barbara steele in "the ghost"

max fischer

noah cross

Played with creepy perfection by John Huston in Chinatown.

"You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and the right place, they're capable of anything."

childhood terrors, part 2

To this day, this moment remains the single most disturbing thing I've ever seen in a movie. A big part of it has to do with the unexpected cut to this medium close-up from a wide-shot, but...man. I still get goosebumps at this whenever I see it.

my kind of sci-fi

In the past two weeks I've seen two great sci-fi movies, in what I guess you could label the "non-Hollywood blockbuster" sub-genre of sci-fi films. All things considered this is probably my favorite film genre.

A few examples:

what I'm whating

Music:

Dream Theater--Black Clouds & Silver Linings

Scale the Summit--Carving Desert Canyons

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds--Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus

Elvis Costello--Secret, Profane, and Sugarcane

The Mars Volta--Octahedron

Books & Comics:

'The Areas of My Expertise' by John Hodgman

'American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House' by Jon Meacham

'The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World 1788--1800' by Jay Winik

'Stel' by Moebius

Movies:

Election

This is Spinal Tap

The Evil Dead

What I'm looking forward to:

'Asterios Polyp' by David Mazzucchelli

'Parker: The Hunter' by Darwyn Cooke

'R. Crumb's Book of Genesis'

96-page Frank project by Jim Woodring

'The Marquis: Inferno' by Guy Davis

Acme Novelty Library #20 by Chris Ware

The Brothers Bloom

Moon

A Serious Man

Doctor Who specials

Porcupine Tree--The Incident

eleanor in winter

A sketch of Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter:


I maintain that The Lion in Winter has the largest concentration of great dialogue in any movie ever made.

Some examples:

Prince John: "Poor John. Who says poor John? Don't everybody sob at once! My God, if I went up in flames there's not a living soul who'd pee on me to put the fire out!"
Prince Richard: "Let's strike a flint and see."

Eleanor: "I even made poor Louis take me on Crusade. How's that for blasphemy. I dressed my maids as Amazons and rode bare-breasted halfway to Damascus. Louis had a seizure and I damn near died of windburn... but the troops were dazzled."

Prince Geoffrey (to John): "If you're a prince, there's hope for every ape in Africa."

Henry II: "I've snapped and plotted all my life. There's no other way to be alive, king, and fifty all at once."

Prince Richard (to Eleanor): "You're so deceitful you can't ask for water when you're thirsty. We could tangle spiders in the webs you weave."

Henry II: "I could have conquered Europe - all of it - but I had women in my life."

Prince Richard: "He'll get no satisfaction out of me. He isn't going to see me beg."
Prince Geoffrey: "My you chivalric fool... as if the way one fell down mattered."
Prince Richard: "When the fall is all there is, it matters."

Eleanor: "I adored you. I still do."
Henry II: "Of all the lies you've told, that is the most terrible."
Eleanor: "I know. That's why I've saved it up until now."


And on and on...greatness...

"People scare better when they're dying."

Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West.

kinda vertigo

"We all go a little mad sometimes."

There are only about ten perfect films, to my mind, and Psycho is one of them.

commentary track

For the most part I have a hard time drawing in silence, I'm not sure why exactly. While music is good, I often like to play a DVD commentary in the background while I draw (this is a little problematic when I'm doing layout work, which requires more thinking on the part of my brain, but it's great for just sketching around or inking).

Here's a few of my favorite commentaries:



John Carpenter's The Thing--John Carpenter and Kurt Russell--Kind of the ultimate as far as enjoyable conversation goes...Carpenter tends to focus on things like lighting and filters when unchecked, but Russell keeps him balanced with great anecdotes (like their crazy helicopter pilot, "Lawrence of Alaska"...or the moonshine still that some of the crew constructed...or the fact that the first car actor Keith David ever drove was a stolen one). It's also worth it just to hear Russell mimic Wilford Brimley's line "AWL KIW YEW!!" and crack himself up, considering my friends and I have been doing that very same thing for years and years.




Seven Samurai (3-disc Criterion Collection)--Michael Jeck, Donald Richie, David Desser, Joan Mellen, Stephen Price, and Tony Rayns--Technically, two tracks here. The first one is by Jeck, who's clearly running off of some prepared notes of his...normally this might feel too artificial, but this is a movie that demands context, and you get it all here--from the studio worries about the film's production, Kurosawa's family history, the significance of the topknot to a samurai, the history of the Japanese period film, etc. Pretty much a Seven Samurai information download into your brain. Jeck also does commentary on Criterion's Throne of Blood DVD.

The 2nd commentary is divided up by five critics and tends to overlap with everything Jeck's track gets into. The best section of this one is Donald Richie's, who wrote THE book on Kurosawa films. Richie also has good commentary track on Criterion's Rashomon DVD.



The Conversation--Walter Murch--Murch describes how he managed to arrange the narrative of the movie in editing, after the film was finished shooting (and missing two day's worth of unshot material) and it's A) amazing that he succeeded so brilliantly, and B) disturbing that the movie wasn't always meant to be thus. It's also a movie Murch is uniquely suited to deliver commentary on, as its plot is so dependant on sound (Murch was the sound engineer on the Godfather films, among many others).

There's a great book of conversations with Murch called The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. While I generally agree with others who have pointed out that comics have become too wrapped up in the particular styles of film storytelling, I do think some of Murch's obversations about film editing can be applied to comics storytelling in an unobtrusive way.

Paul Newman: 1925--2008

My favorite actor.

The Angel of Death

I would love to have this poster, but I'd have to find some secret room in the house to hang it so my children would never see it. Because it would haunt them.

If I had the money...

...I would buy the heck out of these...

Dax Recommends: Three Days of the Condor

Every once and awhile I'll toss a movie, book, or album on here that I would recommend to others (i.e. you).

Higgins: "It'd have to be somebody in the community."
Turner: "Community?"
Higgins: "Intelligence field."
Turner: "Community! Jesus, you guys are kind to yourselves. Community."

In many ways a direct precursor to the Bourne films of the 2000's, Three Days of the Condor (1976) is about a government agent trying to figure out who is trying to have him killed, and more importantly, why. Robert Redford's agent character is deliberately not a killer--his job for the CIA simply involves reading things--so he barely keeps ahead of his antagonists using his wits, with some clever tricks that would slide in well in a Bourne movie. In fact, I'm surprised there hasn't been talk of a remake considering that, with only minimal changes, the story could very easily work in the present day.

There's a fantastic performance by Max Von Sydow as Joubert, the man hired to eliminate Redford's character, and nice parts with other great actors like Cliff Robertson and John Houseman, but the one aspect of the film that most intrigues me, and in some way single-handedly elevates the whole thing for me, is the truly bizarre relationship between Redford and the character played by Faye Dunaway.

Toht

Raiders of the Lost Ark has been on my brain lately.

The original idea behind the character of Major Toht in the film was to have him be part mechanical, in the tradition of pulp science-villains:


However, it sure is hard to top this:

Thanksgiving with the Geats

Went to see Beowulf tonight. I was apprehensive about it, mainly because of the photo-realistic digital nature of the film. It's not my thing, really...I prefer a healthy degree of abstraction in animation. But I'd read what the writers (Roger Avary and Neil Gaiman) had done with the story and thought it sounded neat-o.

Anyways, it is neat-o. While the technology isn't quite there yet (human faces still don't translate as fully believable in digital), the story was enough for me. I'd been worried that I would wind up sitting through another 300 (no offense meant to anyone who liked 300, I just found it to be mostly empty testosterone), but there's one scene in particular--a scene with King Beowulf and a man at a shoreline near a battle--that elevated the whole movie in the sense that, if nothing else, this film was, to me, justified because of it.

Back to the effects, however: I'm not sure it was a good idea to base most of the characters so closely on the actors who performed them. I mean, if you can create whatever you want within that digital world, why have Hrothgar look like Anthony Hopkins? I suppose they felt it lent a level of reality that the audience could grasp onto, but I think in a way it's actually more distancing, since Anthony Hopkins felt more like "the digital version of Anthony Hopkins". We know what he's supposed to look like, so when he feels 'off' somehow it's that much more noticeable.

However, how can you deny Crispin Glover as Grendel? Speaking in Olde English, even.


I've always liked the Beowulf tale...it's the ripping off Grendel's arm bit that tends to grab you as a young boy, I suppose.

By the way, here's an image of that scene by Lynd Ward (and I wish to God I could find his illustrated Beowulf book at an affordable price):


Anyways, while I liked the new Beowulf movie, my favorite off-shoot of the original poem remains John Gardner's novel 'Grendel', told from the point of view of the monster itself. One of my favorite books.