Studio12point Blog

Birthday Card Image For Wife

2012-01-22T21:03:00.001-05:00

Post-It Cartoon: January

2012-01-15T13:01:00.003-05:00

Sketches January 11, 2012

2012-01-11T18:56:00.000-05:00

Post-It Cartoon: Snooze

2012-01-05T18:22:00.000-05:00

Top Ten (Thirteen) Movies in 2011 I Had No Desire To See

2011-12-28T20:20:00.005-05:00

This is my third such list, and if you want an explanation on why I think this is the sort of year-end list that matters, the others are here and here. I had trouble trimming this year's list down, as usual. As for what I did go see this year, I didn't dig on many of the well thought-of movies this year--Harry Potter 7.2 and Hugo come to mind--but I had my fun with the superheroes.

10. Transformers 3 / Pirates 4

Even though I had the least interest in these particular returns to the well, I'm putting them in the 10 spot because honestly, who has the energy anymore?

It takes place on the dark side of the moon,

but they think you can see the Earth from there.

9. Cars 2

Another sequel, but deserving of its own slot because it’s a rare item: a Pixar movie I didn't want to go see. That was because it's a Pixar sequel to a Pixar movie that bored the socks off of anybody with the slightest concept of how much love and attention internal combustion automobiles actually deserve.

"Hyar, hyar..." none. NONE!

8. The Help

It's 2011. If a one minute long trailer for a movie that claims to be about black vicissitudes in the American South features approximately 45 seconds of Emma Stone smiling... or flouncing... or smiling and flouncing… you should be laughing hysterically. And feeling a little nauseous. I only got to do the latter during the theatrical trailer, cause nobody seemed interested in joining me with the former.

Thank God her story's finally being told.

7. Crazy, Stupid, Love

I have nothing against rom-coms. This is strictly a punctuation gripe.

I also get to use this photo... cause... cause it's funny...

not any other reason...

6. Conan The Barbarian/ Immortals

The time when Sword & Sorcery could be produced theatrically has come and past. You can find more boobs and better viscerally-charged blood spilling on HBO… during Curb Your Enthusiasm, more times than not.

"And this, this is a PG-13 orgy.
Act impressed, you can almost see a nipple."

5. Battle: Los Angeles

Ooh, shaky cam and war porn? The only way it could be less interesting and more depressing to my aging brain is if they'd cast it entirely with mixed martial artists and scored it in metal.

Xbox boot up noise.

4. No Strings Attached/Friends With Benefits

Further proof that North American movie culture has been neutered. Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis starred in films about having casual sex relationships and not only did I not want to see those movies, but I haven't even bothered looking up the so-called "good parts" on Mr. Skin.

Also, Kutcher.

3. J. Edgar

Clint Eastwo…. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

"It's that guy in the back row. Doesn't he know the Academy loves Clint?"

2. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Funny this being here, cause I sat through the Swedish films with the wife. And they showed me exactly what I was expecting to see, having heard about the incredibly overrated potboiler novels written as an ultimate Marty Sue indulgence, and not a little bit as distasteful semi-porn. Add in David Fincher's penchant for being David Fincher, and I don't see this going anywhere I need to visit.

Middle-aged Swedish journalists take down Nazis and are catnip

to damaged young vixens... they do not expire from heart attacks

after walking up the stairs.

1. Sucker Punch

Definitely the winner, combining the "empty stylistic crap" feel of The Immortals with the "twelve year old cursing me out over a headset" feel of Battle: Los Angeles, and a "holy crap, this is too sexist-y and douche-y even for a blogger who still reads comics" that was all its own...

"Okay, ladies, tilt forward a little more: we need to see more... uh, empowerment!"

WIP: Summer In Gotham

2011-12-23T16:14:00.000-05:00

I developed this out of an absent-minded sketch, mostly to get back to some basic inking. I hope to eventually give it a detailed background, along with some warm colours.

I must be feeling the winter blues.

Post-It Cartoon: Dream On

2011-12-21T22:51:00.001-05:00

Sketches December 14, 2011

2011-12-14T21:42:00.000-05:00

Post It Doodles December, 2011

2011-12-11T20:08:00.001-05:00

Wikipedia Is Asking For Money Again

2011-12-07T21:06:00.001-05:00

Somehow, even though I use it everyday and feel it gets a bum-rap sometimes, I just can't work up the enthusiasm to contribute.

WIP: Hunting Up Help 3

2011-12-04T21:15:00.001-05:00

I've taken this one further into painting but can't seem to get the lighting right or finish it.

Thoughts On: Hugo (Marketing Edition)

2011-11-30T19:41:00.001-05:00

Marketing Guy: Hey, I'm back from the screening. Scorsese's got a new picture.

Other Marketing Guy: Italian-American mobsters. F-bombs. Disappointingly few boobs.

Marketing Guy: No.

Other Marketing Guy: Irish mobsters then. At least the F-bombs will be cheery.

Marketing Guy: No... it's a kid's movie.

Other Marketing Guy: Kid's movie?

Marketing Guy: It's a magical Christmas kid's movie, dude. Full of nostalgia and whimsy.

Other Marketing Guy: Like … like, what, Robert Zemeckis, sacharine-til-I-puke magical Christmas kid movie?

Marketing Guy: Well, not really. There's a kid in it. Though I can't imagine a kid actually watching this thing. But it's from the kid's point of view. And there's snow. I remember snow. So Christmas movie, right?

Other Marketing Guy: It's a Martin-Scorsese-directed, kinda kid movie. And we're supposed to sell that?

Marketing Guy: It's in 3-D.

Other Marketing Guy: Oh!... Wait, what?

Marketing Guy: With nostalgia and whimsy.

Other Marketing Guy: Okay, nostalgia and whimsy.

Marketing Guy: Well, nostalgia for the birth of cinema… and whimsy at being able to echo its effect with the 3D conceit. Y'know, like the audience who supposedly ducked out of the way when they first saw the film called L'Arrivée d'un Train en Gare de la Ciotat? And this is a 3D film. Get it?

Other Marketing Guy: …

Marketing Guy: ...

Other Marketing Guy: What the s**t?

Marketing Guy: Yeah. I know.

Other Marketing Guy: What's it about?

Marketing Guy: This French kid's dad is dead and he's an orphan--

Other Marketing Guy: F***ing wonderful. Sells itself.

Marketing Guy: -- he lives in a train station and he takes an interest in this old toy maker who's kind of a sad, cranky douche. And there's this robot.

Other Marketing Guy: Finally. Okay. Robot. Talk to me.

Marketing Guy: Well, it's a turn of the century automaton, really. It doesn't, like, move or speak or anything.

Other Marketing Guy: Well that certainly lends itself to 3D.

Marketing Guy: Yeah. About as much as all of Scorsese's patented camera movement and concept shots. Speaking of which. Aspirin?

Other Marketing Guy: Bottom drawer.

Marketing Guy: Anyway, this is not unmanageable. We run a commercial with this thing in it, it'll look like a it's a movie about See Threepio and a kid living together in a magical railway station.

Other Marketing Guy: Okay, okay. We can work with that. Who's in it?

Marketing Guy: British kid, Hit Girl, Borat, and Ghandi, and they're all playing Parisians.

Other Marketing Guy: Now you're just busting my balls

Marketing Guy: Jude Law's in it.

Other Marketing Guy: Well, that's something--

Marketing Guy: For five minutes, before the credits.

Other Marketing Guy: Christ. Well, too bad. In the commercial he goes. So, let me guess, what, the kid and the cranky old douche are raped to death by Nazis at the end, right?

Marketing Guy: No, no, it's got a happy ending, I swear. Well, it's really sad for a long time, cause the ole douche is really sad and really cranky and can't face his horrible, horrible past. Like we're constantly reminded what horrific heartbreak he's been through. Finally, you're sitting there wondering who got killed or who he had to kill, or whatever. And it's all up to the kid to healing the old man's impossibly broken heart.

Other Marketing Guy: >Sigh.< So what's the mystery?

Marketing Guy: I don't wanna say.

Other Marketing Guy: Dude, it's not like I'm gonna sit through this. Just tell me.

Marketing Guy: No, it's not that I don't want to spoil it or anything. It's like this huge dramatic buildup--

Other Marketing Guy: Okay, now you have to tell me.

Marketing Guy: Um… he was… he was a famous film director and now he's not anymore. And then the last ten minutes are like "Hoorah for obscure, genius film directors!"

Other Marketing Guy: …

Marketing Guy: Remember: you demanded I tell you.

Other Marketing Guy: Yes. Yes I did.

Marketing Guy: You did.

Other Marketing Guy: No denying I did.

Marketing Guy: So, commercials: Jude Law, See Threepio, magic railway station, 3D, 3D, 3D--right?

Other Marketing Guy: F**king definitely, dude.

Sketches For November 27, 2011

2011-11-27T16:10:00.001-05:00

Speed Painting: Horse

2011-11-20T18:24:00.001-05:00

I wanted to get a little more familiar with animal physiology (I feel icky writing that sentence). I also wanted to do something in watercolor for the first time. But I quickly realized that you can't blend anything in Painter X watercolor. Which makes sense cause you can't blend real watercolours. Anyway, I had to switch back to oils to make something out of what I had.

I will go back to watercolors, though. But I'll go back with a game plan.

Source: A couple of horse references from Google search.
Time: 1 1/2 hours
Using: Painter X
Brushes:started with watercolors, but switch to oils.

A Darwyn Cooke Rip-Off

2011-11-18T20:23:00.001-05:00

I was looking through Google images of artists to rip-off and decided to try Darwyn Cooke. I've always been a fan of the marriage of clean brush inking and retro style.

As my subject, the winsome Wasp.

No professional-level brushing here. I did this with a Staedler marker I keep at work and added in the colour at home. Doing this make me realize I haven't inked in forever...

WIP: Istanbul Travel Poster

2011-11-17T22:01:00.001-05:00

Okay, time to admit an ugly truth: when it comes to painting anything other than people I haven't the foggiest clue what to do with myself. This travel poster commemorating our recent trip to Istanbul went through so many iterations that I couldn't conceivably list all the things I tried to make it work.

There was something about trying to be impressionistic with all these geometric shapes that did not come naturally to me--at all. Maybe because it's something I never even attempted with conventional media.

This final primitive image is a detail of a larger image that I could not tame and gave up on. I had to cut my losses and move on before I grew too discouraged.

Source: A host of photos of the Blue Mosque as reference and landscape paintings for inspiration on technique.
Time: Weren't no speed painting, I can tell you that.
Using: Painter X, Photoshop.
Painter X brushes used: grainy blenders, oils, loaded palette knife, dry palette knife
Photoshop brushes used: watercolors
Photoshop filters used: multiplied the painting over an old paper texture.

Post-It Cartoon: Green Dumb

2011-11-15T22:11:00.001-05:00

Digital Quick Sketch: Daredevil

2011-11-11T23:10:00.001-05:00

This Daredevil piece started out promising but then I over-detailed it without exactly adding any realism. I lost the sketchy, moody look a speed painting is supposed to have but didn't really gain any zip from the half-assed detailing I plopped down on top of it.

It's also bugging me that I can't figure out a way to make a textured, moody background in Corel Painter X. I could easily switch over to Photoshop and whip one up with a custom brush, but, darn it, Painter X has all these expert brushes meant to simulate actual painting processes--I should be able to whip up a heckuva good textured background the custom way, shouldn't I?

Source: None.
Time: 25-30 minutes.
Using: Painter X
Painter X brushes used: clumpy brush, wet oils, dry palette knife (my new favourite brush), airbrush (sigh), and dodge and burn effects.

Speed Painting: Andrew Loomis Study

2011-11-07T15:28:00.001-05:00

This one was a surprising slog, especially after the successes of my Lion In Winter and Ms. Marvel pieces. The result depresses me. I suppose I should have spent more time on my drafting before I switched to the painting, and that's obviously part of the problem.

Not doing my due diligence at the drafting stage of an Andrew Loomis knock-off is self-defeating, I guess, but sometimes I just want to get straight to the painting/experimenting part of the job. This really shouldn't have been tried "speed paint" style.

I expect in the future to try more knock-off work. J.C. Leyendecker, Alex Raymond, and a host of other vintage greats are all waiting to be butchered.

Source: A screen capture of Loomis's work (no tracing or image manipulation--obviously)
Time: 1 1/2 - 2 hours (ugh).
Using: Painter X, some fidgeting in Photoshop
Brushes: too many to list, all in an effort to approximate Master Loomis.

Sketches November 2, 2011

2011-11-02T18:43:00.001-04:00

Post-It Cartoon: Boo!

2011-10-31T16:58:00.004-04:00

Post-It Cartoon: 99% Jerk

2011-10-26T21:09:00.001-04:00

Sketches October 10, 2011

2011-10-10T20:48:00.002-04:00

Ms. Marvel Poster

2011-10-02T21:52:00.008-04:00

It was time to tackle hair... a daunting thing... so this is no speed painting. I tried every brush that Corel Painter X came with.

Actually, the big accomplishment here was managing to get the colour decent. The reference image was a monochrome picture of actress Jennifer Morrison, from an advert for her new TV show. There was no use of the source picture in the production of the final image, of which I'm terribly proud. (Although that did at first result in a slightly "tranny"-looking face: see below, where I had to lasso, copy, paste and squash her back into shape).

Finally, I slapped a mask on her for fun. Cause I dig the superheroes and because Marvel Studios should make a good chick flick version of one.

Post-It Sketches September 29, 2011

2011-09-28T21:16:00.001-04:00

September Birthday Cards (As Bang! Cards)

2011-09-18T12:03:00.000-04:00

There's a whole mess of birthdays for me to do in September, so I grouped all of them together as Bang! cards (a game I've recently introduced to the family).

Thoughts On: Griftopia

2011-09-07T13:49:00.002-04:00

It took me five starts to get through this book, and it's just too depressing to give my impressions on, so here's a picture of Nute Gunray, Viceroy of the Trade Federation, from George Lucas's silly but fairly prescient Star Wars prequels.

Goldman Sachs joke, political party of your choice joke, tea bagger joke, dying regulations joke, your choice... me, I'm in the fetal position.

Speed Painting: The Lion In Winter

2011-08-12T18:45:00.000-04:00

I consider this a breakthrough image. I didn't think I could achieve this level of detail and photo-realism. I'm more than a little worried I wont be able to reproduce the stuff I learned on this.

As amazing as this'll seem to anyone who knows anything about painting or photography, there was a point where I looked from my painting to the (very) low res photo of Peter O'Toole and exclaimed "Oh, his hair is blue! I have to put blue in here!" Yes, even though a thousand art books and art tutorials and art classes have been telling me since I was a teenager that light and color are transitive.

I have a very literal brain and it fights with stuff like that. Green in skin tone, blue in hair. I think that's why I've always preferred pen and ink.

Source: low res Googled vidcap (no tracing)

Time: 3 hours (not so speedy, I guess)

Using: Painter X, Photoshop CS2

Brushes: artist oils, dodge and burn

WIP: Hunting Up Help 2

2011-08-11T17:41:00.001-04:00

Birthday Card For Niece #1 (No Text)

2011-08-03T20:34:00.002-04:00

Thoughts On: Captain America: The First Avenger

2011-07-26T21:58:00.002-04:00

I think the first hour of Captain America: The First Avenger is the best single hour of comic book moviemaking ever. It is touching and economical. In comparison to it, the endless melodrama of Spider-man 2 and the bombastic nihilism of The Dark Knight are charmless horse-poop.

But Captain America's second hour is a mess. Not bad exactly, but slight and sloppy. It's pretty clear the money and the guts ran out during the production. After taking us out on the town for the wooing of a lifetime--caviar and compliments, wining and dining--we were--to put it crudely--porked in the backseat of a Subaru and left blinking and unsatisfied (and slightly sticky) on the side of the road.

As soon as Cap puts the actual outfit on--as soon as he's actually Captain America--the movie detaches itself from… everything. Not only is there no sense of peril or place or context, there's no sense of basic geography or that a war is going on. We get no World War II love. At all.

And really, what is there not to love?

What we get are montages and brief action set pieces without the slightest bit of context. Cap and his commandos are here, then there, then here. Seemingly it's no problem for his small band of fighters to get anywhere with the E.T.O. to fight the Red Skull, who's doing… something. We don't know what. Advanced weaponry and endless goons aside, Skull's apparently a little namby-pamby as a bad guy. He's so underdeveloped here you kinda wish there were Nazis, y'know, for the dimensionality.

(Anytime you're wishing for generic Nazis to show up for dimensionality it's a bad sign.)

Next thing you know, bam!, Cap's on his motorcycle going somewhere else. Where? We don't know. Is it dangerous? We don't know. Is he in danger? Probably not, he's Captain America. (Which seems to be how we're supposed to read the second half of the movie: there's no danger, just Cap's fateful freeze looming in the future.)

And, bam!, like that we're in the climax, which I still don't know where it began or how everybody got there. Cap needs to catch up with the Red Skull, and bam!, Cap's girlfriend is there with a car, and then he hops onto Red Skull's big black plane, and then bam!, he goes down in the ocean, and…

What the hell happened? Nothing was built up whatsoever. Cap's love interest story was touching, but the rest of it didn't seem to matter at all.

I don't know if Marvel was scared of making the second half of the movie too dark, or of being disrespectful by doing more World War II stuff, or if there was footage they shot that just didn't work. Hopefully there weren't time-consideration cuts, because a two hour and thirty minute version of this movie with a second half that took itself seriously would've made for a genre masterwork.

Oh, and Chris Evans was Captain America; his performance here was so good, so on target with the Captain America from the comics of my youth, that I would let him French kiss me. He went full-on sincere, brought vulnerability and humility, and managed to sound tough without any bombast whatsoever. Kiss me, Chris.

Use your hands too, if y'wanna... just keep 'em outside the clothes, sport.

Finally, now that the two favorite superheroes of my childhood--Spider-man and Captain America--have both been adapted by big budget efforts, I find that they've suffered similar fates.

Like Spidey, Cap got a first movie that was brilliant in spots, and with a character portrayal that was heartfelt and accurate, but in a film that was just too off the mark with its bad guy, its drama and its threats. Now all I can hope is Cap follows in Spidey's footsteps a little farther: getting a follow-up that gives him one real moment in the sun... before the third film shows up and has, y'know, a pie-eating contest or a Busbey Berkeley water-dance number, or whatever "third movie ridiculousness" that's bound to happen.

Thoughts On: Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 2

2011-07-20T20:01:00.000-04:00

I was sad during Harry Potter Eight. Not because my time with Harry and his spotty compatriots was finally coming to an end, but because I wasn't feeling it.

(I was also sad because Harry's so obviously going to trash Captain America: The First Avenger at the box office. Regardless of reviews good or bad, superhero-fatigue, Harry-mania and a lower theatre count than any other blockbuster this summer are going to jump up and down on one of my favourite superheroes.)

Also sad? Alan Rickman's transformation into a menopausal woman is complete.

Watching Harry Potter Eight, the audience went wild repeatedly for a payoff bonanza that I just wasn't buying into. Harry Potter Eight is well made, like all the other recent Harry Potterses. But, also like all the recent Harry Potterses, there's something leaden and monopolar about it. Something high-school-play-put-on-by-goths about it. In that way it reminds me of the television show and perennial social-conservative headache Glee (but I may just be confused because both properties are built around unlikeable young people and schools run by psychopaths).

There seems to be something about these teen ensemble tales encouraging filmmakers to arrogantly brushes off ages-old story-telling techniques in favour of unsupported flashes of melodrama that just aren't earned. Harry Eight is unsure where to linger and where to ramp up. There's excellence somewhere in all of its parts, but, for me, not in its sum.

I wanted to buy into all the pay-offs--hey, I've been on board since the start--but nope, I was just noticing how un-urgent everything seemed to be. How staid and perfunctory.

I didn't feel like cheering, and when the bittersweet coda came around, I found it as flat and unemotional as I found the ending of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, another film everybody loved and my least favourite of the lot.

WIP: Hunting Up Help

2011-07-12T22:29:00.001-04:00

Since my new work has me glued to a computer more than I'm used to, when I get home at night these days I like to keep things old fashioned, so I broke out the old drawing board.

This is a piece in honor of the new job that has me so computer-fatigued: the Online Services Division (ours is for administrative services, or engineering, or the like--but this incarnation is a bit different:)

Graduation Card For Nephew #1

2011-07-03T23:42:00.002-04:00

Sketches June 09, 2011

2011-06-12T18:27:00.001-04:00

3D Suck Is Seeping Into Regular Theaters

2011-05-25T23:01:00.000-04:00

Roger Ebert pegs it with his latest blog entry. I've long been aware of stupid theater owners dimming their projection bulbs in a misguided attempt to save money, but now the new equipment they're using is affording them fresh opportunities to be ridiculous.

Watching Thor recently was like trying to watch a movie through rice pudding.

Thoughts On: Thor

2011-05-14T13:15:00.002-04:00

Thor is a rain shower, not a thunderstorm.

Want less-on-point metaphors? Thor's a meringue, not a pie. It's a preliminary bout, not the main event. It's a pilot, not a series. It's all overture. It's an exhibition match.

Okay, I'm done.

For the record, I like that last metaphor best: Thor feels like an exhibition match. Oh, it's a good film. Kind of. More accurately: once again Marvel Studios has crafted a film with lots of good things in it, and no really bad things at all. At the same time, it's clear that Marvel Studios have painted themselves into a corner. Their conservative approach--stripping their plots to the bare minimum, maintaining a consistent tone in their movies that's never too breezy nor too dense--has one large inherent flaw: people know when you're not giving 100%.

It's very clear now that Marvel is will not be swinging for the fences with each at bat (crap, we're back to metaphor). Or, indeed, during any at bat, even with The Avengers. They're clearly looking to amass singles and walks.

It's not unforgivable tactics, but it's going to have an anesthetic effect after a while, and I felt the first stirrings of that effect watching Thor. Sure, I wouldn't have wanted Thor to adopt The Dark Knight's ridiculous sturm and drang tone, but I wouldn't have minded it aping some of the latter film's size. Likewise, I'm not wishfully pining for Pirates Of The Carribean-type wanton CGI and production excesses, but a little more and grandiose CGI whiz-bangitude wouldn't have been unwelcome.

(If perchance you read online that Thor is a typical CGI-laden summer flick, discount the idea. Its CGI is entirely story-driven. Even during Thor's most tangential points, one could almost feel the presence of the Marvel bean counters, just over the animators' shoulders, saying, "Okay, time to wrap this up, boys. Pixels are money.")

Um... what was I saying?

I don't buy the idea that their films are increasingly becoming commercials for The Avengers. First of all, given Marvel's marketing conservatism, I don't think they're betting on The Avengers to be an inordinately huge hit; the idea of a "sure thing" is counter to the more cautious Hollywood wisdom they're evoking. Instead, I think the "hidden commercials" feeling gets swollen out of proportion only because the Marvel films are so determined to keep their production and story ambitions in check. We're constantly looking for more, it feels like all we're getting are hints of things to come. And Marvel better watch out, cause this is already feeling like too much teasing.

For my own part, I hope the DVD release comes with lots of the cut scenes I know must be out there. Then I'll make my own edit, and try to bulk Thor up a bit.

...

Um, what was I saying?

Mother's Day Card (No Text)

2011-05-08T15:27:00.001-04:00

Post-It Cartoon: Election Night In Canada

2011-05-04T23:21:00.000-04:00

Speed Painting: Mighty Thor

2011-04-26T21:29:00.001-04:00

Here we have a Thor that's weak, lumpy, mushy, you name it. I gave up on this when I found myself not speed-painting, but speed-illustrating.

Source: None.

Time: 1 hour

Using: Painter X

Brushes: conte brushes, detail air brush, dodge and burn

Sketches April 17, 2011

2011-04-17T23:08:00.003-04:00

Speed Painting: Elizabeth Taylor

2011-03-23T22:35:00.001-04:00

The movie legend passed away today.

Sticking to grayscale still.

Source: old photo (no tracing--she'd look more like her if I had)

Time: 11/2 hour2 (not really all that speedy yet)

Using: Painter X

Brushes: flat oils, real fan short, fine detail air brush, round blender, coarse oil blender

Speed Painting: Church Lady (From Old Photo)

2011-03-16T22:35:00.002-04:00

I've become impressed with the benefits of "speed painting" exercises that I see over at ConceptArt.org, so I decided to take up the practice myself.

Source: old photo (no tracing)

Time: 1 hour (not really all that speedy yet)

Using: Painter X

Brushes: oily bristle, dry brush, pointed stump, (some cheats with airbrush I regret)

Why NetFlix Doesn't Fly In Canada

2011-03-14T21:37:00.002-04:00

And I only made up some of these ridiculous substitutions...

Post-It Cartoon: C'mon Folks!

2011-03-10T22:53:00.000-05:00

Minimal Movie Poster: A Man For All Seasons

2011-03-07T22:16:00.002-05:00

Finally got around to another minimal movie poster for another of my all time favourite films. This one's A Man For All Seasons. It was a much harder slog, seeing as it involved fonts... a whole lot of fonts...

I played around with a million configurations, but it's not easy putting that many words into a design, and A Man For All Seasons is all about its words, some of the best ever committed to celluloid.

Sketches March 6, 2011

2011-03-06T23:19:00.001-05:00

Post-It Cartoon: Oscar Night

2011-03-01T20:43:00.000-05:00

Two More Birthday Cards (No Text)

2011-02-28T22:07:00.002-05:00

Five (Six) Films That Geeks Give A Free Pass To

2011-02-15T23:10:00.002-05:00

Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade

The only thing more disheartening than watching Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull's mediocrity unfold on screen last summer was suffering the nerd rage that got hurled at it for "not being as good as the originals". "Originals", plural. Meaning not only the true classic, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, but also the trashy, galumphing Temple Of Doom and the even more slapstick and slapdash Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade.

Last Crusade's been riding on a free pass for far too long, but all the "Crystal Skull sucks" hysteria really brings it home. Here's why it's exceptionally insufferable... ready?... they're the same freaking picture!

The two films share literally their every flaw in common: clumsy star insertion (Connery, LaBeouf), bafoonery in secondary characters, a complete disinterest in creating atmosphere or building tension, large amounts of slapstick, unconvincing visual effects, and a cheapness in tone, especially at the end. Sure, nobody's swinging from any vines in Crusade, but does anybody remember Harrison Ford infiltrating a Nazi stronghold with his hilarious Scottish accent? Anybody?

What really gives Crusade the edge in some people's minds is a) understandably, they love Connery more than they tolerate Laboeuf, and b) it's more fashionable to rip on cheesy CGI than it is to point out crummy matte jobs and compositing (both of which are plentiful in Crusade). And, of course, Crusade never had to emerge after a couple of decades wait.

So let's be clear. Crystal Skull is another weak-ass Indy pic, not the weak-ass Indy pic.

The "Even Numbered" Star Trek Films--Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Stark Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

Oh man, those frickin' whales. I remember seeing Star Trek IV in the mid eighties. Even then it felt heavy-handed, lacking in action, and stuffed with cheeseball comedy. It really benefitted from coming out after the tepid Star Trek III: The Search For Spock. Everybody kind've understood that III had been a pretty flat follow-up to The Wrath Of Khan, and that its seeming attempt to create Star Trek as a grand ongoing space opera wasn't going to work, especially since Paramount seemed to financing the operation with a maxed-out gas card.

At the time, the idea of a more episodic adventure was hailed as a step forward. But the episodic adventure was really more of a Season Three type deal (original Trek fans know what I'm talking about). The cutesiness was released to full, gassy effect, much like a Kraken at the behest of Zeus...

If only that Kraken could've eaten those *#^*ing whales...

Then, after Shatner directed a film that got laughed at (justly so), they released Star Trek VI--a film basically every bit as laughable as the Shat's--but by then people had developed this "even numbered ones are great" theory and they wanted to keep it going. To help them out on their insane quest, the new flick was directed by the guy who made Wrath Of Khan, so we're golden, right?

No, it was an unrelentingly stupid movie, just like the Star Trek franchise has been releasing ever since. It just had a bigger budget that allowed more ships to shoot at each other.

Return Of The Jedi

Y'know all that stuff I said about Last Crusade above? This is the same deal, only double it down. Basically, the only thing that differentiates Jedi from The Phantom Menace is the presence of the original cast and all that holdover affection from the audience which, even Jedi's staunchest defender has to admit, it largely squandered. The only holdovers Menace had were a couple of toasters and a really badly reimagined Yoda puppet. If Harrison Ford had showed up, drunk, for a few days filming, would Menace be better, or it would it just be Jedi?

Like Menace, Jedi is passable entertainment, but it's chock full of rehashed moments, bad slapstick, overt pandering to kids, toy market decisions, clumsy dialogue, weak acting, bizarrely off tone moments and it has a sketchy, seemingly contradictory sense of all its Jedi mystic mumbo jumbo. Sound familiar?

The New Star Trek

The writers of the new Star Trek are the guys who write the Transformers movies. They wrote the new Star Trek movie in exactly the same way as the Transformers movies: with relentless action beats, endless gags and nothing resembling logical thought.

But, you say, one was directed by Michael Bay and the other was directed by J.J. Abrams. Well, that's true. One was directed by a guy who loads up on the fancy angles, the hyper editing, the meth-head pacing, clunky gags, and T&A whenever possible... and the other was directed by... for crying out loud, do I really have to type that all out again?

I think Star Trek is a little better than Transformers, but for the life of me I'd be hard pressed to tell you why. And it's only a little better, so why stress my brain? I mostly wonder why people loved, loved, loved this new Star Trek instead of, say, "kinda liking it", when they're capable of rightly hating the Transformers movies.

(Must be the robots. They were utterly impossible to follow or distinguish from each other. The Star Trek ships are... well, they're over-designed, too, but there's never more than two of them on screen at any given moment. Could that be all of it?)

Avatar

Hey, I finally saw this.

It was ridiculously weak.

Not bad. I wouldn't call it that. It played by all the rules, and never ineptly. But my sweet, merciful blue booty, who couldn't anticipate every single moment in this film before it happened? Seriously, I felt like Medium watching this. And that's disconcerting. I usually feel much more like The Mentalist, even if I look more King Of Queens-y.

I'm not just talking about seeing the ending coming, or recognizing all the Dances With Wolves s**t, but feeling in advance every single beat of this film, feeling them vibrating in your skin like a bothersome itch. Knowing exactly what the bad guy's gonna say, knowing when they two leads are gonna start falling in love, when the complications are gonna show up and what they'regonna be. Even if you only see five movies a year and are only ten years old you still had to be ahead of this flick. Amish kids are ahead of this flick.

The effect of that must not bother some people, cause it renders a movie just this side of unwatchable to me. Either that or this must have been something on the big screen. Like really something. Cause I can't honestly surmise why anybody would give a flying lizard.

Thoughts On: The New At The Movies

2011-02-14T13:01:00.001-05:00

Flipping through the channels last night, I was surprised to see PBS listing At The Movies and was instantly flooded with nostalgia. Watching At The Movies on PBS comprised a large part of my young adulthood.

This new show, produced by Roger Ebert (I remember him announcing it on his blog) is hosted by a thirty something woman and a twenty something man who are purportedly film critics of some repute. These days that could mean a high circulation blog or a low circulation newspaper.

All I know about her is that her name is Christy Lemire, she looks soccer-mom hot, and when given an assignment to list the five movies that made her want to be a film critic (the theme of last night's show) she listed, among others, Magnolia and No Country For Old Men. I don't quibble with her choices exactly, but did she just become a film critic yesterday and was it because her real estate license fell through?

All I know about him is that he looks younger than my Playstation 3, his name is unspellable and I suspect Klingon in origin, and, given the same task as the girl, he took a balls-to-the-wall approach and listed a D. W. Griffith movie (not Birth Of A Nation), a Jean Luc Godard documentary (I didn't even know Godard made documentaries) , a Jacques Tati film (F-you, Jerry Lewis!), some other really obscure film (that I think either predated celluloid nitrates or was produced in a country where there is no electrical current) and lastly Shoah, the five hundred and sixty eight hour Holocaust grind. He's deep, y'all. At least neither of them listed a Tarantino film.

Anyway, I just found myself missing my youth, going to my film school to play pretend Spielberg, then heading home to watch the surly, childish Ebert try and lord it over the unflappable but infinitely dull Siskel. I also miss giving a fig about movies in general.

Now Siskel's dead, Ebert's fighting cancer, and, according to the guy during the PBS break after the show, the U.S. Congress is about to eliminate all public television funding. And me? I'm just hoping for more superhero celluloid beat-em-ups, at least until the Mayan Calendar thing gets rolling.

Thank-You Card For Dog-Sitting Sister

2011-02-14T07:29:00.002-05:00

And what says thank you like a Red Lobster gift card?

The Captain America Super-Bowl Trailer: 5 Encouraging Things, 5 Discouraging Things.

2011-02-07T13:02:00.005-05:00

No. 5. Encouraging: The general visual look.

The palette looked right, so did the lighting. I could have done with a little more World War grit--that shot of Cap and the Howling Commandos walking through camp is pitch perfect (1/3 Guns Of Navarone, 1/3 Inglorious Basterds, 1/3 Raiders Of The Lost Ark). Still, the retro look of the Rebirth lab was spot-on and the castle-ish battle setting is vintage-perfect from countless comic books.

How high do you think the lifts in his shoes are for this shot?

No. 5. Discouraging: Slo-frickin' motion.

All those slow-mo shots are very worrying. Slo-mo is the lazy director's first choice. One of the shots--Cap swinging on the chain--looks like it might be a Zack Snyder-esque ramping effect. (For those of you unaware of this procedure, it's the flashy, douche-y cousin of slow-mo.) In The Incredible Hulk, Louis Leterrier, of all people, showed up what a real time Captain America action scene should look like when he turned Tim Roth loose on the Hulk. Joe Johnston take note: one should not be beaten to the punch and schooled by the guy who made Clash Of The Titans.

No. 4. Encouraging: Really good CG.

The pre-serum Steve Rogers looks scary-good. Considering that trailer effects usually look like unfinished video game garbage (see Green Lantern) this indeed bodes very well. Still, I don't think we should be subjected to too much of the Benjamin Button effect. Hopefully they'll do shots of the pre-serum Steve from the back and use stand-ins and other stuff we wont notice, but it's nice to know they can pull this off when they have to.

No. 4. Discouraging: Not very much Red Skull.

Sure, it feels good while you're tearing, but then you're all raw, dude!

Nerds everywhere are pausing and vid-capturing like mad just to get the lonely, sad image above. Really, how could there not be a lingering shot on the Skull and a line-reading? I didn't need any mustaches to be twirled (honestly, can you grow a mustache on a skull-face?) but something more was needed.

No. 3. Encouraging: Laying the groundwork early that Cap is not a steroid jerk.

The first line in the trailer belongs to the super-soldier serum's creator, Abraham Erskine, and he reminds Steve--and us--that Captain America needs to not just be a good soldier, but a good man. This, along with the way they're clearly letting Chris Evans have a little breathing space with the character (see below) reassures me that there wont be a bombastic, tough-guy Cap in our future. However...

Where is he now that professional baseball really needs him?

No. 3. Discouraging: No "impressive" Captain America line-reading.

I think from a marketing sense it's probably a very smart move that there isn't a definitive "impressive" Captain America line reading. ("We have to win this...", "Follow me, boys...", "I'm dedicated to the dream", etc.) It's becoming clear Marvel's doing their darndest to think of international markets.

Still, it feels like some part of the impressive, intimidating Captain America should have made it in there somewhere. And it remains to be seen if Chris Evans can be commanding in a way that will let him awe the generally un-awe-able Tony Stark that we know from Iron Man. Of course, a screen hero needn't be a John Wayne war-movie type for other males (or the audience) to feel impressed by him. I for one think it can be done, and has been done, by an "aw shucks" lead. Jimmy Stewart pulled this off excellently in the fifties in a series of fairly gritty Westerns made by director Anthony Mann. I just don't know how easy it would be to be pulled off today, jaded as we are.

No. 2. Encouraging: Ferr-i-ners.

Hayley Atwel's playing a Brit and the multi-ethnic Howling Commandos were very prominent. This is another wise move on Marvel's part, even if it does feel a little Inglorious Basterds-esque. If the Commandos manage not to be ridiculously broad stereotypes, so much the better. And think of the eventual Commandos/Basterds mash-up that some nerd will eventually make.

(Nick Fury and Dum Dum Dugan against the director of Cabin Fever and the little guy from The Office? The Basterds would be toast...)

No. 2. Discouraging: He didn't throw the bleeding shield.

True, the shield's displayed prominently, at least at the end, but a thrown shield would've been the money shot. Oh well, I suppose it's for the best that we don't get this served to us right away--maybe not even until the film itself--but darn it, the twelve year old in me wants to see it now!

Hold on to that if you screw this up, pretty boy!

No. 1. Encouraging: Evans's portrayal.

Somewhere along the line somebody (rightly) pointed out to Marvel that the uber-serious, haunted, and somewhat humourless Cap from the recent run of comic books might not be ideal, at least not for this first movie. Cap needs to start from a place of human warmth and charm--an underdog even--and definitely an everyman.

No doubt Cap's toughening will be part of the movie's journey, but what we get from Evans in the trailer is very much in the manner of the traditional "aw shucks" American cinema hero I mentioned above. Hopefully, the character ends up in a middle ground. The last time a balance between "aw shucks" and "alpha male" was pulled off to perfection was Indiana Jones. Since then, it's been hard for any actor to do what Harrison Ford did (and could only do briefly, as it turns out). In the interim we're had leads tipping one way or the other. Willis was too smirky, Costner too dull, Swartzeneggar too ridiculous, Hanks too boyish, Crowe too thuggish, Cruise too insane, etcetera. It would be nice to see Evans pull this off, but it's very long odds, isn't it?

No. 1. Discouraging: A lack of gravitas.

Maybe it's because our first look at this movie comes in the form of a TV spot and not a cinema trailer, but just as I'm happy to see Chris Evans project charm and humanity through the trailer, I'm annoyed that the trailer provided zero build-up and tension as counterpoint to those light moments. There's no surging music, no title cards, no stings... no size whatsoever. It all just goes by in a flash... and a fairly breezy flash at that. Just as a ridiculous comparison, the Super-Bowl spot for Transformers 3 had a lot of good, atmospheric "pumping up", a good sense of being epic, even though we all pretty much know by now that nobody but a lobotomy patient would go see a Transformers movie.

The proof in this particular pudding will come with the full length theatrical trailer for Captain America: The First Avenger. If the epic shows up to counter balance the fun, I for one can't wait.

Sketches Jan 24, 2011

2011-01-24T21:12:00.002-05:00

Birthday Card (No Text) For Nephew #2

2011-01-19T21:52:00.000-05:00

Post-It Cartoon: Holy Aronofsky, Batman!

2011-01-18T21:10:00.000-05:00

Thoughts On: True Grit

2011-01-10T20:37:00.000-05:00

Plain old genre work kicks ass. True Grit is the least self-consciously "Coen" of the Coen Brothers' movies, and I couldn't be happier. Hey, not that their "Coen-i-ness" isn't entertaining and all. Or maybe I'm just digging on a fresh Western, for the most part.

I don't really turn on the film school switch in my head anymore.

That's old school quirky, right there, pardner.

I feel the need to point out that True Grit isn't really a remake in the modern day spirit of the term. To almost everybody's way of thinking these days, a remake is something cynical, designed to cash in on nostalgia. If there's a business angle to redoing the passable but desperately unhip 1969 John Wayne western, True Grit, I'm missing it. The original movie has zero resonance for most people under retirement age. And those around retirement age? Well, let's just say by 1969, the self-obsessed baby boomers and the thickening throwback John Wayne had more or less bid each other adios and ridden off into very opposite sunsets.

(Subsequent generations probably know the original film best as little more than a trivia answer. "The one he won the Oscar for? Oh, you know, that one with the girl with the Beatles haircut...")

But the remake thing has me thinking about "borrowing."

I've always thought of the Coen Brothers as being from the "Reveling In It" school of film borrowing. This school's most famous graduate is probably Quentin Tarantino, but the lineage stretches back past Brian DePalma and his schoolgirl-style Hitchcock obsession, all the way to the French New Wave and what I imagine were a lot of tedious conversations about the auteuristic merit of John Ford's jodhpurs.

The Coens started their careers joyfully excavating Preston Sturges and Frank Capra and I forget who else. (Those were film school days for me, and I've done my best to blank them out.) "Reveler" knock-off films can be cool, and they even can be standout achievements, but I've never fully been able to love them. The very best Tarantino, for me, will always feel like a cool cover song played on an amplified guitar with a lot of fuzzy pedal effects. Eric Clapton can play the hell out of a Robert Johnson song, sure. But Johnson's recordings are the real deal.

Sure, the Coens developed their own, true voice sometime around Fargo and left the glib knock-off stuff (mostly) behind them, but True Grit feels to me like the first time they've let a genre have an earnest controlling share of the final product. Like if they'd let The Man Who Wasn't There be an actual Film Noir.

And to tie in the borrowing theme a little more, Carter Burwell's score is built around old-timey favourites like Leaning (On The Everlasting Arms). A remake score for a remake.

I don't know what that means, if anything. I'm just noting the symmetry of it in an effort to look smart.

It impresses the chicks.

Post-It Cartoon: Movie Ratings

2011-01-04T22:20:00.000-05:00

Minimal Movie Poster: The Sweet Smell Of Success

2010-12-22T21:56:00.002-05:00

I just discovered all the cool new stuff being done with minimal movie posters these days, so I did one of my own. It's for one of my all time favourite films, The Sweet Smell Of Success.

It's good practice with the Bezier tool, which I've always run from. And my design sense needs the practice, too.

I Put Up The Movie One, So Here's TV

2010-12-20T21:52:00.000-05:00

The Challenges Of Captain America, Take Six

2010-12-14T21:14:00.002-05:00

Ah, toujours l'amour.

In the comics, Captain America's wartime love is a woman named Margaret "Peggy" Carter. Peggy is a member of the French Resistance. Only she's, sigh, American.

Okay, sounds a little stupid, but this isn't too surprising, given when the character originated. She was introduced in Tales Of Suspense #84. That's the sixties. Remember, this was an era when a movie like Breakfast At Tiffany's could cast Mickey Rooney in buckteeth as Audrey Hepburn's comedic Japanese neighbour. In other words, it was an era of xenophobic American butt-clenching ... moreso than today, even.

(Things are not that much better today. Remember during Cap's casting process when many a message board were overrun by pleas from "fans" that the Captain America role not go to a "ferr-i-ner". As if the craft capable of giving us Daniel Day Lewis as a quadrapalegic, Charleze Theron as Aileen Wuornos, or Tom Cruise as somebody likable, isn't up to letting a guy with an accent be a superhero in tights.)

Okay, back to Peggy. I think Peggy needs revamping.

The leaked pictures for the forthcoming movie seem to agree with me, although rather than switch her nationality, the pics of actor Hayley Atwell (a Brit!) on a New York set seem to indicate that they've abadon the French Resistance angle and simply moved the love affair stateside. This way she gets to stay all American and true blue. (She might play British, I don't know much about the uniform she's wearing. That at least would be something.)

Still, why do away with the "love in the midst of war" thing? It's a pretty potent trope. It's been around a long time. And what about the added colour from a clash of cultures? And isn't there an international market to think about? So why not head it off a little if you're the filmmakers, not to mention provide yourself an opportunity for commentary, character dynamics, and goodwill?

Frankly, it makes perfect sense to me that Cap should fall in love with an actual member of the French Resistance... So that's the way I wrote it. She should be gutsy and impressive and not at all a doe-eyed pushover.

My inspiration as I created this version of the character was Maria from Ernest Hemingway's novel, For Whom The Bell Tolls (hence the close-cropped hair). Obviously, this woman is older and less an innocent than Hemingway's girlish, "barely-there-except-to-worship-the-hero" heroine, but that's her genesis.

Back when I was trying to find the time to do an animated

Captain America trailer, my model sheet was drawn up using actor

Cecile DeFrance (Haute Tension) as a reference.

This is a worldly woman and a true foil for a smart hero. Her presence can and would dilute the silliness of such a being as a "Captain America." Her acceptance of him--especially if she's not an artificially transplanted American pushover, but a battle-hardened survivor with her own suspicions and doubts--would carry so much more weight and make the romance that much more real.

Using a French Peggy, even a "meet cute" like this serves to undercut our expectations. Not just our expectations of Cap's character (Hey, we think, He speaks French or learned to speak French really quickly!) but our expectations about how the relationship will play out. It makes things that much more interesting.

But I understand that blockbuster filmmakers are wary of "interesting". So, sure, yeah, stock, vanilla love interest, that could be good, too. We all know the character's headed for either a bad end or a fair number of hip replacement surgeries before Cap gets to see her again.

Top 10 (17) Big Movies In 2010 I Had No Desire To See

2010-12-07T22:53:00.009-05:00

Just like last year, time to document how Hollywood failed to win me over.

These are the films that, despite a reasonable pedigree and decent intentions on the part of the filmmakers, I'd rather twist an ankle or get several paper cuts than go see. Why? Because there's nothing there. No charm, no magic, no reason for being released in a theatre at all. Their mediocrity is evident on a molecular level.

Now some of the films listed below I'll no doubt one day watch on television, and one of them I was taken to on a family outing already. These aren't bad films. These aren't Bounty Hunter, or Sex And The City 2, or Saw3D. Bad films of that sort creep out of their icky genre ghettos every year and are indicative of nothing. Rather, what I find enlightening, is how many bread-and-butter pictures can be put out that should be slam dunk given the talent involved and yet don't have a clue about how tired, derivative, or uninteresting they are.

There are no sequels or remakes (per se) on this year's list, which is interesting. All the mediocre dreck listed below is original mediocre dreck, at least ostensibly. In the case of such films as Alice In Wonderland and Robin Hood, they are adapted dreck. I couldn't limit the list to ten, just couldn't, but I did break it down into only ten spots. Lumping together the formula pictures made it pretty easy. "Obnoxious male and female mega-stars in high-octane espionage action film"? Ugh.

As for stuff I liked this year, sure, it existed. I was entertained by Iron Man 2, How to Train Your Dragon and Harry Potter 7.5 and suitably if rather clinically impressed by Inception and Black Swan. Toy Story 3 was Pixar, so yada, yada, yada. I'll see True Grit soon, too, cause the Coen Brothers are always worth a look.

10. Alice In Wonderland

Oh, Timmy, you're so weird. Imagine.. making a career out of not caring about characters or scripts or anything that actually holds a movie together. And, yeah, the visual junk is weird, too... I guess.

"Mr. Burton... we're ready to shoot... um, y'know... movie stuff?"

9. Unstoppable/Book Of Eli

Far be it from me to knock the incredible Denzel. I like him. He's fine. He's the black Harrison Ford with slightly less grump and better luck with projects. But the flicks he chooses, or that choose him, are so relentlessly vapid: swishy camera, color-tint, saturation, commanding Denzel line reading, swishy camera, color-tint, saturation, commanding Denzel line reading.

Google Images fails me again. On the bright side,
apparently, handsome black actors really are unstoppable.

8. Shrek Forever After/Tangled

Poor Disney. They've been cross-contaminated.

It's not just the fact that Tangled is CGI, but that its ads also hint at emphasizing Shrek-style attitude. No hint all of an involving, emotionally-diverse story, just gags, gags, gags. Do they even sing in this one? I have no idea.

"You hear that, Buttercup? We're going to the magic land of 'Computer'!"

7. Secretariat

Is this a trend now? Horse movies? Did a film producer really say--out loud-- "Hey, y'know that Seabiscuit movie sure went over big. I'm gonna guess that wasn't just novelty; I see a demand here. Uplifting horse racing movies."

Apparently, big year for princesses and horses in the

movies... just like the Internet every year.

6. Robin Hood

"Less colour, less adventure! Roll 'em!"

Hey, here's one thing didn't the Errol Flynn film definitely didn't have: poo storm.

5. The Killers/Knight And Day

These two flicks came out a month or so apart, as I sketchily remember, providing their only entertainment factor: watching the least likable A-listers who've ever lived fail in exactly the same way as the least likable B-listers who could be bothered.

Every single picture I Googled for Knight And Day had them

on a motorcycle... is that all that happens in this damn movie?

4. Red/The Expendables

What's really sad about this pairing is that it should be a trio. The movie The Losers should be included here, too, since it too was a slick, glibly violent movie about charming, quippy killers in a world of less humorous (and hence less adorable) killers who are all out to kill them instead. I made the wife rent The Losers cause I mistakenly thought it might be good since it was free from star egos. Naw, nothing makes this sub-genre of barfy cute movies about "bad-ass" killers palatable. Least of all stars, though.

Add Oscar winner for hilarity.

3. Prince Of Persia/ The Soreceror's Apprentice

This year's PG-13, CGI POS's headed to TV and DVD PDQ.

And so the king looked out over his CPU processing power, and it was good.

2. Green Zone / Salt / The American / The Tourist

Here come the stars again, only the espionage action this time is thoughtful instead of ridiculous. And by "thoughtful" I mean rote. And by "rote" I mean "Je*** * f***** C***t! Do I have to watch another of these not-tense-in-any-way, desaturated, shaky-cam nightmares!?!!"

If you can get a beautiful person to run through this scene

while being chased by gunmen, apparently you have a movie.

1. Kick-Ass

In the top spot this year, a cheat. Darn it, I'm just not ready for the superhero genre to be deconstructed yet. Leave my men in tights alone!

Dweebs, c'mon! Figure it out already, and tell Scott Pilgrim while you're at it: we should want to disappear inside the story, not inhabit and comment on it! Gah!

"F*** you, Blog Guy."

R.I.P. Irvin Kershner

2010-11-29T20:55:00.001-05:00

Thoughts On: Harry Potter (1/2 of) 7

2010-11-28T21:18:00.006-05:00

During the first half of Deathly Hallows Part One, the Harry Potter franchise was in full swing again, all wands blazing. But the second half of Part One is nonsensical and needlessly stretched, like transvestite underwear.

Overall: not bad--a lot better than the last one, which I didn't get into at all, and I'm looking forward to the conclusion--but for me this Harry Potter stuff is coming off a little bit like emotional torture porn. Instead of severed limbs and exposed viscera getting explored in repetitive, graphic detail, it's adolescent angst and head-scratching melodramatics. Frankly, not all this raw nerve hysteria is convincing and even less of it is compelling.

At the start of the movie, Hermione Granger is seen, heartbroken, erasing her existence from the muggle world and her parents' memories to protect her parents from Voldermort's inquisitional forces.

Then she becomes a zombie... how cool would that be?

Zombies make EVERYTHING boss!

This was an example of a rare, great character moment, even if I was left wondering why she waited until the start of this movie to get around to it, when the bad guys were blazing guns for her and her friends as far back as a movie and half ago.

But this sort of believable, understated moment is replaced later by a lot of yelling and head-butting between the spotty but lean-limbed trio of main characters. The denseness and ill-timing of this in-fighting and navel-gazing would seem to indicate that Harry, Ron and Hermione have all been zapped by the dreaded "blunt force trauma to the judgment center of the brain" curse.

I really get impatient with these parts of the Harry Potter films because there've been so darn many of them by now and none of them feel true, and they lessen my attachment to the characters. Not to mention, all the fooferall is clearly just to kill time, to provide dramatic beats between clue discoveries and story revelations.

If actual story bits had been inserted between Harry's snail-pace sleuthing... well, those story bits would have to include Voldermort and his emo gang of menopausal bad-asses killing everyone and going elf-bowling. The after-party would be long over by now. Helena Bonham Carter would be waking up with goblin-vomit in her extensions.

And speaking of all the Harry Potter sleuthing, I'm going to go out on a limb and declare my certainty that nobody but the most rabid fans can put all the past wizarding fooferall into somekind of discernable shape. I read the books, or rather I had Stephen Fry read them to me a couple years ago, and I still couldn't follow or care about the revelatory clues in this flick. Something to do with Whizzlebug the Whidsnatcher and Dumbledore's bisexual third cousin, Finnicky Jim.

Honestly, I think the average viewer had a better idea of how Inception unfolded than what's going on with all this long-forgotten Wizarding footsie.

Oh yeah, now the wizards just shoot at each other with their wands without so much as a grunt of a spell anymore. Frankly, the next side to just bring a fully-loaded Glock, wins. But zap! pow! it was pretty fun.

Balance The U.S. Budget

2010-11-15T09:42:00.001-05:00

The New York Times put out a cool page where you get to tinker with the US budget. Everybody should have a turn. There should be more interactive demonstrations like this one. Very educational (and good geeky fun).

I hacked the military to pieces, eliminated the pork and farm subisidies and increased taxes. Too simple?

Hey, America, no need to thank me.

Post-It Cartoon: Symbols

2010-11-11T21:31:00.000-05:00

Sketches November 9, 2010

2010-11-09T22:02:00.003-05:00

Post-It Cartoon: The Dreaded Title Rises Again!

2010-11-02T22:21:00.000-04:00

Election Day Down South

2010-11-01T23:17:00.002-04:00

Film Map

2010-10-31T22:26:00.003-04:00

Found this on the interwebs. If I knew who to attribute, I would:

Post-It Cartoon: Avenge This

2010-10-28T22:47:00.000-04:00

Fighting With Disney Style

2010-10-27T20:45:00.001-04:00

Post-It Cartoon: Fantasy's Least Deadly Warriors 2

2010-10-20T21:31:00.000-04:00

This Needs To One Day Be A Real Site!

2010-10-19T23:14:00.001-04:00

Just playing around...

Digital Sketches For October 18, 2010

2010-10-18T22:52:00.001-04:00

The Challenges Of Captain America, Take Five

2010-10-17T21:19:00.007-04:00

I noted in an earlier post that the origin story for Captain America is,well, poop. This opinion might not sit well with some Captain America fans, but his origin story, quite frankly, is the origin story of a bad guy.

If it were announced tomorrow that the U.S. Army were working on an aggressive eugenics program to create a race of super-men, there'd be rioting in the streets... one would hope. Or at least, given the times we live in (sigh, shudder) , a real zinger of a segment on The Daily Show.

But let's leave poor Steve Rogers out of the equation for the time being. What do we think of the scientist who decides to give the U.S. army a process to make super-men? What do we think of Dr. Abraham Erskine, creator of the super-soldier serum?

Well, either he's oblivious to the ethical concerns of what he's doing, or he's an outright Mengele, or he thinks the ends justify the means cause Hitler's really, really evil and America is all milk, honey and freedom-boners. (I'm pretty sure it was this last point that prevailed in the minds of Captain America's creators back when the comic started, even if I can't quite agree to the point of sanctioning eugenics, godless Canadian commie ewok that I am.)

However, those other two options have never wowed me either.

When it came to my fun-script and my Erskine, I didn't want him to be naive or evil, so I decided that I had to do the unthinkable and stuff untold minutes, pages and scenes into an already lopsided script, bite the bullet, and texturalize Abraham Erskine. I was sabotaging the quaintness of the origin story, but by now this was old hat. I had already dampened Steve Rogers's formerly exuberant patriotism. It was time to concede the simplicity of Cap's origin entirely.

From the start, I had a clear picture of Erskine:

Were he alive and still working today, if we could drag him away from Grumpy Old Men 3, I think Walter Matthau would've done this Erskine proud. This is an Einstein doppleganger, obviously. Same whimsy, same adopted childlike mannerisms, same fierce underlying intelligence we can sense and slightly fear. And, like an Einstein or an Oppenheimer in a similar situation, he's not 100% on board with his paymasters:

I'll take a moment here to point out that this script is using the same, graduating super-soldier process that we saw a bit of in The Incredible Hulk. Only this time, where the Tim Roth character in Hulk was left high and dry, eventually Steve will get bombarded with the laser-light show, or whatever, that seals the deal.

But the question remains why a sensitive genius is going along with the idea of super-soldiers in the first place. To answer this, I gave Project Rebirth a dark history.

Early in the script, Steve learns that he isn't Project Rebirth's first test subject. In fact, there were five men who participated at an earlier date, initially to wondrous results, but ultimately to the point of madness and physical collapse. (This revelation makes Steve's willingness to say yes an act of exceptional courage, especially after he's shown film of the men.) Erskine, we're told, came back to the project after a year away, finally having figured out a way to prevent his serum's dangerous and limited returns.

But that's not all there is to the story. Steve, for his own part, suspects nothing the night before his final treatment:

In the comics, traditionally, Erskine is shot dead by a Nazi spy moments after Steve is given his "vita ray treatment". This part of the origin is plain daffy, and not just because I had to type the words "vita ray treatment". We're supposed to believe that a Nazi spy infiltrated what was likely a "Manhattan Project" level of security, waited until it was proven to work, forwent any notion of stealing the process, then decided to expose himself so he could shoot Erskine dead after the fact.

Hopefully, this doesn't get a literal treatment in the final film. Things should play out a bit more obliquely. In my fun-script, moments after Steve is bombarded, or whatever, a ticking time bomb is discovered by Erskine in the bowels of his machine. Everyone evacuates the area... or so we think, until it's revealed that there's a man--the film camera operator--still inside the lab. Erskine breaks from the pack, hurries back, only he's not in time. The man is killed and Erskine himself takes serious injuries.

Steve visits Erskine in the hospital.

This scene gives Steve an opportunity to show he's not daft about the implications of his own existence, that he's not just a puppet. And Erskine's weaknesses--his feet of clay, for which we can forgive him--can be exposed:

Erskine confesses that meeting Steve provoked a second moment of weakness. Before destroying his life's work, he could not resist making Steve its one true recipient. Before Steve leaves, Erskine tells him that if he's really curious about why Erskine came back to the project, he will find his answers in an out of the way hospital in Kentucky.

After Steve leaves, the Nazi spy does show up, though Erskine is not surprised to see him. Erskine, ever brilliant, was aware that the destruction of his machine and his process would force the Nazi spy, whomever he might be, to make a desperate move and tip his hand. Rather than let himself be kidnapped, Erskine forces the man to kill him. What follows is the script's first action set piece, as Steve gives chase to the spy and his back-up.

After that, however, he escapes the army's custody, makes his way to Kentucky and discovers that after the original batch of volunteers, and after Erskine had briefly departed the project, the army had not given up on testing Rebirth with less than willing (or at least informed) participants:

This revelation, with its unsettling real life connotations, lays down the final, non-B-movie layer on Cap's original B-movie genesis. No matter how much madcap action ensues (and that's plenty, as is only fitting) Captain America himself carries more water. I can't help but think we'd respect him--and root for him--more if he did.

Post-It Cartoon: Fantasy's Least Deadly Warriors

2010-10-14T22:51:00.002-04:00

Thoughts On: The Promise: The Making Of Darkness On The Edge Of Town, And Being A "Music Guy"

2010-10-13T20:49:00.003-04:00

Actually, you'll find the words below.

If you'll take a glance over to the right margin of my blog you may notice that there is no post label for "music". There's one for movies, one for TV, one for books, and another for video games. Heck, there's even one for comics as movies. But nothing about music.

That's cause I'm not really a music guy.

I grew up with a couple of "music guys" as friends and I was envious of them. They felt about songs the way I felt (at the time) about movies. Their passion seemed, I dunno, hipper and more adult, and it was related to girls and sex and poetry and all the things that Star Wars and Spider-man--and me--definitely weren't.

The trick to finding this image is not using the search term: "vinyl fetish"

Watching The Promise: The Making Of Darkness On The Edge Of Town recently on my satellite cable reminded me that at one time, for a brief, raw period, I really, really was a "music guy".

I got into Bruce Springsteen during my last year in high school. At the time, I wasn't listening to the radio (not that I ever really have) and had no idea what was going on with the popular music scene. I had maybe twenty albums on cassette tape, and most of them were oldies: Sam Cooke, Creedence Clearwater Revival, that sort of thing. Two tapes I had were Bruce's Nebraska and his Live '75 to '85 albums, both copied from LPs my father owned.

About the time I was listening to the live album more and more, I made a new friend at school. He told me about the other albums, so I tried them. Some I liked, some I didn't. He told me about these strange things called "bootlegs", and he gave me copies of a few to listen to. Some were made up of quirky, unreleased songs. Some were entire concerts. And for really the only time in my life, somebody's music really began talking to me.

The Promise: The Making Of Darkness On The Edge Of Town details a period of music-making in Bruce Springsteen's career that essentially provided the soundtrack to my university life (some fifteen years after the fact).

In the late seventies, Bruce Springsteen was a song-writin' machine, churning out ditties both anthemic and amusing, raucous and reflective. And that was just in the studio. In concert, he was a demi-god; a literally peerless combination of showmanship, youthful raw energy, silliness, profundity, mature artistry, and a complete lack of pretension.

Watching The Promise, which is made up of video grabbed during three years of studio recording, I saw Bruce not only younger than he is now, not only younger than I am now, but almost as young as I was in university. In the footage he is obviously a lonely, roughly unfinished, lost and very passionate fellow: a New Jersey born and working class carbon copy of the young middle class Canadian he'd be reaching fifteen years later.

That conversation we had--those bootlegs playing deep into my psyche as I walked through endless and countless neighbourhoods late at night, either from or to work or school--meant everything to me. It was restorative and probably did more than little bit of the emotional heavy-lifting for me during a pretty depressed part of my life.

The music was so freaking heartfelt that it feels like an intimate two-way conversation even as it roared bombastically through a late seventies era arena. It still does. Though I no longer hunt up new concerts to listen to--or even listen to the old ones much--it's nice to know they still exist in my iPod, eternal, and for the most part secretly great in a way that nobody else seems to know, and most of all there for me if I need them.

I'm pretty sure non-Bruce fans would be bored by The Promise, and more than a little lost as to what the big deal is, since it meanders and is without narration and context at any point. It's a gift to the already initiated, and it made me remember how much that intimate two-way conversation meant to me, when I was a lonely young man walking through the darkness on the edge of town.

If you can find a way to be "a music guy", even for a little while, I highly recommend it.

Bit Player Love Affairs

2010-10-12T21:23:00.000-04:00

Their parts weren't large, but I remember them still:

The Book Store Girl From 'The Big Sleep' (Real Name: Dorothy Malone)

Suck in that gut, Bogie.

Ms. Malone is probably responsible for my lifelong crush on any girl in a pair of glasses. I can't remember how old I was when I first saw the Big Sleep, but it was the right age to begin a fetish. And I love Bogart but I'll never forgive the jackass for making her take the glasses off before he'd drink rye with her.

Teeny-Bopper Daughter From The Original "Cape Fear" (Real Name: Lori Martin)

Gee, pa sure is taking his time talking to that psychopathic recidivist!

Can't believe Scorcese tried to update this 5 foot nothing cutie with whiny, mouth-breathing Julia Lewis. But then he also replaced Gregory Peck with an actor who admits to drinking his own pee.

The Mistress From "Saw" (Real Name: Alexandra Chun)

You're the guy from Princess Bride? Dude, what happened to you?

She plays a mistress, but all she does is come into a room and sit down on the edge of a bed. She's all tremble-y and vulnerable, though. And who can guess why? Jigsaw's not even forcing her to remove her own spleen with a dull spoon or risk getting dunked in a vat of Danny Glover's overacting.

Blue Jedi Chuck From "Revenge Of The Sith" (Real Name: Amy Allen)

Not the first ones to take aim at that tramp stamp, I'm sure.

Okay, so this character was blatant fan-service. I'm not proud. But when would we ever again be so entranced by swinging blue hips?

Oh, right.

The Bitchy Ex-Wife From "Strangers On A Train" (Real Name: Kasey Rogers)

Are we even sure this is Hitchcock? She's not blonde.

Here come the glasses again, only this time they're not riding some adorable smart alek. They're on a gloriously predatory pain-in-the-neck (heh) ex-wife.

Redhead Girl From "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" (Real Name: Maria Thayer)

Here she is with the 30 Rock guy... and before you ask, yes, Tina Fey yum...

It takes some potent mojo to stand out as a perky, diminutive beauty in a movie starring Kristen Bell and Mila Kunis, let me tell you. Googled images for Ms. Thayer and Forgetting Sarah Marshall will lead to much better results than this... although the 30 Rock guy's in those, too. Shudder.

Special Mention: Bethany McLean In "ENRON: The Smartest Guys In The Room"

So rare, a vidcap from the film wasn't even available. Here's a Daily Show appearance.

Bethay McLean is not an actress and her part in Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room is not a cameo. Still, she's adorable and a cool reporter who helped torpedo Ken Lay and his gang of raiders. I don't go around IMDB'ing reporters from documentaries a lot, but here's to you, Ms. McLean!

Final: DHS Fireworks Poster

2010-10-11T22:33:00.003-04:00

The final textures are done and I finally decided on a cool blue palette.

Thoughts On: The Social Network (Facebook Edition)

2010-10-06T21:13:00.001-04:00

Drawing Jam: Giant Robots

2010-10-05T21:47:00.001-04:00

The topic for the monthly drawing jam over at The DrawingBoard.org is "Giant Robots".

"Klaatu Barata Nikto!"

Birthday Card (En Francais) For Niece #3

2010-10-04T21:14:00.001-04:00

Abandoned Concept: Carribean Beach Resort

2010-09-26T23:39:00.002-04:00

Gave up on this one to personalize the trip a bit more with the "fireworks" poster. Originally I had planned to do a poster for every resort we've stayed at.

The Challenges Of Captain America, Take Four

2010-09-23T22:53:00.002-04:00

The speech.

Something has to get Steve Rogers noticed in that recruiting office. Something has to get him chosen to be Captain America. Traditionally, in the comics, it's a speech. Seems like it needs to be a big speech, doesn't it?

Well, crud.

Problem... in real life, we learn very early on, not all speeches come from assholes, but all asshole make speeches. Politicians, clergy, your neighbour who likes to talk about the "gub'mint". Since Abe Lincolns and Martin Luther King Jr.'s are few and far between, we get edgy about speech-makers.

In the movies, it used to be okay for a hero to give a big speech. Mr. Smith ran at the mouth a little. So did John Wayne sometimes, usually with cows mooing in the background. But at some point the speech-i-fying fell out of fashion.

Now we like our heroes to talk as little as possible. The hero can be quippy (James Bond) or quiet (Man With No Name), terse (Batman) or self-deprecating (Indiana Jones), but (almost) never verbose. Women talk, lawyers talk, cowards talk. Not manly men.

One exception comes to mind: the Leader Of Men. The Leader Of Men (Braveheart, Gladiator) can spout off as much as he wants... provided he's doing it to a bunch of guys about to kill other guys in a testosterone-induced frenzy (with as much dismemberment as possible).

Writing a "Mr. Smith" type speech appealed to me. I've been a sucker for Capra-Corn my whole life. But trying to make it suit modern sensibilities and my own politics? Yikes.

And impossible, as it turns out. At least to my satisfaction.

I went through endless weeks and endless drafts. Pretty much any time I took another look at what came to be known as The Recruitment Office Speech I ended up tinkering with it until my lunch hour had been completely wasted. Before I finally said the hell with it, this was what it looked like:

For me, that's not even close. It's stiff, jumpy, and overwritten. (I suppose that's natural after thirty attempts.) I'm not a natural speechwriter, I guess. I'm too fond of pith and economy, even when I can't achieve it (which is often).

A lot of that stuff up there is my own personal feeling, by the way--strained, naturally, through a skinny, fictional Depression-era American with his shirt off.

I may go back to "The Speech", but I currently feel that going at the thing straight on is probably not the best idea. Rather, let's give little Steve Rogers a slightly more human scene. Let his spouting off come out of hurt feeling at being rejected as unfit when he tries to enlist. Let him argue passionately with his recruiter:

Some stuff I like gets sacrificed this way. FOr instance, Steve doesn't get to point out that he's not naive when it comes to war, and that bothers me. I'm afraid something similar might happen in the real movie, when it comes out. He's also being rude, which is risky. But it all comes from a more human place.

Me being me, I couldn't let the anti-war stuff disappear completely. In this draft (I think we're up to seven by this point) Steve's mother is still alive and running a boarding house. She's a hard-headed, no-nonsense sort, ground down by the hard times, resentful for the loss of her husband, but, we sense, immensely proud of her selfless, caring son. In the scene where Steve has to tell her he's enlisting, he finds he can't go through with it:

I like that scene, and I like the old girl, obviously stereotyped Colleen that she is. But certainly I'm more comfortable, and more convincing, with her speech than I ever was with his.

Zip-Adee-What The Heck?

2010-09-22T22:38:00.003-04:00

From a Walt Disney forum discussion on Song Of The South:

I drop by Disney World forums because of my nostalgia for Walt Disney World Orlando. But there are moments in life where you realize you share passions with people who make you go "Yikes".

Something A-Wrong With Blogger.

2010-09-21T21:54:00.000-04:00

All my formatting and uploading options have disappeared... for some reason.

Famously Derided Things In Movies That I Like

2010-09-20T21:06:00.005-04:00

The Blade Runner Narration

You can't help but imagine a grumpy Harrison Ford sitting in an audio booth delivering his infamous V.O. through gritted teeth. I still don't care.

As for the cheese of the narration, that's kind of why I love it. To be fair, I've never been in love with Blade Runner to the same degree as a lot of geeks.

Speaking of cheesy, dig the shirt. Take away the
cool trench coat, and this is the I-T guy.

I know it says bad things about me, but when I see the Director's Cut now I feel like the movie's slower without being any more contemplative. Yes, I know the V.O. was hastily written by the Kraft Services guy or something, but sorry, I can't help it.

The Close Encounters Ending With The Ship Interior

Far be it for me to argue in favour of more Richard Dreyfus, but the ending to Close Encounters isn't satisfying in any of its versions. So, speaking for myself, I like seeing the inside of the ship.

Without the ship interior, basically the ending of the movie is that last alien coming out to flip Francois Truffaut the bird. There's only two things we care about by this point in the movie: the Roy Neary character and getting more and grander spectacle. So I say: let him in.

Gah! Let him out, let him out! There's a Goldblum in there!

I know Spielberg prefers his version, but sorry, I'm a Philistine.

The Aliens in Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull

With all the lazy directing and sickly cute jokes in Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, it seems unbelievable that some folks still took time out to bitch about the fact that there were "aliens" in their "Indy."

I say, considering the slap dash nature of every other element in the film, the aliens come off pretty well. Even if Crystal Skull's ending is abrupt, unsatisfying and CGI-laden--and not at all as Lovecraftian as George Lucas once hinted he had in mind--it at least had more gravitas than Last Crusade's freaking Holy Grail. For reasons we cannot guess, that movie reasoned that the cup of Christ might abide on an obvious, over-lit soundstage protected (for some inexplicable reason) by Goonie traps.

"Yahweh? Yeah, never heard of him... does he have a bitchin' spaceship?"

Forgive me.

The Talky Ending Of Psycho

A lot of people (like William Goldman and Stephen King) have lambasted the ending of Psycho, when Simon Oakland comes and teaches Psychology 101 for ten minutes to people who are grieving, likely in shock and no doubt on their way to a lifetime of therapy themselves.

Well, I kind of like it. If only because it provides breathing space between the reveal of "mother" and the chilling finale with Anthony Perkins in the loony ward. Plus, Simon Oakland is really good here, in a Shatner-esque, "throw yourself into the bad dialogue" kinda way.

"Y'see, he was... how do I put this... oh yeah: nuts."

What can I say?

Many Faces Of Me

2010-09-15T22:21:00.001-04:00

I've had a fair few avatars over the years

Fan-Editing: Kolchak Meets The Marvel Superheroes (Test One)

2010-09-15T01:51:00.003-04:00

Finally got back around to some fan-editing tonight, and I think I did pretty well, although I forgot how important it was to save my progress in anticipation of unexpected programs quits! (Grrrr.)

My current project is Kochak:The Night Stalker Meets The Marvel Superheroes (working title). It's a welcome respite from the Star Wars prequels. It takes my love for the old Kolchak TV series and mashes it together with the Marvel heroes. In some ways its a version of "Marvels", the limited comic book series done by Alex Ross and Kurt Busiek, in that it follows one man as he pays witnesses the startling advent of the superhero age.

In this recreation of a Kolchak: The Night Stalker TV episode, using program footage against clips from the recent spate of superhero flicks, we watch poor Carl Kolchak as he struggles to come to grips with the hottest news story since vampires invaded Las Vegas: the city of New York is suddenly awash in freakish, costumed nut cases.

How exactly the story will fit together, and, for that matter, the visuals, is a mystery, so I played together with this one sequence to get an indication of where I was headed. I'm semi-happy with it, at least as a starting point. The filtering isn't right yet, in fact it's horrible, but I'll get there.

Test One:

Thoughts On: Wishful Drinking And Hitch 22

2010-09-13T22:00:00.004-04:00

The Match-Up: In this corner, the second to last book I read, Wishful Drinking, Carrie Fisher's brief, unrelentingly sarcastic bio-pastiche. It's a transcription of her one woman show, and it's mostly about fame, drugs and mental illness. Miss Fisher employs her entertaining Dorothy-Parker-cum-Me-Generation personality to full effect, but skimps on personal revelations in favour of glib self exposure.

In the opposite corner, the last book I read, Christopher Hitchens's Hitch 22. The professional intellectual and iconoclast looks back at his life as a former shit-stirrer for lefty causes, his sucking around with literary types, and the evolution (some might say intelligent design) of his pro-war beliefs. Mr. Hitchens is his usual well-read, merciless self, and, needless to say, he skimps on personal revelations in favour of glib self promotion.

Who Reads Their Stuff Better? I listened to both books on audio, and Hitchens wins. Carrie's a great reader and performer, and she does a Debbie Reynolds (her mom) that is spot on and hilarious, but she tends to get very shrill. Hitchens underplayed his material in his usual smarmy, smug way, but managed to be less tiresome over a longer haul.

Who Name-Drops Better? Frankly, as a Star Wars fan boy, I was hoping for more dish on George and Harrison and Mark. Instead, Carrie mostly talks about her mom, her former husband, Paul Simon, and her sleazo dad, Eddie Fischer. Still, dishing as she is about real, honest to goodness Beautiful People, albeit old ones, what chance does Hitchens with his writers and dissidents and politcos stand? The win goes to Carrie.

Who Did Drugs Better? All due respect, but the amusing drunk thing is really old, Hitch. Carrie has done everything but Death Sticks and that's on top of a bi-polar condition.

Who Made Me Feel More Like A Failure? Carrie might've been in the movies, but Hitchens gets to be famous just for writing and saying whatever crap comes into his coconut. I'm also in jealous awe of the endless number of places he's been and people he's talked to. And that's odd, cause I don't like to travel and I hate talking to people.

Who Tells The Most "You Had To Be There" Stories? Hitchens helpfully devalue all of the stuff mentioned above by recounting (at length) the piss-up word game session he had with Amis and others. Did I say at length? I meant ad excrutiating nauseum. Women are not funny, Hitch? Are they as not funny as drunk off their ass pretentious Oxford grads?

Whose More Grown Up? Neither. Carrie's mea culpas are few and far between, as are Hitchens's.

Who Would I Rather Hang Out With? Natalie Portman or Jon Stewart.

Digital Sketches, September, 2010

2010-09-12T22:38:00.004-04:00

Captain America Pics Leak

2010-09-09T20:51:00.000-04:00

Maybe they don't need my script so much as a talented art director and probably some touch-up and colour-corrector guys. (Their stunt men could also lay off the donuts.)

The Challenges Of Captain America, Take Three

2010-09-08T22:26:00.002-04:00

Time to jettison all my cuteness and write an all World War II Captain America. Time to give up the satirical ghost and kill all my topical babies:

The terrorist organization HYDRA would no longer begin life as a modern day Blackwater-type private military contractor called Clear Dawn. The modern day Red Skull would not be exposed as a prop boogie man. And none of this would, in a convoluted turn, actually end up resurrecting the real Red Skull by the script's end.

Yes, so topical and so waaaaaayy off track sometimes. I was clearly exorcising some demons. See if you can detect my subtle hand in this utterly needless "media" scene:

Whoah, Nelly.

I decided there was value to doing the script "old school". More challenge, too. The linear, guy-becomes-a-superhero story being as worn as it is

I had two ways I could star the new, all World War II script. One was was predictable, an easy bookend device, probably what they'll use in the real film: Cap is discovered in the modern day, then the movie in flashback.

The other opening scene I had in mind was far more unusual and ambitious. There's a form of bio-pic that rather than telling a famous person's whole life story, confines itself to the early portion, usually right up to the definitive birth of the famous figure we all know (The Aviator, Coco Before Channel, RKO 281, Elizabeth, etc., etc.) It seemed to me that's what this film should be doing, giving us the formative phase of a hero character, his trial by fire, rather than his most famous exploits. Especially since his main superhero existence would be quite gaudy and here we were in actual history.

Thus I planned a real crucible for Steve Rogers. I wanted to show why his nominal super powers and tight underwear would end up being the least important thing about him. I wanted to start in childhood and I wanted to form him by early experiences, rough ones. The opening scene would be Steve Rogers as a boy watching his father pass away from mustard gas inhaled on the front lines of World War I many years earlier:

The music I has in mind for the scene was the main theme to Miller's Crossing, so I couldn't resist writing in that that's what was needed. My feeling for this way of opening the film that I toyed around with the idea of animating it. I did some tone-setting storyboards in advance of this bizarre and utterly unfeasible undertaking:

As with my earlier opening, I was deliberately playing against bombast and expectation. I was shooting for understated and I was deliberately counter-pacing the usual superhero story. And there was more trouble ahead. The Great Depression, no little thing:

With what I thought was great economy (three pages) I got through most of this stuff, tied it in a pretty pink bow and got Steve to adulthood and the story around to Hitler:

All in all, if I have to say so myself (and I am) a job well done. The story of a family, a boy's growing up and a pretty evocative snapshot of The Great Depression. Still, it would all prove too unwieldy. When I finally finished the first act, it ran out to forty eight pages, which is pretty long, indicative of a three hour movie.

It would all have to go. Back to the drawing board.

Lisa

2010-08-31T22:35:00.001-04:00

September's come too soon.

Sketches For August 26, 2010

2010-08-26T21:17:00.005-04:00

Travel Poster: Monorail Poster Redesign.

2010-08-25T23:18:00.003-04:00

This was my first travel poster attempt, a redesign of a Disney original. My only additions were to add the year and switch it from a day scene to a night scene. 2009 was the year of our trip to the Contemporary Resort, an old childhood favourite of mine. As for making it night, I was scared of playing with too much colour.

I don't want to provoke the ire of Disney lawyers or anything, but the thing's hanging on my basement wall as we speak. Still, as long as I'm not putting it up in public or selling it or anything, I should be safe, right?

Right???

(I hear Disney lawyers, upon attaining adulthood, are exposed to a special "mist" that enhances their ferocity and gives them extra-sensory perceptions.)

Thoughts On: Blood's A Rover

2010-08-24T21:48:00.003-04:00

Blood's A Rover is the third and final instalment of James Ellroy's massive "Underworld USA Trilogy". Like American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand before it, the book's an endless parade of shakedown men, tough guys, intelligence spooks, FBI agents, commies, right wingers, mobsters, degenerates, horrible racists and unforgiving racist caricatures.

Oh, and lots of transcripts. The man loves his transcripts.

Like the previous books, this Ellroy yarn is told in almost telegram-style prose. See Dick Run. See Dick Extort. Extort, Dick, Extort. So I'm glad I listened to this one. I couldn't have read it.

Luckily, the Audio CD is read well by professional Bill-Maher lookalike and star of Nightmare On Elm Street III, Craig Wasson.

He might not look like much, but hey, he kicked Freddy Kruger's ass.

Of course, I don't know if Wasson got specific instructions to make every character identified as a Jew in the text sound like a cross between Jackie Mason and Alan King, and to make every person of colour sound countrified, even when they're L.A. natives, but I can't really claim that he's working at odds with the material, which is deliberately childish about such things.

Like the former two parts, there's a lot of 60's conspiracy stuff here, but I don't get the sense James Ellroy takes any of it serious. And I think his only political conviction is his pretty transparent world view that you either recognize the filthy, complicit game that is life, or you're a sucker. In all six gazillion words of his trilogy, I don't think five hundred deal with anybody who'd be considered a "regular citizen".

Ellroy likes the people in the know, the "game players", even the scum, no matter what kind of violent thug they are.

I'm sure he felt like this when he was writing it...
but y'know, with a computer in front of him and less
high-grade horse in the bottom drawer.

One thing's for sure, Ellroy sure loves this cozy, dirty little world of secrets and levels, this bygone age of men in hats. He loves trails of ink on paper and trails of spilled blood, and he's willing to follow them anywhere, and invite us along in detail.

Post-It Cartoons: Starlets

2010-08-23T21:13:00.003-04:00

Once Again With The George Lucas

2010-08-19T22:54:00.002-04:00

Once again I find trapped myself between George Lucas, who often makes it hard to do right by him, and his fanboy former fans, who... well, they're fanboys. The mice under your sink are more likable.

If only fanboys loved cheese as much as Japanese animated tentacle porn.

Let's get some obvious stuff out of the way: Lucas has put out some shoddy DVDs in the past. The Special Editions are a mixture of technical laziness and bizarre aesthetics: there's the inverted sound placements, the newly added slapstick, all the things they didn't correct, like the poorly rotoscoped light sabers, the still piss-poor CGI in a few spots and the weak-ass color work on Star Wars and Empire.

Then there were the theatrical release discs which were just old laser disc transfers. More about that later.

I understand that a lot of fanboys are impatient and frustrated with George trotting out the "doing this costs a lot of money" shtick again. He hauled it out last time too to excuse the glitches. And it's ultimately unnecessary. For several reasons.

George is right to only release special editions on blu-ray. Not generous, not warm, not very "Uncle George", but essentially right.

To be sure, the "costs a lot of money" thing is BS. I don't know what fix-ups like this cost, but I'm sure George has got the money that's needed. But it does cost some money, and it's his money and these are his films and there are always going to be more formats, so where exactly does his obligation to "do right by the originals" start and where does it end?

More importantly, in porting twentieth century films to twenty first century digital formats, there is no one clear mandate, no matter how much fanboys would like to argue the point to the contrary. To begin with, there is no such thing as faithfully transferring a celluloid film to a digital disc. And that's the starting wedge (no pun intended) for a legitimate argument about where a "proper" transfer might begin and end.

When the laser disc transfers came out, fanboys bitched because of the stereo sound. Of course, Star Wars didn't get released is 5.1 sound because 5.1 sound didn't exist in 1977. This begs the question: do fanboys want faithful transfers or not? The answer is no, they don't. They want everything they think the discs should have--all the technical benefits of the last thirty years (which are largely thanks to who again?)--minus the stuff they don't like.

Well, yeah, I have my wish list for Star Wars blu-rays, too, and it sure wouldn't jibe with theirs, and it sure wouldn't jibe with George's. I want the digital add-on special effect-s, with the exception of the Greedo shooting thing and the slapstick humour. I want a cleaned-up print and a little colour correction, but not what we got last time.

I'm okay with not getting these things because Star Wars is a film I saw in 1977 (and again in 1980) and I've come to grips with that. So go ahead, George, screw these up, too. As maddening as it is that you can't summon the soul to do this properly, I do love how it drives them crazy.