convert them to MOBI from EPUB using Calibre or some such.
[-ecl]
The World Cup and Classic Science Fiction (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
As reported by GBN https://www.gbnews.com/sport/football/england-vs-mexico-ben-leo-mexico-city-fireworks-england-team-hotel:
"Watch the extraordinary moment GB News star Ben Leo confronted a group of rowdy Mexican fans trying to keep the England team awake at night outside their hotel.
Shortly after midnight in Mexico City, unsportsmanlike supporters began launching fireworks, beating drums and chanting opposite the Three Lions' digs.
But with England already facing an uphill battle to progress some 2,200 metres above sea level, Ben took matters into his own hands to ask why they needed to resort to this..." [-GBN]
ObSF: "A Slight Case of Sunstroke" by Arthur C. Clarke, anthologized in TALES OF TEN WORLDS and THE COLLECTED STORIES OF ARTHUR C. CLARKE. [-ecl]
How AI Is Changing Language (comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
In the 06/19/26 issue of the MT VOID, I wrote about AI detection. This is a follow-up.)
In an essay in The Guardian, "How AI is changing language", writes about the inherent problems of AI detection, and some of it is what I have been saying, but he also notes a different problem.
He cites Claire Hardaker, a professor of forensic linguistics, as saying "her respondents tend to rely on a few quick rules of thumb to identify AI language, including the presence of cliches and the use of dashes. The “rule of three”, where words or phrases are arranged in a satisfying trio, is also thought to be a giveaway."
Before I even read this, I had noted in a comment to File 770 on AI writing ) https://file770.com/pixel-scroll-7-1-26-alas-poor-pixel/#comments), "I suspect if Edward Gibbon’s work were run through an AI detector, it would decide his triads made it AI-written."
As Shariatmadari goes on to say, "all these 'tells' are also characteristic of human writing, which, after all, the large language models (LLMs) that produce them were trained on. 'You could go back to Charles Dickens and say he had AI, because he used the em dash too.' And orators have known about the rule of three ever since Julius Caesar said Veni, vidi, vici."
But the different problem?
"The problem is that not only does AI train on human writing, but humans are stylistically influenced by AI, the interplay creating a kind of linguistic hall of mirrors."
In other words, if you read enough AI-generated writing, you will start to copy it.
The entire (fascinating) article is at:
[-ecl]
This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper):
Our book-and-movie group read/watched the second and third episodes of THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES. (We had done the first episode a few months ago.) The first thing to note is that Bradbury set his stories on what is now called in science fiction circles "Old Mars", a term coined by Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin in the anthology of the same name. Bradbury wrote these stories before the Mariner and Viking missions told us that Mars's atmosphere was too thin to support humans, or that there would not be liquid water on the surface (and certainly not in the quantities shown in the film, which looked more like rivers than small trickles), or that there would not be clouds in a blue sky (shades of TOTAL RECALL here).
And even though we knew that Mars's gravity was well below that of Terra's long before Bradbury, he seemed to assume it was close to Terra's. (As did the film THE LAST DAYS ON MARS and THE MARTIAN. Well, they're filming on Terra.)
Some of it seemed familiar. Sam and Elma's hot dog stand (in "The Off Season") is not that different in concept from the diner near the air base in SEVEN DAYS IN MAY. Both sets of owners thought they had picked an ideal location; both were wrong (for different reasons).
And speaking of the hot dog stand, where did Sam get the hot dogs and hamburgers we was going to serve thousands of customers? For that matter, where did any of the food come from? We see no farming, and one cannot transport enough food from Terra to Mars to support the population shown.
And while the outside of the buildings looks modular and spartan, the bedroom we see has wallpaper, a fancy padded headboard for the bed, two very decorative (and breakable) lamps, and a whole host of other things unlikely to be found in a colony founded only a couple of decades earlier.
Another familiar story was "The Long Years", which reminded me very much of the "Twilight Zone" episode "The Lonely", and also of FORBIDDEN PLANET, both having sort of average guys single-handedly building advanced androids/robots (primarily for its language and expressed attitudes, common in 1950, but racist in 1997).
The mini-series dropped some of the book's episodes: "There Will Come Soft Rains" and "Usher II", neither of which really have anything to do with Mars, and "Way in the Middle of the Air", which was dropped from the 1997 edition of THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES as well. The re-issue of the book in 1997 changed the dates of the various stories and bridging comments from 1999-2026 to 2001-2057. It is of course now out of date again. One (well, this one, anyway) hopes that the next publication will restore the original dates.
Conversely, the mini-series included episodes not in the first publications of THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, such as "The Fire Balloons", which did not appear in a regular edition of THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES until the 1997 edition. (It was written after the first publication of THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES in 1950.) This explains why, when I watched the mini-series, that section looked entirely unfamiliar--I had read a 1967 printing of the 1950 edition.
There was also a personal moment for me. In the episode "The Silent Towns", Bernadette Peters uses a lip pencil (a.k.a. lip liner) to touch up her make-up. I immediately thought of my mother, who also used a lip pencil (as she called it). When we lived in Rantoul, Illinois, in the early 1960s, she needed a new one, but apparently such an exotic item wasn't available in the somewhat rural town, so she ended up asking a friend in New York City to buy her a couple and mail them to her. Why this memory remains to me after sixty years is a mystery. [-ecl]
Evelyn C. Leeper
evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com
Quote of the Week:
I do not try to dance better than anyone else.
I only try to dance better than myself.
--Mikhail Baryshnikov
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