Jason's Blog, page 152

Tiger

Nanzak!

Slugzak doesn't work that well as a name. For this drawing to make sense, you sort of need to have read Arzach, or at least that first story. Also, drawing Bushmiller is a lot more difficult than it looks...

Cigarette

Another sketch.

Smoking Gun

Sketch done without penciling first.

Popzach?

Okay, I'll go back to work on my book now.

Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing

War correspondent William Holden falls for part European, part Asian doctor Jennifer Jones in Hong Kong during China's Communist Revolution. Directed by Henry King.

I found this dvd for only 3 euros. It's not Minnelli or Sirk, but it got that 50s melodrama thing going on. It's also got the completely artificial dialogues that belong to those movies. I found it a bit hard to care about the story. Holden and Jones didn't get along at all during filming, that might be part of it. But they just don't seem like real people. Showing some real pain, like Humphrey Bogart drunk at night, after he meets Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, would have been nice. Hell, even a scene of a character brushing his teeth. Instead you notice things like how often you see the characters in profile, looking at each other and the lack of close ups. I've wondered about that in movies from this period. Apparently it's because the cinemascope anamorphic lense didn't allow for close ups. Which makes it sometimes hard to read the feelings of the characters. To get back to Casablanca - if it had been made in the 50s, there wouldn't have been any close ups of Ingrid Bergman's face, and what loss that would have been. The film also made me realize that Titanic, the James Cameron film, is pretty much a 50s melodrama combined with a 70s disaster movie.

Hyena

Matewan

West Virginia, 1920. Coal miners and a union organizer have to fight the Mining Company. Written and directed by John Sayles.

The film is based on real events, the socalled Matewan Massacre. The Depression hasn't even started yet, but things are already pretty rough. There are actors that later will be better known, so watching the film you constantly go, Hey, there's that guy from NYPD Blue, there's that guy from Shawshank Redemption. Hey, it's that woman from Dances With Wolves. There's the Sayles regulars Chris Cooper and David Strathairn. There's even Darth Vader and Bonnie Prince Billy! Will Oldham is actually pretty good in his role as a young preacher. The film is almost a Western in the way it opens with a stranger arriving in town and ending with a big shootout. Unfortunately, it came out before the independent film boom of the nineties. If released a couple of years later, by, say, Miramax, it could maybe have been nominated for an Oscar for best film. It would have been well deserved.

Moose

These are still illustrations done for an encyclopedia in the late 90s.

Elephant

...with, apparently, only three legs.