A Small Hand for the Drowning Damned

Maybe all Lady Macbeth needed was a little more affection. One might infer this from the title of 1948's Kiss the Blood Off My Hands, a film noir set in post-World War II London. Starring Joan Fontaine, she's not exactly Lady Macbeth, though her costar, Burt Lancaster, has plenty to feel guilty about in this beautifully shot film by Norman Foster.

I actually didn't mind Lancaster so much in this film. Maybe his sleazy egotism was just right for the role. He plays an American GI and small time hustler named Bill who accidentally kills a man in a pub at the beginning of the film. To evade the cops, he climbs rooftops before crawling through an open window where poor innocent Jane Wharton (Joan Fontaine) is trying to sleep.

For some reason she believes him when he says it's all a misunderstanding. Maybe not surprising considering in the 1940s she had kind of a track record for falling for dangerous or duplicitous men, like in the two Alfred Hitchcock movies she was in, Suspicion and Rebecca. It's not explained exactly what she sees in the man who broke into her apartment except there's the impression of a warm personality naturally concerned for a wounded soul, a depth of character I put down entirely to Fontaine's performance. It's quite easy to see how Jane would be absolutely flat in the hands of a lesser actress, causing the credibility of Bill's motivations to suffer, too.

She wins him over and he makes an earnest attempt to change his ways despite being constantly shadowed by a gangster played by Robert Newton with a cockney accent. He'd witnessed Bill's accidental crime and wants to use it as leverage to get Bill to pull jobs for him.

The vulnerability and sense of hopelessness in Bill, due partly to his experiences as a prisoner of war, come across very nicely for his motivation to take advantage of people without compassion. Jane slowly redeeming him is generally sweet even as what he's become rubs off on her a bit to her tremendous distress. This may be even more beautiful actually.

There's a conspicuously code enforced ending to the film but otherwise this is a really nice noir.

Still Detectives

One way to tell someone's a lousy psychiatrist is if he says being threatened with torture means someone's not going to torture him, especially if he uses this false insight as a taunt. So here's Velcoro being a genuinely bad man on the new True Detective, though in this episode he finds out he's even worse than he thought, like one of the nicer lines from the episode where he advises his son that if, on an occasion where he experiences pain, he wonders if there's a limit to the amount of pain one can experience, "pain is inexhaustible. It's only people that get exhausted."

Velcoro records these monologues for his son since he hardly ever gets to see him and, as we see in this episode, he'll have even less opportunity if his ex-wife has her way. I liked just about everything about this episode except the final shot which made for weird continuity with a previous shot of Velcoro, the last shot clearly inserted to hammer a point home to the audience that I don't think really needed to be hammered.

I loved Bezzerides in the sexual harassment therapy group. Her casually talking about how she loves big dicks a nice demonstration of what a farce the situation is. She has a discussion with her sister later about making contact with pimps in order to get into a party. It seems like the hypocrisy she exhibited in the first episodes has smoothed out a bit in the sixty day gap between this episode and the previous one--she's also gone back to smoking regular cigarettes instead of e-cigarettes.

Last week's shoot out, by the way, really impressed me. I loved the sense that anyone could get shot and I especially loved the portrayal of the emotional impact on the survivors at the end, that kind of thing is usually avoided on shows where lives are unrealistically cheap. I'm distinguishing here between lives being cheap because people die all the time, which they certainly do on True Detective, and lives being cheap because they don't mean anything to the people who live, a mistake even some good shows make. True Detective, again like Twin Peaks, knows it's valuable to make death look like it really hurts the people who witness it.

Though for all that, seeing Teague Dixon getting shot in the head last week doesn't make me feel like it's the last we'll see of him, particularly after some of the events in last night's episode.

I also particularly liked the scene of Bezzerides and Paul finding a horror scene by following carrion birds. And I thought the relationship between Frank and Jordan was really effectively sweet, which is going to make next week's showdown between him an Velcoro all the more effective.

Heaven's Zany Magic

If the Marx Brothers had made a politically conscious film in the late 1960s it might have looked something like 1969's The Magic Christian. You might call it a Marxist Marx Brothers movie, actually, the main point of focus through its chaotic narrative is the corrupting influence of money. Starring Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr as well as an endless parade of celebrity cameos, its screenplay is by Terry Southern (based on his book), Joseph McGrath, Peter Sellers, John Cleese, and Graham Chapman, some high comedy wattage that ensures at least some of the humour is going to be effective. A review quoted by Wikipedia calls the film "sub-Bunuelian", which is a bit like calling something "sub-Shakespearean" or "sub-Rembrandtian". It certainly falls below the genius of Bunuel but it is pretty clever at times.

Speaking of Rembrandt, John Cleese cameos in the film as an art dealer who watches in horror as the immensely wealthy Sir Guy Grand (Peter Sellers) destroys a Rembrandt he's just purchased for an absurdly vast sum of money. But Cleese is powerless to do anything because the god, money, has spoken.

This is a bit replayed in different forms throughout the film as Sir Guy demonstrates continually to his mostly silent new ward, Youngman (Ringo Starr), that people are willing to do anything for the right price, from the traffic cop (Spike Milligan) who literally eats a parking ticket to fixing by bribe a boat race where Richard Attenborough and Graham Chapman cameo.

As you might be able to tell from the names of Sellers' and Starr's characters, there's plenty of wordplay in the film's names. The name of the film itself, "The Magic Christian", at first presents the contradiction between the religion that condemns magic and a practitioner who embraces it. One naturally assumes the title refers to Sir Guy whose apart benevolence and wish to subvert the culture of greed would mark him as the idealised version of a Christian while his ability to casually effect extraordinary and weird changes to people and things would indicate he wields a magic of some kind. But in the last act of the film, we learn the Magic Christian is in fact a new cruise ship which we see being boarded by the rich and powerful--including two actors posing as John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Considering the film stars Ringo Starr and has an original song written by Paul McCartney, one can maybe infer this was a reflection of rifts in the group as the cruise ship proves to be the custom tailored Hell for powerful hypocrites.

The captain of the ship has a camera in the bridge at all times but the footage on the televisions bizarrely doesn't match up when the passengers go to investigate what appears to be hostile takeovers by vampires and gorillas suggesting a disconnect between complacent reality and distant violence, which is referred to earlier in the film when Guy and Youngman engage in childish war games in a mansion and the film randomly cuts to gruesome footage from Vietnam.

I'm not sure I think the film's statement was really strong enough to warrant the footage of people actually being killed but I admire the courage of the filmmakers in any case. There is a simultaneous sense of carefully calculated writing and throwing anything at the wall to see what sticks. Possibly this is a reflection of multiple writers, I can imagine reading Southern's source novel would be illuminating.

Here Yul Brynner rather fetchingly cross dresses in a cameo to serenade Roman Polanski. Brynner charms several patrons of the bar before they're horrified to recognise the star. Earlier another patron is horrified by an exhibition of two body builders because one of them is black. There is some minor schadenfreude in seeing bigots having the things they hate shoved in their faces despite the fact that it's not especially clever. Naturally, they're also menaced by Dracula himself, portrayed by Christopher Lee, who stalks through the ship corridors in a surprisingly effectively creepy shot.

Never quite as profound as it sets out to be, The Magic Christian is nonetheless a mostly delightful series of clever moments. I particularly enjoyed an earlier scene on a train where a hot dog vendor injures himself in the attempt to give Sir Guy proper change for a hot dog and a production of Hamlet where the "To be or not to be" soliloquy turns into a strip tease to the delight of the crowd, an insight, I think, into the reason people often stage and want to see Shakespeare in a experimental settings and costumes--because they don't really understand the text as is. I also liked the not exactly pertinent scene of Raquel Welch using a bullwhip to command a room full of topless women to row the cruise ship. What this has to do with capitalist corruption I'm not sure but I certainly wouldn't have advised cutting the scene.

Twitter Sonnet #771

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Touring saints convince no av'rage blighter.

Extra Electricity

I wonder if it's safe to set my clocks again. Hopefully the power won't go out again while I write this. I was having a dream about holding a scorpion because I'd heard there was a prize for people taking a scorpion's sting and surviving when I was awoken by a terrific crashing and boom. This was 6:30am, it's a good thing I'm still on Comic Con time because there was no way I was getting back to sleep while there was this thunderstorm outside. The first thunder I heard was exceptionally loud and each one was louder followed by flashes of light and my window blinds fluttering into my room from the open window. I've never had lightning come so close, many car alarms went off outside and when I checked out there later I was truly surprised not to find blackened and burning husks of vehicles.

Not a good time for watching movies, which is too bad because I went to Barnes and Noble yesterday where they were having one of their 50% off sales on Criterion titles. I got these four:

That's Lewis Allen's The Uninvited, Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers, and Seijun Suzuki's Tokyo Drifter. That's two crime films, a horror film, and the intensely painful and insightful portrait of human nature that is Cries and Whispers. Can't wait to watch it again.

Incidentally, the books visible on the upper right are less than half of the books I've been using as research for my upcoming comic. The first twenty four pages of which will hopefully be available for reading before the end of the summer.

While inking and colouring the past couple weeks, I've listened to two Doctor Who audio plays (among many other things), Caerdroia and The Next Life, the last two stories of the Eighth Doctor's "Divergent Universe" series where he and his companions Charley and C'rizz travel through an alternate universe without the TARDIS. Caerdoia is a slightly dreamlike story involving a planet size labyrinth with various elements from the Doctor's and his companions' minds manifesting, including two copies of the Doctor, a gentle and a violent one, like the Star Trek episode "The Enemy Within", the only time I've seen Doctor Who borrow from Star Trek rather than the other way around. Caerdroia also features a minotaur in its labyrinth making--I think--four versions of the labyrinth minotaur on Doctor Who. Alongside The Mind Robber, The Horns of Nimon, and "The God Complex". Wikipedia includes The Time Monster but I don't think that one really sufficiently resembles the minotaur myth.

The Next Life felt like a direct follow-up to the anniversary episode, Zagreus, which began the "Divergent Universe" series. It even has Anneke Wills return as an illusion of Charley's mother--Wills, who played the First and Second Doctor Companion Polly, appeared in the 40th anniversary audio play along with several other former cast members in a role different from the one she originally inhabited. Also appearing this time, for the first time since the 1996 TV movie, is Daphne Ashbrook who played the companion Grace in the American/Canadian pilot. Due to the fact that apparently CBS owns everything about that pilot except things related specifically to Doctor Who as it existed outside the pilot, Ashbrook was not permitted to reprise her role as Grace, instead playing a new character called Perfection whom the Eighth Doctor encounters when he washes ashore alone on a dangerous island. I must say their chemistry is much better--funnier and sexier--here than in the pilot. Such are the wonders accomplished by better writing.

She May be the Supernatural Egyptian Queen

Three adventurers, war veterans, cross the desert in search of a city that probably doesn't exist in 1965's She, Hammer studios' adaptation of H. Rider Haggard's 1887 novel. There've been other adaptations, I haven't seen them, nor have I read the book, but I can say the abnormally expensive looking Hammer film captures a lot of the charm of a Victorian magazine serial, the format in which the novel was originally published.

Here's a side of Peter Cushing you don't often see. He plays one of three World War I veterans--the film moves the story up to 1918--Professor Holly. He and the handsome young Leo (John Richardson) and their former subordinate, now valet, Job (Bernard Cribbins, Wilfred Mott from Doctor Who) are celebrating their discharges in a Palestinian bar when Leo is led away by the beautiful Ustane (Rosenda Monteros). She introduces him to another beautiful and more mysterious She named Ayesha (Ursula Andress).

She gives him a map and Leo manages to convince his good natured comrades to join him on the seemingly impossible task of finding the lost Egyptian city Kuma.

This was my favourite part of the film. It's clear that Hammer actually brought the cast and crew to the locations for once, a marked contrast to the set-bound Mummy from a few years earlier--and the chemistry between the three men is wonderful, particularly between Cushing and Cribbins. Cushing plays his easy going professor as a man who knows the danger but shrugs and faces it anyway purely for the excitement of discovery, Cribbins plays Job more amiably than his biblical namesake but can't help shake his head in disbelief now and then at the foolhardiness of his superior officers.

The latter portion of the film concerns their adventures in Kuma, which is also pretty good. I liked Ursula Andress' headdress and feathered cloak she wore whenever she was in her throne room.

And Christopher Lee gives a nicely subtle performance as her cleverer than he seems adviser.

The guy behind him may have the most unflattering breastplate I've ever seen.

Comic Con Report, volume 5

I don't normally buy things for myself at the Con but this year I finally bought one of the pocket watches I eye every year at the booth for Honeck Sculptures. I'd bought some watches from them last year for my mother's and sister's birthdays but now that I have some waistcoats I figured I needed one. They had winding watches and battery powered watches, I would have preferred a winding watch but I really liked the owl design on this one.

And the back:

It was thirty five dollars. I spent around sixty dollars on gifts for other people so plus trolley fare for the five days I'd say I spent about 120 dollars on this Con. It certainly helps that I get a free professional badge, it also helped that I packed my lunch every day, which I recommend everyone do who plans to go to Comic Con in the future. The queues for overpriced, disgusting pizza are almost as long as the queues for panels. This year I made myself sandwiches--wasabi, red wine vinegar, mayonnaise, cucumber, black olives, jalapeño, provolone, and tofurky. I also always packed a granola bar and an apple.

There were a lot of things at the Con this year that I've covered multiple times in years past, like the sword fighting on the mezzanine--if you want to see that, it was pretty much the same as the videos already up on my YouTube channel from previous years. One of the new things this year was Mad Max: Fury Road cosplay--I asked this woman if she was dressed as Furiosa and she told me she was in fact the male character War Boy. Which seems a vague matter for gender swap cosplay, possibly she just didn't know how to handle Furiosa's mechanical arm.

Female cosplayers have outnumbered male cosplayers for years now though this year I think it was an almost total rout. I felt like there were fewer cosplayers in general, actually, but certainly at least 85% of them were women. Here's one of the two female Beetlejuices I saw:

I heard a group of Disney princesses exchanging stories about making costumes and one of them turned to another and said, "You see? It's girl's stuff." To put it mildly.

Here's a different group of Disney cosplayers with one man almost hidden in the back:

Disney certainly had a strong presence this year. Here's a Belle from Friday morning:

I think this lady's from Frozen, I'm not sure, I've only seen the movie once.

Surprisingly, I don't think I saw any Elsas.

I think this woman is a character from Iron Man (yes, this is also a woman);

I felt like I saw more DC characters this year, though fewer Harley Quinns than usual. There were numerous Batgirls like this one, I don't know who her friend is dressed as:

This baroque Joker and Harley Quinn were pretty amazing:

The detail on this (can I call her "steampunk" without getting in trouble?) Bane's costume was pretty great, the mask was made of keys:

Here are a couple Star Wars cosplayers I forgot to post yesterday. I told the one on the left I liked to believe all stormtroopers have purple hair.

I asked this woman if she was a specific character or just "the human body". She's from the anime series Attack on Titan which I've still only seen one episode of.

I didn't make it to the anime theatres this year but I saw plenty of anime cosplay. Evangelion fandom is still going strong--I called out "Rei!" to get this woman's attention. When she didn't seem to hear I called, "Ayanami!" She replied, "Yes, I only respond to my last name."

This group of Hayao Miyazaki cosplayers had just gotten their badges--I suspect for the first time ever because all of them, particularly the No Face on the left, seemed flabbergasted that anyone would want to take their picture.

This Yoshi warrior woman even had a decorated phone in her belt:

I don't know who this woman is dressed as but she found a pretty cool pose scene for herself:

I met this woman on the trolley earlier in the morning and ran into her again at the Con--she was dressed as Mrs. Lovett from Sweeney Todd. I asked her boyfriend if he was dressed as Jayne or if it was just a hat. "Sure," he shrugged as though saying, "It can be Jayne cosplay."

Well, I think that covers just about everything except the million little things I've forgotten and will probably mention later. It was a nice Con this year.

Twitter Sonnet #770

Streamers in a sealed tin can remember.
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Outlines traced in vinegar wake the bee.
Across desert sugar the mantis ran.
Gestures around holy curtains contain
A seedless landscape's Hollis Brown refrain.

Comic Con Report, volume 4

Here's a shot from downtown, early Thursday morning. I love weird lighting effects on big buildings.

This is near the theatre where Conan O'Brien hosted his show throughout the Con. I saw O'Brien on the way home that day but I didn't manage to get a good picture before my camera ran out of memory.

I got a new camera not long ago but I'm still using my old memory card, I guess the pictures and video this one takes are much bigger. But I like having a true zoom on this one instead of just a crop on the spot.

Here's the event hall early on Thursday which was surprisingly not very crowded:

While I didn't get into the Star Wars panel, I did see a few cool Star Wars related things. Though maybe many of you won't be quite as delighted as I was to see this young lady (on the left) keeping the EU flame alive with this Grand Admiral Thrawn cosplay.

Her friend on the right was a character from some anime, I forget which.

This year the late Grant McCune, special effects designer on the first Star Wars film and many other films, had a large booth in the event hall with actual models used in the production of films he worked on.

This X-Wing was about fourteen inches long.

The TIE Fighter was about fourteen inches tall.

I was surprised by how large this jet from the X-Men movies was.

McCune's Oscar.

This is the actual Winnebago model that was used for Spaceballs. I ran into some Spaceballs cosplayers later at the other side of the Con--they'd heard that the model was on display so I tried to give them directions but rather failed, I think, vaguely waving my arm, "It's over that ways."

Leia and Han.

There were a few impressive Darth Vaders, this one I thought could have pulled back his helmet just a bit. Of course there was a steampunk Vader:

Well, that was a lot of pictures. I think I might be able to finish up with these reports to-morrow with . . . even more pictures! Oh, you lucky people, stay tuned.