MT VOID, 05/17/24 -- Vol. 42, No. 46, Whole Number 2328

THE MT VOID
05/17/24 -- Vol. 42, No. 46, Whole Number 2328
Co-Editor: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Co-Editor: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
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Topics:
         Correction (oops by Evelyn C. Leeper)
         INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (film review
                 by Mark R. Leeper)
         Word Use and Mis-Use (letters of comment by Tim Merrigan
                 and Paul Dormer)
         This Week's Reading (DARWIN SLEPT HERE)
                 (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Correction (oops by Evelyn C. Leeper)
In response to my review of I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE in the
05/10/24/issue of the MT VOID, Pete Rubinstein points out:
[Evelyn wrote,] "I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE (1949): I WAS A MALE WAR
BRIDE came out a few years after the war, when the bombed-out
European setting could be used for a comedy.  (In general, most
wartime comedies were set in the States, or well behind enemy
lines, e.g., London.)"
London was behind enemy lines?  I need to refresh my knowledge of
WW II.  [-pir]
Evelyn responds:
Ooops!  Here I made exactly the sort of mistake I bemoaned in the
05/03/24 issue in my comments on word use and mis-use: I mixed my
expressions.  What I meant was either "well away from enemy lines"
or "behind Allied lines."  [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (film review by Mark
R. Leeper)
[For the 40th anniversary of INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM,
we are reprinting Mark's review from 1984.]
There is more to making a sequel than simply reusing characters.
How the characters strike an audience will be very dependent on
the style of the filmmaker.  If the style of a filmmaker varies
radically from one film to another, each film of a series may
still stand on its own, but the seam will be painfully obvious
between the films and the series as a whole will be weaker.  This
is the problem with the James Bond series.  The Bond of FROM
RUSSIA WITH LOVE is a hard-as-nails secret agent who can be suave
if given a chance.  The Bond of MOONRAKER is a suave bungler whom
the scriptwriter contrives to always be at the right place at the
right time.  The transition was slow but the series as a whole is
weaker.  There are many fewer films in the Indiana Jones series
from Spielberg and Lucas--the second film just came out--but
already the two films do not fit well together.
INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM amalgamates the styles of
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and Spielberg's 1941.  The result is
enjoyable but a real disappointment.  RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK
copied the serial style by taking itself semi-seriously.  It is
nicely ambiguous as to whether the audience is supposed to take
seriously scenes like Jones being dragged behind a truck protected
by only a leather jacket.  The viewer is free to believe such
scenes or guffaw at them.  INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM
takes the scene a step further by having Jones stop a speeding
coal train by dragging his foot on the wheel.  Again the viewer
can ask, "Is that for real?"  But when Spielberg adds billows of
white smoke coming from the shoe, turning the scene into a joke,
the answer is a resounding "Of course not!"  The
serious/tongue-in-cheek ambiguity that worked so well in the first
film is taken away.  When Spielberg cinematically tells his
audience "this scene is just for laughs" the adventure aspect is
taken away.  We no longer have an Indiana Jones film but an
Indiana Jones cartoon in live action.
And the humor of INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM is all too
often a brand that simply does not work: the contrived mechanical
humor of 1941.  The opening nightclub sequence of INDIANA JONES
AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM is just Spielberg asking what the elements
are present in a nightclub and how to combine them to create as
much chaos as possible.  Spielberg just said to himself, "Okay,
the diamond is on the floor.  Now how do we make it hard to pick
up?  I know--suddenly a crowd of dancers comes out and kicks it
around the floor.  Now what?  I know--a bucket of ice is spilled
on the floor so you can't find the diamond."  The addition of this
clockwork humor fills the proverbial much-needed gap in the first
film.  It is not in the style of the 40's serial the way RAIDERS
OF THE LOST ARK was; it is 1941 humor and this film comes off as
Spielberg's attempt to vindicate that style of filmmaking.
As far as the plot is concerned, this film had nearly the
potential of RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.  It starts with Jones
frenetically finishing up some previous adventure in which he was
procuring a rare and valuable find in return for a diamond.  Once
again his find is stolen from him and his customer attempts to
kill him with a novel death trap involving flying him thousands of
miles, then sacrificing a valuable plane on the sound assumption
that airplanes are cheaper than bullets.  This literally drops
Jones (together with a nightclub singer and a boy sidekick) into
his next adventure, the return of a sacred stone to an (Asian)
Indian village.  The stone is being kept at an Indian palace built
on top of the temple of a thugee cult which is built on a slave
labor mine.  Jones goes down only the three layers so misses the
drug ring, the ancient artifact counterfeiting factory, and the
bordello, which were the next three floors down in the
sub-basement.
Like any Lucas or Spielberg film (yes, including 1941, though
perhaps not THX-1138), INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM
entertains.  The viewer lays down his five bucks gladly, sure that
he is going to get five bucks worth of entertainment.  INDIANA
JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM is worth the price of admission, but
RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and STAR WARS\FR were worth the price and
some more besides.  INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, with its
gaps in logic and contrivance, is worth only the admission price.
The next Indiana Jones film may not be worth that if Spielberg
doesn't stop having fun making films instead of getting down to
the serious business of making fun films.  [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Word Use and Mis-Use (letters of comment by Tim Merrigan
and Paul Dormer)
In response to Paul Dormer's comments on word mis-use in the
05/10/24 issue of the MT VOID, Tim Merrigan writes:
[Paul wrote,] "I remember, some years ago, seeing a description of
a forthcoming TV programme.  It was about someone setting up a
company to provide office lunches.  The person was described as an
ancestor of the Earl of Sandwich."  [-pd]
I note, that while unlikely, it is possible for there to be a
living ancestor of the current Earl of Sandwich, if his mother or
one or more of her ancestors is living.  [-tm]
Paul replied:
Both his parents died in the nineties and were in their eighties.
Unlikely indeed any of his ancestors are still living.  [-pd]
Paul also added:
Incidentally, a follow-up is a letter in The Guardian a while back
from someone complaining that British Summer Time (daylight
saving) starts end of March, just after the solstice but it ends
at the end of October, a month after the solstice.  Of course,
they meant equinox, not solstice.  [-pd]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
DARWIN SLEPT HERE: DISCOVERY, ADVENTURE. AND SWIMMING IGUANAS IN
CHARLES DARWIN'S SOUTH AMERICA by Eric Simons (The Overlook Press,
ISBN 978-1-59020-299-9) says hardly anything about Darwin's time
in the Galapagos Islands, which is just as well--that aspect of
the voyage of the Beagle has been covered by many books.  Much
less time is spent on Darwin's time in South America, even though
that time profoundly affected Darwin's thoughts, attitudes, and
perceptions.  (Or at least that is Simons's contention.)
Simons fell in love with the idea of tracing Darwin's footsteps
when he found himself next to the Beagle Channel in Tierra del
Fuego and seeing Darwin's THE VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE in an
English-language bookstore, decided to read about the ship (and
its voyage) after whom the channel was named.
Simons splits his (and Darwin's) travel into three parts:
Scientific exploration on the east coast of South America, a look
at the politics and culture that Darwin found there, and a more
chronological journey up the west coast.
The problem is that most of the places Simons visits are, frankly,
boring.  His Stories of hiking around in the rain looking for a
specific hacienda, or asking a series of people in a town about
Darwin, only to discover that none of them knew anything about him
(at least in conjunction with their town), make one desire to read
THE VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE instead.
And just to cap this off, the typography is ... terrible.
Normally books have an even right margin by using variable-width
fonts.  This has a variable-width font, but also compensates for
long words that would extend past the right margin by putting the
word on the next line, and inserting spaces *between letters
within the first word* on the line that is left somewhat
underpopulated.  Also occasionally the letters in a word are
mashed together (perhaps to solve the reverse problem).
My recommendation: read THE VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE instead (or at
least first).  [-ecl]
===================================================================
                      Mark Leeper
                      mleeper@optonline.net
           One cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.
                                           --Stephen Hawking