Comic Con Report, volume 2: Doctor Who Edition

This is the best fourth Doctor I've seen at the Comic-Con. It's also the third I've ever seen. So far I've only seen one guy dressed as the fourth Doctor, a couple years ago, and it was haphazard enough to be pointless--just a stripey, not even past waist length, scarf, a cheap brown fedora, a t-shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes. Sure, I mainly take pictures of girl cosplayers because I'm a letch, but even if I weren't, girls just by and large seem to have better costumes. They even dress as guys better than guys.

Though the girl in the background of this picture, dressed presumably as the ninth Doctor, probably oughtn't to have bothered;

On the right is, yes, a TARDIS bunny girl. This was simply a great idea. I love bunny girls. I don't care what that says about me.

It was my favourite TARDIS costume and I saw quite a few, and even more TARDIS hats.

This TARDIS dress was the most conservative TARDIS outfit I saw--the Dalek dress next to her was one of many Dalek dresses I saw. There was a little girl in a red one at the panel on Sunday who enchanted Smith and Gillan. This little TARDIS won the adoration of every woman he walked past waiting in the Hall H line;

I just really hope word doesn't get around his school he dressed as something called a "TARDIS".

I was up at 5:30 to get in the line for Doctor Who. Before it were the panels for Fringe and Supernatural. The hall was filled before the Fringe panel began and I was lucky enough Fringe fans didn't care about Supernatural or Doctor Who and chose to leave after that panel, allowing me and a few hundred other people into the room. Since I've never seen Supernatural I took the opportunity to use the restroom. I felt compelled to get this picture because there were celebrities of sort on stage, but you can see I didn't bother trying to get close;

It's always weird listening to a panel for something wildly popular you know nothing about, listening to the handsome stars of the show coyly avoid answering certain questions and trying not to seem too taken with the adoration they're receiving. One young woman blushingly offered to carry star Jensen Ackles' baby, something the moderator of the Doctor Who panel mentioned to Matt Smith, causing Smith to remark, "We have time, I'm sure we can squeeze something in."

I got footage of the Doctor Who panel, but I don't have to edit and upload it because someone else uploaded longer, closer footage already, so here you go;

Adhering to the request of Con administration and the various studios, the person who took this video has omitted the preview footage from season seven that was shown. There were two rather long clips, first from the Western episode, "A Town Called Mercy", which was all right, and at the end of the panel Steven Moffat presented a very long clip from "Dinosaurs in Space", the second episode of season seven, which was a funnier clip, though hampered slightly by the too busy quality the new series occasionally has. The Doctor puts together a gang comprised of Queen Nefertiti, an Edwardian, vaguely T.E. Lawrence type played by Rupert Graves (Lestrade on Sherlock), Amy and Rory, and Rory's dad, played by Mark Williams, who's accidentally brought along when the Doctor materialises the TARDIS around Amy, Rory, and his dad while the three are trying to change a light bulb and the Doctor becomes alarmed later when he finally spots Rory's dad and demands to know how he got onboard the TARDIS.

It was a good panel, I liked Matt Smith's enthusiasm about Comic-Con, and Karen Gillan, as usual in interviews, feels remarkably in love with Doctor Who. Arthur Darvill seemed like he was recovering from a nervous breakdown and Steven Moffat didn't talk nearly as much as I would have liked. The panel was moderated by Chris Hardwick of The Nerdist, who's a funny enough guy and seemed to have struck up a genuine friendship with Matt Smith, but it has to be said Hardwick dominated way too much of the panel, which I think actually rankled Moffat a bit--after someone offstage mentioned there was time for just one more audience question and Hardwick began making jokes about what an unpopular thing to say that was, Moffat dryly pointed out when Hardwick was finished that there was now time for no questions.

I'll finish by posting this picture of a seventh Doctor I sat next to, the only seventh Doctor I've ever seen at the Con;

He sadly remarked that his costume was incomplete, but I was impressed just by the fact that he'd gotten the right shoes;

Twitter Sonnet #406

Sealless helicopter water starts blank.
Black hotels loom by the sixth super car.
Oesophagi feed the intestine tank.
Its not for sunburn Austin travels far.
Contracted queues confound mushroom breakfast.
Apples squeeze blurred bludgeons across the dark.
Clocks bend for frenetic singing repast.
Shoulder mounted chihuahuas mutely bark.
Money paper knocks the nervous shade skunk.
Sensitive eyelashes shield the sunbeams.
Monochrome cools the small neglected trunk.
Plums peel the confetti into two teams.
Frozen blueberry corks cull the large shoe.
Pink necked paint man one time asked, "Doctor who?"

Comic Con Report, volume 1

Waste not, want not, that's the Sarlacc's philosophy.

So like I said, I didn't see many panels, the Con this year for me was almost entirely about roaming the exhibit hall and waiting. I did see a lot of great costumes. Almost immediately on Thursday, I ran into this girl;

"You again!" I said the moment I saw her. I've now run across her three years in a row at the Con, the girl who makes her dress out of the enormous bag they give you to hold the Con schedule and souvenir book in.

2010

2011

I actually saw a couple other girls this year wearing bag dresses, but they were always bags from previous years and not as well made. The original Bag Girl, let's call her, always uses this bag from the current year, and mind you, I ran into her early Thursday morning, which means after she got the bag the night before she made an entire dress for the next day. You can see this year she even made a scaled skirt that kept the image advertised on the bag.

I was at the Con early every morning. I wanted to go to portfolio review, which is where a variety of publishers basically give job interviews to artists and writers--mainly artists. I did two interviews, I don't know yet if anything will come of them. Thursday there was simply no panel I wanted to see--at least, not one that happened early enough for me. I wish I could've gone to the RiffTrax panel.

Joss Whedon at this point could probably be called King of the Con. I got to the Con at 9am on Friday, which was much too late to get into the Firefly anniversary panel scheduled for 12:30. I overheard one girl complaining, "They're stopping us at twenty thousand!"

I ran into this girl dressed as Kaylee from Firefly (I'm not sure who her friend's supposed to be) on the trolley Saturday evening and she told me the reason the Firefly panel was held in the woefully inadequate Ballroom 20 upstairs, which seats 4,500, instead of Hall H, which can hold 6,500, was that Hall H was reserved only for promoting upcoming media. This is an example of some rather inflexible thinking on the part of administration, if you ask me. In any case, it seems like Firefly fandom, instead of waning in the years since the show's cancellation only seems to be getting bigger, and I think it's only partially due to the success of Whedon's The Avengers.

The life size trolls at Weta's booth were really impressive.

On Saturday, I wanted to get into Hall H to see the Hobbit presentation. I got up at 6:30 am and got to the Con at around 9am. For some reason I didn't feel like I needed to hurry--I wanted to see the Django Unchained panel early in the day in Hall H and the Hobbit panel was scheduled for 2:30pm. Somehow I didn't reckon on so many people willing to sit through so many panels to see the Hobbit panel because not only did I not get into Django Unchained, the people in Hall H didn't leave when that was over because The Hobbit was their only objective all along. I waited in line from 9am to 2:30pm. Which would've felt like a waste of time, except I met a really nice girl from Austin named Katie who was waiting to see the Iron Man 3 panel scheduled after The Hobbit. Katie's more hardcore into comics and cons than anyone I've ever talked to, and while I was with her she briefly texted a friend of hers who was at another Con in another state trying to acquire for her rare, Junior Justice League comics from the 1980s that had never been collected in trade form. She told me about seeing a panel for the latest of the Ninja Turtles reboots, a television series, not the Michael Bay movie. It seems like Ninja Turtle reboots are coming so frequently nowadays--in the past five years, there was another unrelated to each other TV series and movie. Katie said this new one sounded like it might be good and made an effort to pay homage to the old series, using one of the voice actors and having a theme song resembling the old one. I was really into Ninja Turtles when I was a kid, but it's something I have more trouble reconnecting with than anything else I enjoyed in my childhood. I suspect if a new series works, it'll be because of an adult working from an impression of the series as remembered than how it actually was.

Katie was also a big fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation when she was a kid and I mentioned to her these pictures I got of LeVar Burton, Brent Spiner, and Marina Sirtis on Friday;

Okay, that's about all I have time for to-day. I'll leave you with this video of the belly dancers of the Adrian Empire which was incredibly awkward video to take I'll admit. They were all facing the wall and when I walked over I felt uncomfortably like they were dancing just for me. The knock out on the left gave me a smile once that seemed to say, "This is my empowering public display of sexiness of which you are partaking," and when I smiled back she stopped smiling abruptly as it felt more like a "moment" than I think either of us really wanted.

Comic Con Report: Prologue

Well, it's over, for me anyway, Comic-Con 2012. I am exhausted and I only managed to get into one panel I wanted to see, the Doctor Who panel to-day. I had to get up at 5:30 to do so and I only just barely got in. I got up at 6:30 on Saturday for the Hobbit panel was stopped just shy of going in. But I have plenty to share as well as an extraordinary amount of Doctor Who related material, not just from the panel, so stay tuned to-morrow by which time my mind and body shall hopefully have concluded regeneration.

Comic Con Blues

Twitter Sonnet #405

Orange surprise expedites yellow glow.
Naval guards give their autumnal venom.
Breadcrumbs climb to-morrow's dull Twilight row.
The back feet are put full before Gotham.
Scales cover coalescing apparel.
Jesus summons reflections up bad stairs.
Traffic safety's downplayed by the moral.
Knitted bricks behead the yarn woman pears.
Safer snakes are secured by the booth babe.
Facsimile archaeology blazed.
The false serpent savaged the ship called Abe.
Holographic kingdoms are hard to raze.
Pink chipped monkey bars carefully swim east.
Myna birds believe in Belloq's young niece.

Friday the 13th at Comic-Con

Friday the 13th at Comic-Con

And the Lanes were Lined with Hutt Sex

My first Slave Leia sighting of 2012, from early this morning, and Comic-Con can now be said to be underway. Thursday looks to be this year's Sunday--not a whole lot was going on and I was too tired to stay up for the RiffTrax panel. Sunday, though, I only this morning realised, has the Doctor Who panel in Hall H. Usually nothing's happening on Sunday.

I did get a tonne of pictures to-day though, I'll be posting next week. Now I'm just going to enjoy being off my feet for one night.

To the Artifice

Tying to get ahead on my comic for the days I'll be losing to Comic-Con, I spent a lot of time inking and colouring yesterday. The Howard Stern Show and Nick and Artie are both on vacation, so I listened to audio books--Seamus Heaney reading his translation of Beowulf, Nicol Williamson reading The Hobbit, and the first hour or so of The Brothers Karamazov read by someone with a slightly distracting, perpetually snide tone. So that's over nine hours of listening to audio books, during which I inked and coloured all the while and I still think I'm going to need to be playing catch up next week.

There's this "Comic Creator Connexion" service Comic-Con provides where writers can meet up with artists. Registration capacity has been reached for writers but not for artists. I doubt there are many other pre-registered events at the Con for which capacity hasn't been reached. This disparity does not in the least surprise me--it's a lot easier to say you're a writer even if you're not than it is to say you're an artist. There are people who write twenty five words a year of creative writing who are comfortable calling themselves writers--after all, who would check? People have a hard enough time reading renowned writing nowadays. But there's too much easy proof in the pudding with art--it takes more time to make, and it doesn't take long to form an impression of the results.

Anyway, to-night's Preview Night, the Con begins. I need to get my stuff together. I probably won't be posting much until Monday. 出かけます。

Twitter Sonnet #404

Armed astronauts acclimate to banjos.
Dormitory detours displace Degas.
Lamps liquidate the lesser G.I. Joes.
Legal language scarred the wooden Sega.
Gatling gourmet gives new life to noodles.
Sorrow sorts the bathtubs from the vista.
Long kite tackle takes bass over hurdles.
Cakey realm shadows display Batista.
Tangerine wizards stomp the swallowed tick.
Credulous legends pled for doubled tale.
Pulverised pearls displaced the lonely brick.
Tarantula kings powder thorax pale.
Martian nurses negotiate shorn wool.
Ink indicates the calamitous fool.

Shell Costumes

This is a rather large turtle I saw on the way to the store yesterday. I'd heard about there being a lot of turtles in the river, but I never saw them until a couple days ago when a dead duck was floating under the bridge. I'm not sure what happened to him, he floated with what was left of his belly up, which wasn't much. The turtles seemed to love the corpse--you can just barely make out the head of a turtle poking up next to a wing in this picture;

I can't help thinking of the Mock Turtle.

I don't have a lot of time to-day and I'll have less to-morrow as I prepare for Comic-Con. I'm getting supplies together for all the time I'm going to be spending sitting around in the convention centre, getting supplies with which I can pack lunches. I also made some cards to hand out for Echo Erosion;

The tagline is a take off on David Lynch's tagline for INLAND EMPIRE: "'A Woman in Trouble'". I hope the concern I excite for the cat will be enough to overcome the cumbersome url. I wish I could've afforded a domain for this comic.

I used up my colour ink cartridge making cards and printing pages to take to the portfolio review--this seems to be a very good year for waiting around at portfolio review on Thursday, since practically nothing is going on on Thursday. I think the RiffTrax thing is on Thursday night, but I'm not sure I'll try and see it since it's been moved to one of the hotels outside the convention centre, as has all the Adult Swim stuff. First the anime rooms, now this. I like the idea of the convention just taking over the whole city, but I wish it didn't mean I'd have to walk so much to see everything I want to see. Hopefully it's not searing hot downtown, by the bay, like it is here, a ways inland.

It's going to be really sad that Ray Bradbury's not going to be there this year, though I see he's going to have two tribute panels, one of which is going to have Margaret Atwood, who's also going to be on another panel. I've never read any of her stuff, but it seems like a few people I respect really like her.

So far the panels I most want to see are Quentin Tarantino's for Django Unchained, the Firefly reunion (with Joss Whedon and most of the cast), and the Hobbit panel which Peter Jackson's been aggressively winking about. This could be a slow year at the Con, but I'm still looking forward just to being there.

With These Handcuffs, I Thee Wed

He stalks her, he forces his way into her apartment, hits her, ties her up and keeps her captive for days. But is he really such a bad guy? Pedro Almodovar's 1990 film ¡Átame! (Tie Me Up! Time Me Down--literal translation of the title is simply Tie Me Up!) seems as though it would dispute the validity of the very question. It's a movie with a coyly light touch for a story filled with relatively heavy elements. It's billed as a dark romantic comedy, but I don't think it can be so neatly categorised. It reminds me of a Coen brothers film inasmuch as it ultimately seems to be about the impossible to categorise, to simplify, condemn or to justify nature of human relations. It's a funny and charmingly amoral film.

Which is not to say I condone, or am charmed by, a guy abusing a woman in the way Ricky (Antonio Banderas) abuses Marina (Victoria Abril). But by the end of the film, their relationship doesn't seem to be based on any inequality of power and Ricky seems to snap comfortably into Marina's life. One could say it's the story of the right man doing the very wrong thing, but that act being a part of his nature which makes him the right man.

I think everyone in their lives senses at least once there's no moral bottom in the universe, and most people back away from that quickly with great fear. But it doesn't take long to realise this is how it has to be, if one considers all the blood that is shed, all the lives that are exploited in order to facilitate the standards of living in civilisation.

Ricky is mentally disturbed, like a child almost. He's released from psychiatric care at the beginning of the film, and immediately shows to us his release was unjustified by sneaking into Marina's dressing room--she's a famous actress--and stealing things left and right without the slightest hint he understands he might be doing something wrong.

Yet he's very sincere in wanting to prove he's the right guy for Marina. It's like he exists in some tiny universe where social rules are totally different. Wikipedia quotes Almodovar as saying of him, "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is essentially a love story, or rather a story of how someone attempts to construct a love story in the same way as he might study for a degree: by means of effort, will power, and persistence… when you have nothing, like my main character, you have to force everything. Including love. Ricky has only (as the flamenco singers say) the night, the day, and the vitality of an animal."

I bet a lot of people found it disturbing, too, that Marina's feelings for Ricky change from fear and hatred to comfort and affection around the time he scores drugs for her. She wants to have sex with him after he gets beaten up badly while attempting to get her some heroin.

Does she have Stockholm Syndrome? You may fairly say so. The ostensibly happy ending seeing everyone in a car, singing, while a worried look slowly appears on Marina's face, left me with the feeling there's a well of unresolved issues in her relationship with Ricky, yet it's not nearly as uncommon, and perhaps far less malignant, than one might suppose.

The Struggle for Cancan

I've now seen three movies about the Moulin Rouge, and I'd have to say Jean Renoir's 1954 film French Cancan is by far the sexiest and the most fun. It's also the first one I've seen in French, and it has the sort of befuddled languor characteristic of so much French cinema--charming and lovely when done by Renoir, kind of tediously narcissistic in French films of the past twenty or so years. French Cancan concerns fictional sex dramas surrounding the construction and opening of the Moulin Rouge, a lightweight plot carried by absolutely gorgeous visuals and musical numbers.

Jean Gabin plays Henri Danglard, the unflappable mastermind behind several clubs before the Moulin Rouge he never has himself the money to pay for. He seems to exist within French society of the late 1800s as a middleman between the rich and their culture, always managing to draw in funds by mysterious ways. And he's the gravitational centre of the film, his air of effortlessness and faith providing an emotional sense of scale and depth.

The girls are beautiful, the costumes are beautiful, the colours are beautiful. Danglard recruits Nini, and through her POV we see the process by which girls are trained in a cheap practice hall to dance in Danglard's various venues, the procedural quality distinctly reflecting the doubtless influence had on the film by The Red Shoes. There's nothing like the resonance of The Red Shoes' character drama in French Cancan's tabloid-like tale. But there is an awesome catfight.

Maria Felix plays Lola, the first lover we see Danglard with, and her top is constantly threatening to come off.

Felix sounds like a fantastic star, I wish I could track down more of her films. Even on Wikipedia, most of the links to her movie titles go to the wrong pages--like a film she did called Mare Nostrum just goes to a page about the Mediterranean Sea.

Oh, and Edith Piaf's in the film, performing. So there's a lot to take in here.

Twitter Sonnet #403

Grass cups can't stop the cocoanut top joy.
Hula puzzles strangely resemble djinn.
Dalek templars shoot rooks that pawns employ.
Only dream quest zebras can truly win.
Silence sits well on crackers left unclaimed.
Revolutions reincarnate in cars.
Unseen shoes place the soft heel in no frame.
At death, some podiatrists go to Mars.
Antimatter cherry trees drop grape nuts.
Plastic peanut butter falls on Tetris.
Deformed Smurfs grow bigger in Pizza Huts.
Soft antennae tricked the broadcast mattress.
Jingoistic orange juice collapsed in space.
Penicillin music selects the ace.

It's All a Road Really Needs

There's a kind of deliciously plotless quality to 1967's Two for the Road. It's a movie about a married couple who run into trouble in their relationship a few years after they first fell quite in love. I'm not sure how long they'd been married, but judging from the ages of stars Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney, it couldn't have been more than ten years. Them falling in love is a lot more convincing than their ruptures, though both actors convey differences in their characters adequately enough to quickly establish for a viewer what point in the relationship we're seeing in this film which is not told in a linear fashion, bunching up and juxtaposing the different stages of their rapport. There's a great deal of pleasure to be had watching these two roaming about beautiful French countryside with a dreamy yet fundamentally exciting Henry Mancini score.

The movie's directed by Stanley Donen, who'd previously directed Hepburn in Charade, which also had a great Mancini score. But the two movies are otherwise vastly different, and it's interesting to compare Two for the Road with Hepburn's 1964 film Paris When it Sizzles--the earlier film was a criticism of New Wave filmmaking, the 1967 film is a production clearly ready to acknowledge New Wave was there to stay and sets about to incorporate New Wave aspects while trying to maintain something of the reliable Hollywood formula. Stanley Donen, who got his big break co-directing Singin' in the Rain, may have been a suitable director for this sort of coordinated endeavour--I imagine if it'd been someone like Alfred Hitchcock or John Huston, the response to such an idea probably would've been a simple, "Fuck you, I'll just try and make a good movie like I always do." Which probably explains why audiences complained about how fake the gorgeous matte paintings in Marnie looked.

Anyway, although the movie is basically no more than a character study without traditional beginning, middle, and end threads, Donan feels compelled to fill it with plot waypoints--cars breaking down, people getting chicken pox, hotel food being unreasonably expensive. These things are too often relied upon to explain the difficulties in the relationship of the married couple. Being external they do little to explain the character motivations. Their impending split feels consequently incredibly superficial--she wants to leave because he spends too much time with his work, he wants to leave because he believes men should be free.

William Daniels and Eleanor Bron play a very broad, progressive couple who believe in permitting their obnoxious daughter total freedom. They are kind of funny, but mostly they feel like a fruitless detour--the example they provide of marriage I guess is to explain some of Hepburn and Finney's dislike of the idea, but it's just too broad, and seems too influenced by an ill-considered criticism of contemporary parenting techniques.

But the best parts of the movie easily override this stuff, which is Finney and Hepburn walking in the rain, taking shelter in cement tubes, swimming, rigging themselves a mosquito net in a hotel room. This stuff is fun, it really makes you want to go on vacation with them.

Wikipedia quotes this letter Audrey Hepburn sent to Henry Mancini before production began;

Dearest Hank: Please won't you do the music for "Two for the Road", the Stanley Donen picture I am now doing with Albert Finney? It is the best script I have ever had, wonderfully tender, funny and romantic. Can't imagine anyone else but you scoring. I am at Hotel La Pinede Saint Tropez, France. All my love to you both. Audrey.

Can you imagine any modern actress writing a letter to a film composer, hoping he'd score a movie for her? I love Audrey Hepburn.

I was thinking about it. She's really not sexy, I always imagined she'd look like a holocaust victim naked, though her thighs in this movie have more meat than I'd have expected.

She just has this wonderful thin skinned quality, the sort of gasping cry she does when things go wrong sounds so exactly like heartbreak and there's an extraordinarily effective quality to her joy as well. She was unique.

Pigeon Puts Out Fire with Gasoline

The new Echo Erosion is online. See if you can spot all five pop culture references. Here's one hint;

Moth Knees

So tired. To jumpstart my Comic-Con schedule, I decided to get up three hours early to-day, after which I spent several hours getting groceries, and now I still have almost a full day's work to do on my comic.

Just random thoughts happening to-day. James Bond--well, the easy part is "Bond" I think because it implies firmness, dedication. "James" not "Jim" or "Jimmy"--he makes you say the proper name, which is one of those that ends with an S without being plural. It's slightly awkward to say and there's an implicit sophistication in the slight trouble it takes to say. It makes him seem like more of a douche to me somehow.

It's weird how Tom Cruise divorces women when they turn 33. I'm 33, so I guess I wouldn't be considered eligible. Though I'm not one of those people who thinks that Cruise is gay. The other night I heard for the first time someone in the media, Artie Lange, sharing my opinion that Cruise is asexual. I think that's what Eyes Wide Shut is all about, I think that's why Kubrick cast Cruise and Kidman. Ask yourself; how different is Cruise in interviews really from David in Prometheus? Yes, he may be a robot.

He sure left Katie Holmes in a spot. After bringing her into the Scientology fold, adapting her to this strange little world, forcing her to turn down good roles like the one in The Dark Knight, she's kind of up the river without a paddle. Well, unless you count the fact that she's still going to be unimaginably rich.

Something I was thinking about while watching that Alice in Wonderland a couple days ago--a girl who worked at a local Mexican restaurant was telling me how much she loved Alice in Wonderland, though she seemed surprised when I mentioned the movies are based on books. She laughed as she told me she'd found out a few days ago that the answer to "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" was "Because Poe wrote on both." She said she'd have never guessed it. I felt a mild despair as I realised there was no way of telling her that the riddle actually has no answer without sounding like a lunatic. How can there be no answer when she "knows" the answer?

Twitter Sonnet #402

Darkness and flashlights created people.
Purple cinnamon twins take down spacecraft.
Mutilated hands make a strange steeple.
Wriggling pink pig pudding was Spam's first draft.
Double water expands in the tin lake.
Prairie dog agents dig the equator.
Lateral necklaces are proven fake.
Santa's letters just confused Darth Vader.
Cold caramel totems trickle fury.
Sugar grain stars mean night coffees aren't black.
Termite fire makes skeletons hurry.
Stations move sometimes on a circle track.
Linoleum tea trains ground teeth to fall.
Funhouse gum friends grey fountains at the mall.

An Alice on a Soundstage

Sometimes the danger in adhering as close as possible to the source material can result in something a bit grotesque--like using John Tenniel's illustrations as templates for bulbous tumour ridden monstrosities. In my quest to see every Alice's Adventures in Wonderland adaptation ever made, I'd been putting off seeing 1933's Alice in Wonderland because I'd heard many times how bad it was. While it is certainly one of the weaker adaptations, it does have its virtues.

Alice herself, played by Charlotte Henry, is by far the biggest flaw in the movie. Henry's pretty hot--a nineteen year old, mind you--and carries some of the fetishistic pleasure of a woman dressing and acting like a kid, but she's also a terrible actor, with the stilted phoniness of an early talkie actress who's been through the studio's paranoid proper diction system and has come out of it a lifeless cube of poise.* Alice comes off as more stupidly cheerful and generally blank than she ought to.

The screenplay is a fusion of elements from both Alice books, and I actually liked how much of the dialogue was preserved--like the scene where Alice becomes a Queen and she has a clever nonsense conversation about etiquette with the Red and White Queens. But the best part of the movie is the supporting roles.

Cary Grant famously played the Mock Turtle, but behind a huge mask and distracting, broad sobbing delivery. Edward Everett Horton and Charlie Ruggles are well suited for the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, though Horton's hat is too large and plain.

The best is W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty and Gary Cooper as the White Knight. Fields has the perfect tone of lazy overconfidence, and Cooper perfectly embodies the sweetly confused and fundamentally kind quality of the white knight.

But, aside from Alice herself, the main problem with the film is its straight, lifeless digestion of the source material. The filmmakers shot actors performing a script made up of bits from the books but without any real connexion to it. Despite the efforts of good supporting actors and the inevitable charm of Carroll's dialogue, this feels like a high school play.

*Hmm. I see she died on my first birthday, April 11, 1980, in San Diego, where I live now. So that's kind of weird.

When Bread was New

A couple days ago, I helped bring several of the local ducklings into the bread eating habit. I'm getting them while they're young now. I ought to've taken video and set it to Velvet Underground's "I'm Waiting for the Man".

Large pictures of duckling corruption on my Live Journal.

I went to see Prometheus again yesterday with Tim, who hadn't seen it. It remains a delightful and beautiful film. Although it was projected wrong--something felt funny in the beginning, and then I became sure when the P and the S were cut off on the sides of the title when it came up. I went out and complained, saying that the matting was wrong before I came back and realised the shutter things on the sides were as open as far as they went--the film was simply being projected on a screen too small for it and the staff didn't care. I bet Madagascar 3 was projected properly.

They were showing a few other movies that I wanted to see--Ted, The Amazing Spider-Man, and I even kind of want to see Snow White and the Huntsman. Money's been especially tight for me lately so I'd carefully been setting aside enough to see Prometheus again since a saw it the first time a few weeks ago. And by yesterday, there still was no movie I wanted to see more. I'm hoping it's done well enough to get a sequel--I like this quote on the Wikipedia entry; "Further detailing his sequel concept, Scott stated that it would follow Shaw to her next destination, 'because if it is paradise, paradise can not be what you think it is. Paradise has a connotation of being extremely sinister and ominous.'" The possibilities, just in terms of visual filmmaking, of such a Ridley Scott movie are extremely tantalising.

What Red Leaves Witness

The brilliant autumn trees, hills, and farmland in the first few shots of 1983's adaptation of Something Wicked This Way Comes gave me to know they'd at least gotten one thing right. The Wikipedia entry quotes Ray Bradbury, author of the original novel, as saying of the film that it's "not a great film, no, but a decently nice one." I'd say that's about right.

Bradbury was allowed to write the screenplay, but creative conflicts with the director and the studio were behind the film's flaws--though in the end I'm surprised to see it was the studio, Disney, that played the hero and recut the end of the film to Bradbury's specifications, making it less of the "family friendly" movie director Jack Clayton wanted. The end of the movie still doesn't begin to approach the satisfyingly weird and thematically complex climax of the novel. The movie also introduces the concepts of death and aging, the gulf between childhood and adulthood, but it doesn't digest these things as interestingly as the book.

The main problem is the casting. Jason Robards and Jonathan Pryce are both good actors, but just so totally wrong for the parts they played. Robards' role of Charles Halloway was originally written by Bradbury for Gene Kelly, and one can see how essential it was to have in the part a man who may have been older and yet had a fundamental boyish quality, a sense of irrepressible mirth. You need that to make the laughing and dancing stuff at the end work. Wikipedia says Bradbury wanted Peter O'Toole or Christopher Lee for Mr. Dark--it's painful just to contemplate how perfect it would've been had Lee been in the role. With Lee in the role, it would have made the movie twenty times better. Imposing physique and voice and with his minimalist philosophy of body language, Lee would've had the perfect mix of menace and mystery. Jonathan Pryce, on the other hand, may be the least imposing and mysterious actor who's ever lived.

He's great as nervous and harmless Sam Lowry, but as a mastermind villain type--it's like we're being asked to feel threatened by Goofy.

Still, for the atmosphere and Bradbury's distinctive voice in the screenplay, this is a decent movie to watch in October or November. It might make a good double feature with The Trouble with Harry.

Twitter Sonnet #401

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