THE MT VOID
05/05/23 -- Vol. 41, No. 45, Whole Number 2274

Co-Editor: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
Co-Editor: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Sending Address: evelynchimelisleeper@gmail.com
All material is the opinion of the author and is copyrighted by the
author unless otherwise noted.
All comments sent or posted will be assumed authorized for
inclusion unless otherwise noted.

To subscribe or unsubscribe, send mail to eleeper@optonline.net
The latest issue is at <http://www.leepers.us/mtvoid/latest.htm>.
An index with links to the issues of the MT VOID since 1986 is at
<http://leepers.us/mtvoid/back_issues.htm>.

Topics:
Mini Reviews, Part 21 (THE BURNING SEA, SPIN ME ROUND,
THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE) (film reviews
by Mark R. Leeper and Evelyn C. Leeper)
The Vodka Is Good, But the Meat Is Rotten (comment
by Colin Harris)
This Week's Reading (MOBY-DICK and the new edition
of my annotations) (book comments
by Evelyn C. Leeper)

===================================================================

TOPIC: Mini Reviews, Part 21 (film reviews by Mark R. Leeper and
Evelyn C. Leeper)

This is the twenty-first batch of mini-reviews, including an older
film:

THE BURNING SEA (2022): Every year seems to bring a Scandinavian
film about some sort of disaster or danger at sea or from the sea
or underground (e.g., THE WAVE, THE QUAKE, A HIJACKING) and every
one of them has been fairly realistic and fairly enjoyable, so I
was looking forward to seeing THE BURNING SEA this year. But while
the script has some new ideas I have not seen in disaster films
before it does have a familiar plot. Part of an oil platform sinks
and is flooded, and a robot is sent in to search for survivors.
Then the rest of the platform explodes. It takes a quite a while
before we find out what the actual disaster is that is causing
this, and it turns out to be bigger than we thought.

Released theatrically 22 February 2022. Rating: high +2 (-4 to +4)
or 8/10

Film Credits:
<https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12753120/reference>

What others are saying:
<https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_burning_sea>

SPIN ME ROUND (2022): In SPIN ME ROUND, several managers (a half
dozen women and two men) of "Tuscan Grove" restaurants win a trip
to Italy to the headquarters of their chain. (If "Tuscan Grove"
reminds you of "Olive Garden", it is no coincidence.) Somehow it
seems too good to be true. (NO SPOILER: And it is. An early
example is when they are driven past the villa where they had been
told they would be staying, to a motel only slightly above a Motel
6 level.) The managers start getting on each other's nerves, and
the assistants of the chain's owner are equally annoying. This has
all the elements of a romantic comedy: a visit to a market, a yacht
trip, a fancy party, ... But SPIN ME ROUND put these elements
together in an offbeat--and sinister--way. The managers are
forbidden to leave the grounds, the totally banal cooking lessons
end and the training sessions consist of watching movies such as
LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL, and women keep disappearing.

SPIN ME ROUND would go well visually with Stanley Tucci's "Italy"
series, especially the episode in Liguria, but there is really very
little about authentic Italian food. Hey, it's about Olive Garden,
right?

Released theatrically and on various streaming services 19 August
2022. Rating: +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10

Film Credits:
<https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14596320/reference>

What others are saying:
<https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/spin_me_round>

THE ROMAN SPRING OF MRS. STONE (1961): I'm a sucker for Tennessee
Williams films, radio drama, etc. Williams's work seems to fall
into two classes: the total over-the-top plays (CAT ON A HOT TIN
ROOF, A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER, THE GLASS
MENAGERIE), and the more restrained works (SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH, THE
NIGHT OF THE IGUANA, and this one).

In this Vivien Leigh plays a character with some resemblance to
Blanche from A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, and some to herself. All
are women who are getting older, and must change to accept this.
Leigh herself does by taking this part, acknowledging that she is
no longer the beautiful Scarlett O'Hara, attracting all the men to
her. Mrs. Stone only accepts her age and her inability to play a
twenty-something from Shakespeare when she overhears audience
members comment on it. And Blanche never accepts it.

This was Leigh's penultimate movie, but it is also Warren Beatty's
second movie (he had done some television work before), Lotte
Lenya's second movie (her first was thirty years earlier; her next
was FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE), and Ernest Thesiger's last movie. So
it is basically book-ending several careers. [-ecl]

Released theatrically 28 December 1961. Rating: +2 (-4 to +4) or
7/10

Film Credits:
<https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055382/reference>

What others are saying:
<https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/
tennessee_williams_the_roman_spring_of_mrs_stone>

[-mrl/ecl]

===================================================================

TOPIC: The Vodka Is Good, But the Meat Is Rotten (comment by Colin
Harris)

Colin Harris reports on another mailing list:

I see that this text comes up on the Hugo nominating page as part
of the Intro.

"You already have the nomination qualifications for the 2023
Chengdu World Science Fiction Convention Hugo Awards. Please
nominate the 17 categories of Hugo Awards as well as the 'North
Star Award' and 'Amazing Award', a total of 19 categories of
awards, and click 'Submit' at the bottom of the page after
nomination 'Nominate' button...."

North Star should obviously be Lodestar and Amazing Award should be
Astounding Award ... which presumably results from the Chinese
website contractor retranslating the Chinese version back into
English rather than using the English original. Particularly
unfortunate perhaps given that these two names were both the
subject of a lot of debate in recent years! [-ch]

===================================================================

TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)

Announcing Version 2.0 of my "Annotations to MOBY-DICK"!

From my Introduction to the new edition:

After I produced the first version of these annotations in 2018, I
was listening to the audiobook of MOBY-DICK and heard a paragraph
that I was 1) sure I would have annotated it, and 2) sure I had not
annotated it. It turns out that the edition I had been using
(Penguin Popular Classics, ISBN 978-0-140-62062-7), supplemented
with the Project Gutenberg version (mostly for cutting and pasted
long quotations), did not include all of "Melville's notes". These
*are* included in the Norton Critical Edition (ISBN
0-393-09670-X)--or at least more are--but it is not clear whether
these were included in some published edition of MOBY-DICK, or
whether they were extracted from other separate articles, letters,
etc. The polished language of the notes indicates (to me, anyway)
that they were not mere marginalia on some earlier draft. The
Penguin edition does not label them as Melville's notes, because
unlike the Norton Critical Edition, it does not any any of its own
notes.

I have added all the notes (labeled as such), even if I have no
additional annotation, since it is possible that they should be
considered part of the text (as indeed they were in the audio
version).

In retrospect, it would probably have been better using the Norton
Critical Edition rather than the Penguin Popular Classics edition,
but I did not have the Norton Critical Edition at the time. The
first few essays in the Norton Critical Edition discuss the
variations in the text between the first American and the first
English editions. However, I don't think these variations would
have affected my comments in any but very minor ways. (Although
the absence of the Epilogue in the first English edition explains
why several contemporary reviewers seemed not to have read it, and
I have now so noted this.) A totally different reason is that the
Norton Critical Edition is bound better; my copy of the Penguin
Popular Classics now has the last two dozen pages or so detached.

While I was discovering all this about the Norton Critical Edition,
I also found this in the Foreword to that edition:

"We have annotated the text sparingly, most often when a passage
presents a problem of identification or recognition which a reader
cannot solve without the aid of a desk dictionary, or when a reader
might not become aware that there is a problem, and so might miss
the point of a passage. ... The allusions in the book come thick
and fast, but they normally reveal their relevant denotative and
connotative meanings by their contexts. For example, what is
important about Cato in the first paragraph of Chapter 1 is not his
birth date and death date, but the philosophical flourish with
which he commits suicide, and the contrast of Ishmael's less
desperate substitute. Footnotes to such limited allusions are
irrelevant, and sometimes defeat Melville's (or Ishmael's)
purposes. Footnotes which identify all of the allusions in 'The
Whiteness of the Whale" do more than destroy the sense of Ishmael
as the storyteller--they frustrate his appeal to the reader to
follow him *imaginatively*: "But in a matter like this, subtlety
appeals to subtlety, and without imagination no man can follow
another into these halls."