Jason's Blog, page 158

The Long Riders

Jesse James robs banks and is shot by Robert Ford. It's the one with all the brothers: Keith, David and Robert Carradine, James and Stacy Keach, Dennis and Randy Quaid and Christopher and Nicholas Guest. Also starring Harry Carey jr, from the John Ford westerns, Mr Blue and Pamela Reed. Directed by Walter Hill.

It's a great western - one of the last good ones. It's well written. The dialogue rings true, something that often is not the case in modern westerns. There's a great score by Ry Cooder. Actually, there are real musicians in the film, playing music. It used to bother me in the old Ford and Leone films, that the fiddler or whoever was clearly an actor faking it to prerecorded music. People are being shot in Peckingpah-ish slow motion. For being a Hill film, there's a surprisingly strong female character, Pamela Reed as Belle Starr. Okay, she's a whore, but still... Dennis Quaid plays the goofy brother, not Randy. David Carradine is badass as Cole Younger. Love the scene of the Swede trying to buy his horse, in the middle of a bank robbery. The horses through the windows scene is still great. There's even the cowboy being shot and falling off the roof scene!

The Duellists

In Napoleonic France Harvey Keitel keeps duelling Keith Carradine. Also starring Albert Finney, directed by Ridley Scott.

Well, this is one gorgeous looking film - almost like a series of paintings come to life, often shot at magic hour, and with a convincing recreation of the time period. The fencing looks very realistic, far from the clearly choreographed Errol Flynn type of fencing. Keitel is intense, as usual, and I've always found Carradine to be an underestimated actor. The film has a sort of impressionistic storytelling - short scenes with big gaps between - and is less Hollywood than Scott's later films. Actually, I would say it's his best film.

Hellboy

... painted on a cigarette case.
Thanks, Nicolas Verstappen.

Aliens

This one I saw in the cinema. In Norway it was sensored. Several scenes, like Bishop being ripped in two, were cut. It's Cameron's second film, if you don't count Piranha 2, and his best one. I doubt he will make anything better. It's a pretty much perfect film. There's an element of Greek myth to it, the way Ripley goes down to the kingdom of death to get back the little girl. The characters are memorable. The budding relationship between Ripley and Hicks is never mushy. The fight between Ripley and the alien queen is intense. You can sort of see that some of the vehicles are models, but it doesn't take you out of the film the way bad CGI does. It probably should have been the only sequel. I don't know if anything would be lost in a world without Alien 3 and 4. Every alien film is basically one thing: people running down a corridor and the alien coming after them, and how many variations can you do on that?

Alien

I wish I had seen this film in the cinema when it came out. 14 years old is a good age for seeing it, I think. Problem is, in Norway the film had a 15 years old age limit, and I was such a goody two-shoes kid that I never tried to sneak into a cinema. I read the comic book version of the film, though, by Walter Simonson, and when I eventually saw the film I was actually a bit disappointed by the chestburster scene. It just seemed more ferocious and gory in the comic.

Like Jaws it's a much better film than it had any right to be. Both Spielberg and Scott were young and hungry filmmakers. One can imagine what some old Hollywood hack would have done with the same script. One strenght of the film is that the characters actually seem like real people. They talk in a very natural, 70s film style, something that is completely lost in the later films, ending up with flat comic book characters in the fourth one. And yes, I'm a cartoonist using "comic book" as a negative term here, but anyway... Re-watching the film now, it's again strange to see how slow it is. Almost an hour passes before the monster is loose. The scene where the Tom Skerrit character, Dallas, is killed has sort of been a bit funny to me. When the alien stretches out his arms in that scene, in my head I hear Gotta dance! from Gene Kelly's Broadway number in Singing in the Rain. But that's probably just me.

Charles Addams

Ah, one day too late. Charles Addams was born 100 years ago yesterday.

Three things

1. I've had the new phonebooks lying around - they've been there for almost a year, I guess. I was looking through the white pages for a name for one of the characters in my new comic, when I thought I should check if my name is there. And it is! My name is in a French phonebook! I was almost as excited as Steve Martin was in The Jerk.

2. After not being in a cinema for over a year I went and saw the new Mission Impossible. It's not bad. It's not as good as the first one. It's better than the second one. The setpieces are great. There is some character stuff, and the problem with that is that you don't really care about Tom Cruise as a character. You want to see him run and punch people out. The talky/feely scenes are a bit boring. Some of the gadgets in the film, like making the new agent being able to hover over the ground was a bit hard to believe in. And the bad guy was a bit boring. Wanting to start World War 3, the Bond villains stopped doing that in the seventies. The rabbit's foot, in the third one, was a better macguffin, even not knowing what the damn thing was.

3. For some reason I've been thinking about the duet that Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash did together, Girl from the North Country. There are one of two places during the song where one of them starts to sing one thing and the other something else, then they correct themselves. I've wondered why they didn't make a second take. But perfection can be boring. And that small mistake actually makes it better, more human.

Lost Cat

So, yes, Lost Cat. That will be the title. Here's the very first panel of the story.
Note to self: Erase the pages as you're finished inking them, because erasing hundred pages in a row is no fun.

Good Night, Athos

There's a five page preview of Athos in America, at Robot 6, here:
http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/...

Night of the Demon

Dana Andrews is investigating a devil cult in England, with the help of Peggy Cummins in this film, called Curse of the Demon in the US. Directed by Jacques Tourneur.

There's an interesting link to film noir with this film. Andrews did, among others, Laura, Cummins was memorable in Gun Crazy and of course Tourneur did Out of the Past. The film looks great, and has some creepy scenes - it's mostly psychological horror, based on mood and atmosphere, in the style of Tourneur's previous films like Cat People. There's a special effect involving smoke that is pretty impressive. Unfortunately the producer wanted to show the demon of the title, and well, he shouldn't have. It's obviously some rubber thing that completely breaks the tension. The film, or possibly the short story it was based on, might be an inspiration for Sam Raimi's Drag Me To Hell. The ending is similar, where the person who is cursed is trying to give the curse back.