Song of Isolation

A film about the life of a blind woman presents a difficulty in that film is a visual medium. Presenting her story primarily through the one sense she doesn't have makes the viewer more separate from the protagonist than he or she otherwise might be, the language of the medium building the story for a us in a way she can't perceive--we're forced outside to see the character as alien. Masahiro Shinoda's 1977 film known as Ballad of Orin in the west was originally called はなれ瞽女おりん in Japan--literally something like Exiled Goze Orin, "Orin" being the name of the protagonist and "Goze" her profession. It's through her exile that Shinoda brings us her perspective, allowing him to create a film of beautiful images that very much conveys the perspective of helplessness in isolation very like the vulnerability of the blind in a turbulent world.

The subtle impression of a blind person's world being alien also communicates the solitary quality of her existence. In the movie's focus on sexual repression and abuse, the story of isolation becomes about how the human organism is crushed by the human spirit.

Goze was a profession made up exclusively of blind women, singers and musicians who lived and trained together in houses not unlike geisha. Unlike geisha, though, goze took vows of celibacy.

The women often played for parties of young, drunken men so threat and temptation were always there. Young Orin finds herself excited by the attentions of the men from whom she happily accepts drink after drink. Her love of attention and their demonstrations of lust and affection being related to the fact that she was abandoned at six years old in a small seaside shack by parents who couldn't face this difficulty of raising a blind child. The film opens with the village doctor taking the young girl to the goze house on an overcast day beside frothing, dangerous tides.

We learn Orin's history from Orin herself, who tells it to a ragged young itinerant man she shares a fire with at the beginning of the film. Shima Iwashita, the director's wife, mostly plays Orin with an air of wise, placid contentment, a fascinating contrast to the desperation that defines most of her existence. When one of the men from a party sneaks into her bed, she's expelled from the goze troupe, the measure prompted by the group's hard line on sex ironically sending the helpless Orin into a life where, as she tells the itinerant, she becomes dependant on a series of men who force themselves on her.

At the same time, she finds herself drawn to physical love and describes pleading with some men to stay with her, particularly on cold nights.

The itinerant, Heitaro (Yoshio Harada), seems to revile sex--he becomes Orin's companion and calls her his sister despite her desire that they become lovers. He supports her with the money he earns repairing and selling geta, wooden shoes.

It's hard to say how much of the love Orin develops for him is due to the fact that he's the first man not to abandon her or that he never takes their relationship to a physical level or that they're both orphans and exiles. It's the tenuousness and strangeness of their relationship that helps to crystallise the impression of profound loneliness in most of Orin's life.

"No Movie's Real"

Robin Williams is dead, apparently having committed suicide. A sensitive and gifted performer, I always thought his greatest strength was a sense of his vulnerability through his sadness. It's something that was in every performance, sometimes overwhelming the film, sometimes complementing it perfectly. He was in two Terry Gilliam movies I love, The Fisher King and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, but the performance of his I love most is the one he gave in Mark Romanek's 2002 film One Hour Photo. No other film, in my opinion, better showcased this innate sadness that it seemed to me Williams couldn't contain.

He's not even doing very much in this scene, it's not a big emotive scene, but so much comes through. As a performer, Williams was like a clear pane of glass to his soul.

His stand up comedy and comedic performances were often noted as being propelled by nervous energy. It always seemed like Williams was trying to outrun something. It was a race that required him to be sensitive, knowledgeable, intelligent, and coherent. We saw brilliance when we saw him succeed at this.

Twitter Sonnet #655

Hairless hat creatures dance for chequered flags.
Knowledge leaking through black fountains recursed.
Erroneous donkeys ate their name tags.
For his tail Curious was reimbursed.
A bag of weasels defaced Piggy's moon.
Sharknadoes can't end the eternal war.
Beelzebub's men besieged Brigadoon.
Innocent Hurricane beat the cell door.
Five beats ahead of the egg was air pure.
Now fashionable patterns were floors then.
A twisted cable in a gut's unsure.
A diary awaits the cocaine pen.
Tubes of salt hold some fry matter inside.
Sea-less crowns came with the black luckless tide.

Muffin Evolution

I love when an author so successfully creates a feeling of a time past through the lives of people. The new story in Sirenia Digest, "THE CATS OF RIVER STREET (1925)" accomplishes this very well--the year in the title is really not necessary. Just the mention of The Scopes Trial in the headline of a newspaper would have been enough but Caitlin quite successfully integrates aspects of the period into the lives of the people in a natural way--it doesn't feel like a writer touching a series of bases but a woman going to a corner store and getting her groceries in a box to be delivered later or a man's painful recollections of the Great War feel like real things intimately shaping the lives of the people.

The mention of The Scopes Trial, I think, is more than about helping to establish the period, too. The story is a homage to H.P. Lovecraft and takes place in his fictional town of Innsmouth. The Shadow over Innsmouth, like a lot of works by Lovecraft, is at least in part a meditation on race, on the horror of indications of man's fundamentally animal nature. Lovecraft's work evolved from an outlook of outright racist regard for foreigners to mature into an internalised horror, a realisation that the things he had feared about other races were also part of his race, that the fear he had felt all along was a fear of his own nature. "THE CATS OF RIVER STREET" takes the figures of Lovecraft's story and in a slightly dream logic way seems to draw a parallel between the bitter, entrenched worldview of the Creationists and the hordes of Deep Ones abiding below the waves. I thought of this quote from Isaac Asimov's essay "The 'Threat' of Creationism":

To those who are trained in science, creationism seems like a bad dream, a sudden reliving of a nightmare, a renewed march of an army of the night risen to challenge free thought and enlightenment.

I love the portrayal of cats in the story, too. Easily one of my favourite of Caitlin's stories.

To-day I also finally watched The Missing Pieces, the ninety minutes of deleted footage from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me that was included on the recent Blu-Ray release of Twin Peaks. First of all, to simply call these ninety minutes "deleted footage" isn't quite accurate. This is closer to being a new David Lynch film assembled from the deleted footage to Fire Walk With Me.

I was reminded of MORE THINGS THAT HAPPENED, the bonus scenes featured on the DVD for Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE. Much as the title suggests, the footage doesn't have the usual feel of deleted scenes included on DVDs which normally have the distinct feeling of watching actors on set. Of being privy to the creative process. MORE THINGS THAT HAPPEN and The Missing Pieces feel like windows into the worlds of their respective films. Lynch edited the footage to both films himself, mixed the sound and added music. And I really love him for that. But even that doesn't cover the remarkable feelings I had watching the footage.

Fire Walk With Me was a movie I watched over and over in high school, it's one of those movies imprinted on my brain that I know for better or worse holds an influence over me. That was in, oh, 1995 to 1997 or so. And now I see these Missing Pieces for the first time in 2014. It's like finally seeing the other side of the moon you've been memorising one side of for years.

A linear comparison wouldn't be accurate, of course. There are things in The Missing Pieces that occur after the events of the movie and the series but the fascination in watching it is in how it expands on scenes throughout the film, finally explaining the meaning behind strange, off hand little comments characters made in the film proper. The whole business about Laura being a muffin, for example, takes on a lot more meaning when we see it's Donna who's originally the muffin in the Hayward household. The later scene in the underground Canadian club where Laura takes on the title now looks like Laura fetishising Donna's innocence.

At the same time, in several cases I quite agreed with Lynch's decision to delete scenes. I loved seeing all the footage of David Bowie but, within the film itself, his unexplained appearance is far more effective for its mystery. And that's not to say I'd rather not have seen the extended scene of him in Gordon's office--seeing him interact with the curt and logical Albert and the always slightly on the wrong wavelength Gordon is absolutely delightful. It's just that the scene is right where it belongs, in The Missing Pieces.

There is, of course, a far less linear thread through the film, less narrative pull, though the scenes are put together in not just chronological but an artistically sensible order. This less urgent sense of motion is actually a strength, I feel, though I doubt it's one anyone other than a hardcore Twin Peaks fan would recognise.

At the same time, this format showcases Lynch's peculiar insight into human nature. One of the most powerful scenes to me was one where Sarah Palmer is looking for a blue sweater Laura points out to her she's wearing--and Sarah cries and becomes frightened, echoing the Giant's words from season 2, "It's happening again!" and it's only this one moment that we have any indication Sarah has had problems with her memory, or has maybe had a stroke at some point in the past.

All of the extra scenes of the Palmer family work, actually, and provide a fascinating examination of their subtly strained relationship.

From the standpoint of Lynch's abilities as a pure storyteller, I love how the relaxed pace of Missing Pieces showcases his ability to find ways into scenes. The Norma and Ed subplot from the series was one of my least favourites but I love a scene in Missing Pieces which begins with the two of them in a car playing with a breathalyser.

And there's so much more to love about The Missing Pieces--the scene with Jack Nance and Joan Chen in the lumber yard, an unexpectedly really well shot fight scene with Chris Isaak, Kiefer Sutherland's hilariously slightly incompetent Agent Stanley.

Also, it only just now occurred to me the dwarf with the ring is rather like Alberich and the ring of the Nibelung.

Virtually World War II

It's hard to imagine why the world isn't at peace when everyone's so nice. Soviet spies are nice, Nazis are nice, Communist revolutionaries in China are nice. Everyone's just suffering from a big misunderstanding in 2003's Spy Sorge, a three hour film about the final years of Richard Sorge, a Russian spy who, masquerading as a Nazi journalist in Japan, successfully passed crucial information to Stalin, decisively altering the course of the war. It's a true story but don't expect a lot of authenticity from this well meaning, overambitious film which re-purposes Sorge's story as a cloyingly insubstantial plea for world peace.

It's the final film of Masashiro Shinoda and only the second film of Shinoda's I've seen. Its ineffectually optimistic point of view is perplexing in light of the fact that the other film of his I've seen, 1964's Pale Flower, is such an effectively brutal noir gangster film about deadly compulsions. But Shinoda made quite a few films between 1964 and 2003, enough time to undergo a drastic and unfortunate metamorphosis. A lot of the films he made in the interim were martial arts pictures, which may explain why he felt the shot of rioters air kicking over a Communist girl who was handing out pamphlets was an effective snapshot of brutality.

Over and over again, the film presented something that might have been effective but fell short because of the filmmakers' unwillingness or inability to meet the demands of their subject. The film is filled with cgi that's bad even for 2003, Shinoda perhaps having been convinced by someone cgi can be used liberally for anything. I might be able to turn a blind eye to an obviously difficult to obtain otherwise establishing shot of 1930s China but Shinoda gratuitously employs cgi for street scenes in Japan, too.

Despite the predominant language of the film being English the movie was clearly not meant to be seen outside of Japan. Why would a Russian spy pretending to be a German in 1930s Japan speak English all the time? Why do all the Nazis in the German embassy speak English? Why does everyone in China speak English? Aside from one scene in the office of a French newspaper and one song that's sung in German, the only languages heard in this film are English and Japanese. I strongly suspect this is because English was the European language with which everyone on the crew was most familiar. And the film stars Scottish actor Iain Glenn, whom you might recognise from Game of Thrones, as Sorge.

And he does a good job. His Japanese actually sounds a lot better than his Japanese co-lead's English--Masahiro Motoki as Sorge's collaborator in the Japanese press, Ozaki, is fine when he's speaking Japanese but delivers a completely flat performance when he speaks English, which is unfortunately most of the time.

All of these problems might have been things I could have looked past if it weren't for the movie's fundamental flaw, its idealism. Sorge, who was born to a Russian mother and a German father and who had sympathies in both cultures seems like a natural figure to explore the absurdity of human beings killing each other for patriotism or racism. Some of the film's most effective moments involve Sorge's subtle friendship with a Nazi officer named Eugen Ott played by Ulrich Mühe.

Mühe's performance has a natural warmth and vulnerability--Sorge quickly earns his trust and Eugen doesn't even seem to mind much when Sorge starts sleeping with his wife--it allows Eugen to carry on his own affairs without his wife complaining as much. When another Nazi officer is assigned to the embassy who is known for slaughtering Jews, Eugen expresses some vague disapproval of the man but mostly Eugen is portrayed as someone who prefers life's pleasures and doesn't much like to think about the business side of his business.

The film walks a narrow line between the oddness of genuine humanity and plain implausibility, unfortunately landing ultimately in the latter territory, but there is a nice scene at the end, probably the best scene in the film, where the two men confront each other.

Sorge has a wife back home in Moscow but he's carrying on two affairs in Tokyo, with Eugen's wife and with a waitress named Hanako (Riona Hazuki).

Along with the folly of national borders, the film seems to be arguing for the folly of marital ones as everyone in the movie seems to be married and having at least one affair with absolutely no negative consequences. Of course, when the movie features Nazis who prefer not to kill people, Japanese military police who express sympathy for a Russian spy, and only distant glimpses of the actual horrors of war, the film is already deep into the territory of paper thin argument.

John Lennon's "Imagine" plays over the closing credits and I can't remember ever feeling more uncomfortable hearing the song. It's like hearing "Stairway to Heaven" over the closing credits to Duck Tales.

Nesuko's Awkward Flirting with Two Sexes at Once

Happy birthday, Elizabeth Bathory, another free chapter of The Casebook of Boschen and Nesuko is online.

To-day is also Terry Nation's birthday.

Classic DW - Season 1 - The Daleks - The Dead... by 221btardis

The next free chapter of Boschen and Nesuko will be up on Ray Bradbury's birthday which is two weeks from now--the free chapters will now be published once every two weeks. This'll give me time enough to work on issue five of the comic. I'd planned for five to be the final issue but I'm not sure I can wrap the story up at this point. We'll see.

I woke a little too early to-day from a dream where my sister and I were in a warehouse in 1930s China filled with people sitting on metal folding chairs listening to a speech. There was concern that there were Communist sympathies in the audience. My sister and I laughed at something we saw written on a column. In the evening, she and I walked home through my old neighbourhood with our brother--we don't have a brother in real life. This person in the dream was tall, slightly older than me, making him the eldest, pale, and had black hair and green eyes. I was showing them something funny I saw on YouTube on my iPad (I don't own in iPad in reality) when someone asked, "Is that pornography?" The speaker was a tall woman, taller than my brother, with red hair in bowl cut, a round face, enormous, bug eyed glasses, a button down denim long sleaved shirt over a broad, sloping gut and dark blue slacks.

"No," I said. "Are you security?"

"No," she said. "That looks like pornography to me."

It wasn't pornography but I wondered if she was reacting to some relatively harmless reference to sex in the clip. "Are you a vigilante?" I asked her, at which point my sister and brother walked on, perhaps sensing I might be starting trouble.

"No," said the woman.

"Do you fight for justice?" I asked. She didn't answer and just stared at me.

Twitter Sonnet #654

Dehydrated blackboard cracks the crystal.
Corkscrew shrubbery skitters on the gun.
Red giant Macbeth hands squeeze the thistle.
Blurry water pressure pushed up the sun.
Encroaching kelp came for the clear coffee.
Strengthened sand returned to powerful dust.
Evil was pulled with the pepper toffee.
Salty salads rejoined the Burroughs bust.
Sky length noodle bowls descend on Pilate.
Reddened hands reach up to Lady Macbeth.
Reflections ripple and taint the palette.
Brain surgery pawns present half a death.
Shrieking youth boils in the metal can.
Bathory's blood darkened the Dalek man.

His Woman

Say you're on a date with your sister's publicist shortly after your sister was murdered. And when you ask him if he loved your sister he says, "No. Do you think if I'd loved her I'd have tried to exploit her the way I did?" Would this make you fall for the guy? It sure wooed Betty Grable in 1941's I Wake Up Screaming, a film noir about men taking possession of women. Or the psychologically harmful effects of trying to see the relationship of the sexes that way. It's nicely shot and effectively sinister.

The publicist, really a boxing promoter, is Frankie (Victor Mature) who meets Jill's (Betty Grable) sister Vicky (Carole Landis) at the beginning of the film in a little diner. Vicky's a cagey and pretty young waitress who's unimpressed by sharp dressed Frankie and his two friends who try to flirt with her in a slightly condescending way.

The other two guys are a newspaper columnist and a famous actor and between the three of them they decide, like Henry Higgins, to make over the working class girl and introduce her to society, eventually to make her a star. Unfortunately for the men, Vicky turns out to have enough cool ambition to abandon the three after they give her a leg up. The columnist and the actor are heartbroken, Frankie's just disappointed. Maybe he wasn't in love with her, but he's the only one of the three without an alibi when Vicky's murdered.

The other prime suspect is Elisha Cook Jr. as Harry, the concierge of the building where Jill and Vicky live. He resents Vicky putting on airs, when we first meet him he won't even do a simple favour for Vicky when she asks. Once again, it's a power struggle.

The police detective investigating the murder, played by Laird Cornell like a mix between Vincent Price and Sydney Greenstreet, seems fixated on Frankie. He breaks into Frankie's apartment to watch him sleep, he asks Frankie to give him a ride home at one point, seemingly relaxed and cool as he continually breaches normal procedure and even his legal prerogatives in leaning on Frankie. He continually reminds Frankie of his absolute certainty about Frankie's guilt.

In the middle of all this is Jill, who, as the only one we're certain is innocent works as an audience avatar. Her own initiative in investigating the crime somewhat subverts the gender roles examined by the film, but ultimately she is, unfortunately, placed in second class to Mature--the odd bit of dialogue I quoted at the beginning is actually meant to be endearing. Frankie continues, "Vicky was pretty, gay, and amusing. She had lots to offer and I wanted to put her on the right place on the map. After all it's my business. But when a man really loves a woman, he doesn't want to plaster her face all over the newspapers and magazines. He wants to keep her to himself."

And yet the ending of the film casts a rather fascinatingly sinister light on those words.

There's a deleted musical number from the film that still exists. Initially I thought removing it was a good idea--until I actually watched it and realised the whole thing is about how society is encouraged to see women as children to men.

Out of Land and Time

So here's one more picture from Comic Con--the whole cast of the new series Outlander, a fantasy drama based on a series of books by Diana Gabaldon and airing on HBO's competitor, Starz. In fact, it looks to be a competitor for Game of Thrones, featuring sex, nudity, and lots of blood. More importantly, it's hopefully only the first to follow the Game of Thrones model where whole seasons are made cohesive by adhering to a single book, replacing the chaotic and uneven pattern of traditional television series.

Even a decent series like Breaking Bad suffers from the old way of writing television. I'm on the last season of the show but the last episode I watched, "Rabid Dog", was so, shall we say, broken bad that I'm not sure I can finish. An accumulation of dumb ideas came together in a perfect storm to create a singularly stupid episode, irrevocably damaging character motivations and completely obliterating story integrity. Game of Thrones doesn't need to worry about this so much because the blueprints are already solidly drawn.

Outlander's showrunner is Ronald D. Moore, one of the best creative minds behind Star Trek: The Next Generation and more recently the creator of the 2003 Battlestar Galactica series, a good series that also demonstrates the problems with the old model where ideas introduced in some episodes--like the gods or certain characters' deaths or betrayals--resolved disappointingly when what looked initially like an interesting foundation for storytelling crumbled under the weight of the various tangents the show's different writers took it through. Hopefully the format of Outlander will leave only Moore's virtues as a writer.

It's a time travel series anchored on a protagonist named Claire (Caitriona Balfe), who provides voice over narration. There's a cosy feeling of being in the character's reasonable and respectable head--she was a nurse in World War II and the series begins just at the end of the war with her vacationing with her MI5 husband and the two of them trying to reconnect. Which is hard, since their disparate war experiences have made them to some extent different people, or so she tells us. She also tells us they always manage to find each other again at the end of the day through sex, of which they both are inordinately fond. We don't really see the disconnect demonstrated, but at least we get to see the sex which, like everything else on the show, is attractively shot, and of course the actors are gorgeous.

So, yes, the show falls into the classic problem of the voice over narration, in that it often tells more than shows, at least until Claire travels back in time, halfway through the first episode. The moment it happened was one I really liked where Claire compares the sensation to being like a car accident she was in where she fell asleep in the passenger seat and awoke to find the car falling off a bridge.

She's roughly introduced to the dirty but honourable Scottish rebels, rescued by one of them before a British officer almost rapes her. I'm wondering if this show will play a little safer than Game of Thrones, though to be honest it's nice not having the series begin with a female protagonist falling in love with a man because he raped her.

Normally I find psychologically flawless characters obnoxious and tedious but Balfe's performance is low key and although she has plenty of shojo scenes where every handsome guy she runs across immediately has cause to respect and want her, the primary impression that comes across is her adjusting to the strange, dangerous, and beautiful environment.

And beautiful is definitely the word. Like I said, the show's attractively shot and as Game of Thrones makes brilliant use of locations in Ireland, Outlander capitalises wonderfully on Scottish moorland.

Comic Con Report volume 8--Final

Senjougahara!

Okay, I have to admit, I'm really ready to move past Comic Con now so this last post is mainly a photo roundup. If anyone wants me to talk about the other panels I saw--the Scooby Doo panel, the Pixar panel, the Witcher panel, the Last Ship panel, or the Lego Batman 3 panel, let me know.

She told me she purchased most of this impressive costume and made the rest herself.

The littlest Daedra of them all--from Skyrim.

Lovely pirate Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn.

Metal dame on a booth.

This group spontaneously posed for me so I would have felt guilty not taking a picture.

This woman made her own costume and it's a character from a podcast radio drama she told me all about and for the life of me I can't remember what it's called. It sounded really good, though.

Captain Solo! And he's still frozen in carbonite!

I had a long conversation with this woman about spinning. Wool, that is.

An orc prepares to lob a light fixture at Castle Adult Swim.

Yuna from Final Fantasy X-2 if Yuna had a lot more tattoos.

The Bone Master, apparently.

Dave Filoni in the wild--show runner and co-creator of the popular--and very good--cgi Clone Wars and creator of the upcoming Rebels.

Star Trek Playboy.

The woman in the middle made all three costumes.

The whole cast of a show I'll never watch.

The stars of Teen Titans--from the right, the kind of douchy Greg Cipes who voices Beast Boy, the kind of nice seeming guy, Scott Menville, who plays Robin, and the always lovely, legendary Tara Strong who plays Raven on the show. We were treated to a whole episode of the series which I hadn't seen in years. It's still extremely bad but it's gone from a slight anime influence to a sort of all out, unabashed minstrel show. It was creepy. A J-Pop group, Puffy AmiYumi, did the opening theme for the show and appeared on the panel despite barely speaking English and clearly having only a very vague concept of what the series is about--and the makers of the show clearly didn't seem to have any real interest in J-Pop. Watching Greg Cipes tell the women how they were adorable and he wanted to take them home was just embarrassing.

Anyway, that's all, folks, unless there's more later!

Twitter Sonnet #653

Sepia strings of opaque clouds descend.
Uncaring crowds see no rainy singer.
The love's heart borne songs already happened.
Herrmann finished with a reverse stinger.
Roses sculpted of watermelon meat.
Forecasted tooth pulls dreaming of slow rain.
Essential machines generate grey heat.
Alternate ribbons closing the gold vein.
Chipped and reddened paint revealed the harbour.
Novelty scopes imprint a cancelled sign.
Blue nebula bore companion labour.
Cotton pins and the feathered beads align.
Retracting torpedo hats sink the wig.
Tiny fake footsteps are thinly cut fig.

Galaxies Can't Always Look After Themselves

Here's a picture from my own lousy new camera of something at Comic Con that I've seen better pictures of on various web sites--one of the pods from Guardians of the Galaxy. People talked about the competition between Batman v Superman and Avengers 2 but it felt more like the battle for the hearts and minds of the Con was between the Zack Snyder film and Guardians of the Galaxy--a battle Guardians won so easily I don't think it's a reality most media sites are emotionally equipped to see.

The difference is simple--Batman v Superman gives people what Warner Brothers tells them they want, Guardians of the Galaxy looked like it's serving what people actually want, a creative, fun space adventure film about a group of imperfect friends whose hearts are in the right place. People might be drawn to visit the spectacle of a Superman film, but they want to live in Star Wars or Firefly. An it's that latter sort of thing Guardians of the Galaxy looked like it was, clearly drawing inspiration more from Star Wars than from the far more superhero oriented original comic.

They shut my water off again to-day so I caught an early matinee of the show--the first showing on a Monday but the theatre was packed anyway. I guarantee you won't see that with Batman v Superman.

And it's a good movie. Not as good as it very easily could have been, but as Science Fiction films with Zoe Saldana go, probably the best. And of course Zoe Saldana's in it, though as Gomora, the assassin love interest of protagonist Peter Quill (Chris Pratt), she turns into a dull figure of validation for the male hero--quite self consciously as one scene explicitly shows her taking the role of Peter's mother. Since Peter seems far more John Crichton than Star-Lord, it's a shame the film didn't take a cue from Farscape as far as female characters go.

That's what the movie reminded me of most strongly--Farscape with its fish out of water human lead character who continually makes Earth pop culture references to the comical consternation of his alien acquaintances. Peter seems slightly more impervious to emotional trauma than John Crichton, though, coming across as generally more shallow and childlike, something I think helped actual children in the audience connect with the movie better, though it ultimately makes his character more light weight.

But this is a movie that needs levity to counterbalance its worst quality which is a sentimentality that comes on like the clumsy lovestruck caress of a drunken sumo wrestler. One minute we're seeing how this is a group of badass escaped convicts, the next they're tearfully talking to each other about the value of friendship. I wish someone had pointed out to director James Gunn that Star Wars never had scenes like that but the idea of camaraderie came across anyway--and it came across a lot better. Mostly I think it comes from filmmakers sharing too much of their experiences as movie people holding hands and being vulnerable with each other rather than stretching their imaginations to find the truth in the people they're playing--basically, the problem here is vanity.

The best parts of the movie are Rocket Raccoon, voiced by Bradley Cooper, and Groot, voiced and performed for motion capture by Vin Diesel. Groot is only able to say, "I am Groot" though Rocket seems to be able to interpret this one sentence to mean a variety of things, much as Han Solo was able to understand a whole language in Chewbacca's growls. Rocket comes across as genuinely hard bitten and his resentment about a history of abuse and people treating him as an animal come across much more effectively than the psychic wounds of any of the other characters. Groot, aside from a lame scene involving fireflies, generally works very well coming from a "less is more" method. Diesel manages to bring across a subtle, contented benevolence in his voice work and his body language, and what the animators give him, aid in this a great deal too.

Another thing that really works for the film are the designs for the ships, planets, and alien worlds, the aesthetics of the technology unabashedly drawing from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, and Final Fantasy, satisfyingly creating a feeling of a rough and tumble space opera world.

Nesuko's Garden Wardrobe

I managed to finish The Casebook of Boschen and Nesuko #4 just before midnight. Of course, it went online some minutes after midnight because making a pdf file is still something I find to be a tedious pain in the ass. At any rate, you can buy a copy here. This is the cover:

I modelled the "outfit" after one worn by Brigitte Bardot in Mademoiselle Striptease.

I'm much, much happier with how number 4 turned out than I was with number 3. I think it's partly because I spent half a year on number 3 and just under two months on number 4. I think I work better over briefer periods for some reason. Maybe it's just a question of being in a certain zone.

To-day's the first day since before Comic Con I don't have a task to occupy me from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep. I think I'll try and enjoy a little aimlessness to-day.

Comic Con Report volume 6

I took this picture of David Liebe Hart, whom you might recognise from the Adult Swim series Tim and Eric Awesome Show: Great Job!, on the bridge leading to the convention centre. He charged me two dollars to take the photo. He told me how his management had abandoned him, Cartoon Network had laid him off, and Tim and Eric never paid him for the songs he wrote for the show. He said he was Christian and didn't drink or smoke. He also told me how Star Wars was based on a real war between extraterrestrial Celts and a species called the Corinthians.

"Any relation to Corinthians in the bible?" I asked.

"Not Corinthians, Corinthians," he said.

I also asked him if he'd ever seen Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress or had heard how Lucas based much of Star Wars on the movie but he ignored the question.

He's clearly wearing an earpiece in the photo which was hardly my first indication his plight was not genuine. I never signed a release so if there was a hidden camera my face will probably be blurred, assuming my interaction with him amounted to anything funny, which I don't think it did. I wanted to play along but I don't think I was the right sort of person to get anywhere with the Tim and Eric style shtick. But I could be wrong, Hart called me back when I started to walk away so he could tell me about the alien war.

What I find really impressive is how Liebe Hart and probably the Tim and Eric team have so completely hijacked Liebe Hart's Wikipedia and imdb pages. He has just three acting credits on the imdb page, none of which are Tim and Eric Awesome Show, and none of which are real. Two of them have very obviously phoney--and funny and slightly disturbing--trailers on You Tube.

The second credit, a movie called Gerald, only has a phoney poster and this synopsis:

After Mel Gibson's death by monsters in 2006, the U.S. built the National Monster Refuge, nestled at the base of the mountains. One evening, a young hipster, Gerald Cromwell, slays a monster while working at a restaurant, saving the customers. The ensuing media frenzy draws the attention of Bethany, a young woman who was at the restaurant that night. Gerald's best friend and roommate, Tucker, becomes wary of the girl and her clique of friends. The film follows Gerald as he encounters athletic d-bags, a kind medic girl, a blogger, and a public access show host and his puppet. Worlds collide as Gerald learns about life, trust and love in a time of monsters.

Liebe Hart has a Tumblr page of his paintings here which appear to all be shop window holiday displays.

Speaking of committed performances, on Saturday I saw the panel for Marvel's S.T.A.T.I.O.N., a division of S.H.I.E.L.D. devoted to analysing members of The Avengers including Captain America, Hulk, Thor, and Iron Man. The panel featured an actual neuroscientist, Ricardo Gil-da-Costa; three people from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Preston Dyches, Randi Wessen, and Leonidas Moustakis; and Sebastian Alvarado of Thwacke, an entertainment consulting firm. The panel was moderated by Slate's Phil Plait who adopted the role of a high level S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. Everyone stayed in character for the entirety of the panel. It was a lot of fun.

Well, I'd better get back to colouring. I expect I'll be finished before midnight. And, no, this won't be the last Con Report. I'm not even sure how I saw and did so much in four days. All I can say is I walk fast.

Twitter Sonnet #252

Carnations casting charcoal ruin sleeves.
Flickering flower rings crown the sceptic.
Sharp careless petals slice through nearby leaves.
Red veined lilies lead thin lives and hectic.
Cooling footsteps presage ice shock treatment.
Noh infinity waves across masks bowed.
Muted orange static undressed the pavement.
A leaden minute drags an hour cloud.
Folded forgotten notes skid on the floor.
Waiting dust remains dumb and motionless.
Rains of molten steel retained stop the door.
Turpentine rendered the clouds functionless.
Nebula husks'll hold by worn tether.
Yellow stardust sluiced through molten ether.

Nesuko Hunts Producers

Happy Birthday, Herman Melville, the latest free chapter, chapter 8, of my comic, The Casebook of Boschen and Nesuko, is online.

Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey—why is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness—why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon?

No; but here thou beholdest even in a dumb brute, the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism in the world. Though thousands of miles from Oregon, still when he smells that savage musk, the rending, goring bison herds are as present as to the deserted wild foal of the prairies, which this instant they may be trampling into dust.

Thus, then, the muffled rollings of a milky sea; the bleak rustlings of the festooned frosts of mountains; the desolate shiftings of the windrowed snows of prairies; all these, to Ishmael, are as the shaking of that buffalo robe to the frightened colt!

Though neither knows where lie the nameless things of which the mystic sign gives forth such hints; yet with me, as with the colt, somewhere those things must exist. Though in many of its aspects this visible world seems formed in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness, and learned why it appeals with such power to the soul; and more strange and far more portentous—why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour; and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

--From Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville.

Also, it's my mother's birthday so happy birthday to her.

I'm still catching up on colouring issue #4 (chapters 10, 11, and 12) on Casebook of Boschen and Nesuko. I still have eleven pages plus the cover to colour--I'm hoping to finish by to-morrow as planned but, if not, it'll definitely be up on Sunday, barring unexpected catastrophe.