Jason's Blog, page 161

Hugo Pratt

Top five Hugo Pratt books:
1. La Ballade de la Mer Salée
2. Corto Maltese en Sibérie
3. Les Celtiques
4. Les Ethiopiques
5. Les Scorpions du désert

Film Noir

Top five film noir
1. Out of the past
2. The Big Combo
3. Kiss Me Deadly
4. The Asphalt Jungle
5. Detour

Detective story update

Finished pages: 20
Some details left: 15
Half finished: 19
Just begun: 2
Only 100 more to go!

Moebius

Top five Moebius books:
1. Le Garage Hermétique
2. Le Bandard Fou
3. Arzach
4. Les Yeux du Chat
5. 40 Days Dans le Désert B

Madman

Drawing done for Mike Allred. It should be in his big collection Madman 20th Anniversary Monster, out in January.

Body Heat

William Hurt and Kathleen Turner decide to kill her husband, Richard Crenna. Also starring Mickey Rourke and Ted Danson, written and directed by Lawrence Kasdan.

A nice little film noir exercise. One thing about the neo noirs from the 80s and 90s is that the person commiting a crime actually can get away with it. He or she doesn't need to be caught and punished like in the classic films. And they can also be seen having sex, like in this film, it's no longer only implied that they do, by swapping cigarettes or slamming doors or whatever. The neo noir director is aware that he is doing a noir, something Wilder was not while doing Double Indemnity. For him it was only a crime film - there were no film noir rules set in stone to follow. Like in that film, the dialogue has an artificial quality. Rourke is the one normal person, the outsider not being a part of the noir universe. He's the voice of reason in the film, asking Hurt not to go through with it. But of course, it wouldn't have been much of a noir film if Hurt had listened.

Dune miniseries

I found a used copy of the Dune miniseries, and gave it a look. It manages to make the Lynch version seem like even a bigger masterpiece. What's worse than film CGI? Bad tv CGI! The desert scenes look awful. I know, it's not fair to compare a big budget movie with a tv version made for far less money, but still... I wish they had gone for a no CGI look and given it more of a theatrical feel, that everything clearly is filmed on a stage, like Méliès' silent films. I think that in the end would have been less distracting. The production design is very imaginative, but always less interesting than in the Lynch film. The actors are also less interesting, with a possible exception for William Hurt. I didn't recognize any of the other actors. The accents are all over the place, from Scottish to East European. The cheap look of the series could maybe have been okay if the script was better - they have five hours to tell the story after all - but no, the characters don't feel more developed and the second half, the second disc, really drags. There is no vision, the way the Lynch film, for better or worse, had - it's just bland tv. The one thing that works better is the blue eyes of the fremen, okay, it looks more convincing than in the film.

The Defiant Ones

Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier are two convicts chained together who manage to escape. Also starring Charles Gravelvoice McGraw, directed by Stanley Kramer.

It's a good film. It's a message film, though, so there's not really any big surprise how it turns out. The characters are not completely credible - you can sort of feel them being moved around to make a point. Still, it's more eloquently done than Racism is bad!-film Crash made 50 years later. Curtis is quite good, almost unrecognizable from his usual prettyboy roles, but it's hard not to imagine what the film would have been like with the first choice for the part, Marlon Brando.

Experiment in Terror

Lee Remick is a bankteller threatened by a man to steal 100 000 dollars from her bank or he will kill her and her sister. Glenn Ford is the FBI agent working on the case. Directed by Blake Edwards.

It's a nice, little thriller, shot in black and white, with a terrific opening scene of Remick in her garage being grabbed by a man whose face we don't see. There's also a creepy scene of the same man dressed up as an old lady. In these films the victim is often not believed by the police. Here the FBI agent believes her just based on a phone call and even sends out a surveillance team! Not sure if that would have happened in a Hitchcock film... and Hitchcock would maybe have given it that extra suspenseful touch at the end. But still, it's quite an effective film from Edwards, showing he could do more than just comedy.

One more

Another panel based on an earlier sketch. The main character, the detective, is again a man out of time, a bit like Athos in The Last Musketeer. The story takes place in the present, but he dresses in a fedora and trenchcoat, as if it was in the fourties. And he walks around in a French city, not in LA or San Fransisco.