E.R. Torre's Blog, page 100

Movie costume design…

Interesting article regarding costume design in movies and how it serves to further the story in subtle ways:

I was particularly intrigued with the analysis of the costumes in the original Star Wars film.

Those who have followed this blog for any length of time know that I’m not a huge fan of Star Wars, both the original movie and series of films.  I don’t begrudge everyone else’s enjoyment of them, but they just never worked for me in spite of the fact that I was of the right age at the right time and went to see the original film in 1977 in a packed theater and… it just didn’t work for me like it did for so many others.

Yet the analysis of the dress/costumes in the film as presented in the above video is spot on.  It is a far trickier thing to create “original” costumes that are futuristic and fit into the setting of a film like Star Wars yet are grounded enough in things we as an audience may recognize -even if subconsciously- to understand what we’re seeing.  Thus, the military style outfits of the Empire are recognizably so, even if they don’t necessarily look like any military we are familiar with.  Similarly, Princess Leia’s outfit is regal, hinting at her royalty, yet original/futuristic enough to make us both recognize it for the royal aspect and the sci-fi aspect.

And Luke Skywalker’s outfit… I have to say, I never thought of it the way it was explained above but what’s presented is a brilliant observation.  (No, I don’t want to spoil it)

Good stuff.

Tina Fey is magnificent

Ok, getting political again… last night I happened to catch the SNL Weekend Update Special (I didn’t know they were doing these at all and just happened to luck into seeing it!).

Toward the show’s end, we were treated to the always delightful Tina Fey and this:

Wow just, wow.

Tina Fey, you’re incredible.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter (2015) a (mildly) belated review

Directed and written by Oz Perkins, son of actor Anthony Perkins who is best known today for the role of Norman Bates in the Alfred Hitchcock directed Psycho, The Blackcoat’s Daughter sure does play out like a Hitchcockian horror film.

Here’s its trailer:

I found it humorous to see, after the fact, a couple of videos also on YouTube “explaining” the film and, in my opinion, the explanations are sometimes quite off.

Which leads us to The Blackcoat’s Daughter’s (BD from here on) biggest problem: It presents a story in a very non-linear manner (nothing wrong about that) but fails to be clear enough about what we’re seeing and, worse, getting us to care enough about it.

Which is not to say BD is a total bust.

Mr. Perkins has clearly sucked in Alfred Hitchcock’s oeuvre and if nothing else this film reflects his love for that thrill master’s work.  BD is elegant, measured, and when it gets bloody it certainly reminded me of the film Psycho.

However, the story presented simply doesn’t take you in as it should and while the final reveal (another Psycho inspired element?) is made, you must have seen it coming from a long way away.

In a nutshell, BD goes like this:

At an upscale Catholic boarding school Freshman Kat () awaken from a nightmare where she walks through a snowy parking lot and sees a crashed vehicle which clearly has some victims within it.  That day in late February (which, by the way, was the original name of the film), the school goes on break and parents are supposed to pick up all the kids for a week off.

Kat is clearly disturbed by this vision and somehow appears to know that her parents will not come to pick her up.  Even more eerily, she has a strange attachment to the school’s headmaster and is bothered that he won’t be around for her piano recital given on the date of the parental pickups.

Meanwhile, fellow, but older, student Rose () is a more rebellious student who fears she is pregnant.

When the parents show up to pick up the kids in the boarding school, neither Kat nor Rose’s parents show up.  Kat, who had the premonition of his parent’s death, is very disturbed they haven’t shown up.  Rose, on the other hand, played her parents and told them the pickup date was later that week.  This was done so she could talk with her boyfriend and tell him of her possible pregnancy.

Meanwhile (part deux), a mysterious young woman named Joan () is taking a bus to a mysterious destination.  After arriving at her destination, she sits on a bench in the winter cold and a kindly man named Bill (), realizes she looks lost and cold and offers her a ride.

Bill and his wife Linda () take Joan in and, it turns out, they are on a very sad journey.

I don’t want to get into too many more details here (though I will after the SPOILER ALERT), but suffice to say these five characters and their stories will intersect before we reach the film’s end.

BD is, as I stated before, an elegant, well acted and well filmed movie which presents an admittedly fresh story… but, sadly, when all is said and done the film fails to sufficiently draw in this viewer (at least) and while I appreciate the care and thought behind the movie, it simply doesn’t present enough -and present it clearly enough- to get me to care.

Still, there is meat here and while I may feel this film is ultimately a whiff, Mr. Perkins shows considerable talent behind the camera, even if he’s a little better a director than a writer (again, IMHO).

So I can’t recommend BD even as I can commend Mr. Perkins for giving us something relatively new and interesting, even if it fails in the end to this viewer.

Now, on to…

 

SPOILER ALERTS!!!

YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!!

 

Still there?

You have been warned!

BD presents, in the end a very non-linear story.  It offers us scenes and then returns to them later in the film from a different character’s viewpoint which reveals to the audience just what was going on.

For example, Kat has a strange relationship with the heat furnace in the school’s basement, which is called back to later in the film.

But the one biggest reveal, which as I said before falls into Psycho territory, is that we find that “Joan” is not really who she says she is.  It turns out this woman strangled a woman in a bathroom and took her ID, which was indeed “Joan”.

For this “Joan” is Kat, nine years later.

Kat, it turns out, at the time her parents didn’t show up to get her all those years before, descended into some kind of a breakdown or -and this is where the film kinda lost me- was possessed by a demon.

Kat in time goes on a killing spree and takes out the two headmistresses/nuns living just outside the school before killing Rose who, moments before and in the bathroom had a period -again, something implied more than “shown” although in this case I’m OK with that!- and realized she wasn’t pregnant after all.

So nine years later Kat has managed to escape the insane asylum and is making her way back to the boarding school.  The people who picked her up, ironically enough, turn out to be Rose’s parents.  They are still in deep grief and are headed in that general direction to pay tribute to their lost daughter, unaware they have just picked up her daughter’s killer and will soon become victims of her just as their daughter was.

And Kat’s ultimate goal?

In the concluding moments of the film it is revealed that shortly after Kat was subdued a priest performed an exorcism on Kat and banished the demon that possessed her.

But Kat didn’t want it to go!

So she’s returning to the now boarded up school with her fresh victims (her first while “on her own”) and when she gets to the school and returns to the furnace where she first encountered the demon directly, she finds… nothing.

The furnace where she worshiped her personal demon is long cold.

The demon is long gone, banished forever.

And the disturbed Kat wandered back out to the road and cries.

Fin.

When watching the videos “explaining” what the movie is about, both I watched miss completely the fact that Rose finds out she’s not pregnant.  One of them seems to think that Kat and the school knew her parents were dead already (they most certainly did not) and missed the fact that when the headmaster and police officer come to the school later in the film, they’re obviously doing so to tell Kat her parents are dead, only to find Kat has gone on her bloody rampage.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter all that much. Indeed, the whole subplot involving Rose and her pregnancy/non-pregnancy are, in the end, not really all that important to the story, which makes me wonder if maybe this is yet another tribute to Psycho (Janet Leigh’s character’s story, which initially draw the viewer in, winds up being something of a red herring in the end).

So there you have it folks, a decent and potentially intriguing film that just missed for me.

Driving home yesterday…

…I heard most of Donald Trump’s presser….

And my reaction…

Never thought I’d witness that much crazy by someone in a position of that much power.

Sketchin’ 16

Moving from a genuine hero in Flash Gordon to perhaps my favorite “anti” hero…

[image error]

Of all the characters presented within the movies John Carpenter made, my favorite is easily Snake Plisskin, as portrayed by Kurt Russell.

While I feel Escape From New York, the movie that gave us that character, is far from perfect, there’s little doubt that Snake Plisskin is the real deal.  Love, love, love the character.

The issue I have with the film is that it starts so damn well but seems to run out of steam in its later third.  I feel part of the problem is that the movie’s budget caught up with John Carpenter’s vision and he wasn’t able to make the extravaganza he was hoping for.

Still, Escape From New York is nonetheless a favorite film of mine, if only because of Kurt Russell and that crazy bad ass Snake Plisskin.

For a man so many thought was dead, he sure has a hell of a lot of life in him!

Sketchin’ 15

Did this one last night:

[image error]

Since first seeing bits and pieces of the original 1936 serial episodes many a year ago, I’ve always had a fondness for Flash Gordon as played by Buster Crabbe.

Here then is my interpretation of a famous publicity picture of both he and actress Jean Rogers, who played Flash’s love Dale Arden, as they embrace.

The Confederacy

Apropos of the latest news coming from, among other places, Charlottesville, a personal observation.

I’ve mentioned before that I was born in a communist country which my parents fled from.  I spent my formative early years in a country that could best be described as having a system very close to European Socialism.  I then moved to a country that was a right winger’s wet dream: A country that had almost no taxes and therefore no civil services to speak of, was heavily catholic and outlawed abortion, and was incredibly, depressingly, terrible.

I then moved to and settled into the United States, which I’ve always felt had the best of all worlds.

But when I first moved to the U.S. and was enrolled in a boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida, I was taken aback when I saw things like this…

This is not, by the way, a photograph I took back then, but it represents the type of things I saw.  Not everywhere, mind you, but enough to wonder why.

For to me, my entire life up until the moment I enrolled in that sophomore year of High School, the Confederacy was always viewed -I thought anyway!- the wrong side of history in the years leading up and after to the Civil War.

They were, after all, fighting for one thing: The ability to keep owning slaves.  That couldn’t be viewed as a good thing to people, right?

So why was it that I was seeing people hanging the Confederate Flag here and there and displaying it on their pickup trucks/cars?

And I wondered, young though I was, how the African American population must feel upon seeing these flags here and there.

Times have changed, thankfully, since then.  I’ve been to Jacksonville very recently and I don’t see these types of displays at all.  Then again, I’m not living there so whatever I’ve seen has been based on sticking around the city a few days at a time.

Later on I came to understood the mythology built around the “lost cause” of the Confederacy.  But this mythology avoided mention of the issue of slavery and, instead, focused on the Civil War being somehow about “state rights”.

It was still bewildering because I impossible to not associate the Confederacy with slavery.

Today, as the “alt-right” and the Nazi’s have much of the nation’s attention, I’m finding it interesting to see the push back.  I suppose the old physics notion of every action having an equal and opposite reaction applies to people as well.

So yesterday some people took aim at a statue commemorating “the boys who wore gray” (the article is by David A. Graham and is found on The Atlantic):

Durham’s Confederate Statue Comes Down

Here’s the full video of the event as it happened:

The backlash to the backlash.

Interesting times.

Sketchin’ 13 and 14

A few days back I talked about the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel”.  Over the past four days, that light’s gotten much brighter thanks to taking care of my other daughter, who was moving into a new apartment.

It was a brutal series of days, renting a U-Haul to move all her stuff (and, by the Gods, has she accumulated a lot of it!) to the new apartment but by Saturday we were done and on Sunday we drove back home and today I sit here eager and ready to get back to some serious writing.

In the meantime, I managed to produce two more inked sketches using the iPad and Procreate (the art app).

Here’s the first one, and I’m mighty proud of it:

[image error]

The picture is of Deborah Harry, the singer of the band Blondie, in all her majesty.  Blondie was/is a terrific band and Ms. Harry was, for many years, a great crush of mine.  Not to get all shallow, but she is easily one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever had the pleasure to see, if only through the TV or pictures.

Rock on, Ms. Harry!

Next up is another woman, an actress in this case, that I feel is among the most beautiful to ever exist.  Alas, my attempt at making her picture fell, IMHO, flat…

[image error]

So here’s the deal: Since beginning these pictures, I’ve at times hit “home runs” and at other times did a decent enough job but felt I could’ve done better.  Of the pieces I’ve done, the one I’m probably most disappointed with remains the Lauren Bacall piece (you can see it here).  This one, alas, is also a disappointment.

However, and paradoxically, I think this picture actually isn’t all that bad “as is”.  But as a picture of the absolutely stunning and luminous actress Susan George… it just doesn’t work.

Though she’s been in some really dark films -none darker than the original Straw Dogs– I’ve always pictured Ms. George as accented in bright lights, her pale skin, beautiful blonde hair, and bright big eyes front and center and her entire being sexy as hell.

Alas, in this piece I’ve presented someone who looks like they belong in a noir feature and whose features are way too hidden in dark shadow.

Don’t know why it turned out that way but I knew I was in trouble when I erased the face, re-tried it, didn’t like what I was doing, erased again and re-tried it again and, after doing the same four times, gave up.  It just wasn’t working the way I wanted it to.

Again, however, I feel the picture itself turned out perfectly fine… if my subject was someone other than Susan George.

Oh well, on to the next piece!

Charlottesville…

It’s tempting to say the usual lamentations and pointed criticisms…

But its also mind-boggling to witness the news regarding Charlottesville over the weekend along with the response from our “President” afterwards.

One life was lost when angry, ugly rhetoric gave way to -yes, oh yes– a terrorist act.  Our “President”, so quick to condemn any act, whether terrorist or not, that has even the faintest association with other nationalities or cultures, nonetheless found it near impossible to condemn Neo-Nazis that were marching over the weekend and, specifically, the Neo-Nazi who was responsible for killing Heather Heyer.

It’s… there just aren’t words.

No words at all.

To the family of Ms. Heyer, my sincerest condolences, for what its worth.

There remain a lot of good people out there and it remains my fervent hope that this darkness plaguing us will lift.

Soon, hopefully.

Great timing…

Getting political here, again…

So yesterday our President had some hair raising things to say about North Korea… words that made him sound a lot like North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, the man who his words were directed at!

And coincidentally and over on the cable channel Starz, they happened to be playing Dr. Strangelove Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb.

Seeing Sterling Hayden’s insane General Jack D. Ripper had me in a cold sweat.

Suddenly, the film wasn’t quite as funny as before.