CulturePulp.

Portland Opera's 'L'Heure Espagnole' and 'L'Enfant et les Sortileges': The Live Comics Adaptation

On Monday, March 28, the Portland Opera held its final "Drink n' Draw" -- inviting a handful of PDX cartoonists to the Newmark Theatre to quaff beer, eat pizza, get a backstage tour, and watch a dress rehearsal of two Ravel one-act operas, "L'Heure Espagnole" and "L'Enfant et les Sortileges."

(God, I love that I live in a city where this sort of thing happens.)

I was just over a virus that spent a week staggering wino-style through my body, so I didn't draw as much as usual. But I managed to assemble low-calorie "live comics adaptations" of both (very entertaining) shows.

My drawings after the jump -- along with links to drawings by other, better cartoonists. These sketches will also be on display in the rotunda-level lobby of the Newmark Theatre during the Friday, April 1 performance of the two mini-operas -- possibly with a few artists in attendance.

Stumptown Comics Fest minicomic No. 3: 'The Sabertooth Vampire' Season One minicomic.

This is the printer's proof. The paper will add a little more color. Just three bucks a copy at the Stumptown Comics Fest and at a special April 13 signing event (more soon).

Stumptown Comics Fest minicomic No. 2: 'Cort and Fatboy and the Buried Unicorns.'

It's at the printer now. Available at my Stumptown Comics Fest table April 16-17 and also at a special April 13 signing event (more on that really, really soon).

Stumptown Comics Fest minicomic No. 1: a "Jaxxon's 11" ashcan.

More info soon on my appearance at this.

CORT AND FATBOY: 'Battle,' 'Breakfast' and Buzz Ballads

 

During the Friday, March 11 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, we talked about the brilliant webcomic "Breakfast of the Gods" -- plus "Battle: Los Angeles," "Buzz Ballads," remix culture, the "Super 8" trailer and a bunch of other nonsense.
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Cort and Fatboy (Friday, March 11, 2011)

 

'Breakfast of the Gods' now in print (w/ a backup story by yrs. truly)

Back in 2007, I interviewed Brendan Douglas Jones about his brilliant webcomic "Breakfast of the Gods" -- a totally unauthorized, "Lord of the Rings"-sized epic starring breakfast-cereal mascots.

As I wrote then: "'Breakfast' is a deadpan parody that follows Cap'n Crunch and Tony the Tiger as they battle the evil forces of Count Chocula. It's exhaustively researched -- there are dozens of cameos from throughout breakfast-cereal history. It's also hilarious. It pushes your nostalgia buttons. And it's -- dare I say it? -- kind of moving at times."

Well, Brendan finally finished his epic story. And now he's collected it in print. You can buy the 140-page, full-color "The Complete Breakfast of the Gods" at his website, BreakfastOfTheGods.com. It contains backup stories written by Jones and illustrated by yrs. truly, Bill Mudron, Barry Deutsch, Jonathan Hill, Jon Schnepp and Chris Silla. Highly recommended.
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Breakfast of the Gods

MOVIE REVIEW: 'Rango'

Movie review in the Friday, March 4 Oregonian....

 

The funny and powerfully weird "Rango" is probably the closest I've seen a big-budget computer-animated feature get to the comic vibe of my favorite Chuck Jones cartoons -- specifically, the Bugs/Porky Western spoof "Drip-Along Daffy." Director Gore Verbinski ("Pirates of the Caribbean") and his animation team are really, really good at aping that Jones trick where you follow a big sight gag with a subtle sideways glance.

But saying "Rango" occasionally evokes the best of Termite Terrace only captures part of the experience of this strange, specific cartoon. The story concerns a domestic chameleon (voiced by Johnny Depp) who falls out of the back of his owners' car in the middle of the Mojave Desert. He wanders into a tiny, drought-ravaged town populated by animals and decides to reinvent himself as a heroic gunslinger. This plan may backfire. He is also followed around by a chorus of mariachi-band owls who seem to be actively rooting for his demise.

It's a pretty standard hero's journey, really, but there's nothing standard about the way Verbinski executes that story. He seems deranged in the best possible sense, liberated from the grind of shooting two sub-par "Pirates" sequels back-to-back. The movie has an odd, grown-up reference-set -- everything from Leone to "Mad Max" to "Chinatown" to "Apocalypse Now" to Hunter S. Thompson. The animation by ILM is funkier (and more violent) than the usual Cal Arts-inflected stuff you see in multiplexes. The character design is asymmetrical, bumpy and deformed, often to hilarious effect. Hans Zimmer's score is comically epic. There are at least two surreal desert-hallucination scenes and a canyon chase that might be the best over-the-top set piece I've seen since "The Good, The Bad, The Weird." And the comedy doesn't feel even a tiny bit dumbed-down; I suspect the adult jokes will sail over kids' heads while they laugh at the sight of an all-animal posse roaring across a John Ford landscape on roadrunners, but frankly, the adult jokes are the best parts of the movie.

At the moment, I have no idea how "Rango" will play to young audiences -- it feels like a movie made for adults (or maybe just for the animators themselves) that will crawl into a certain kind of child's mind and geek him or her out for years. I could be wrong about that. But it's definitely not an insult.
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(105 min., rated PG for rude humor, language, action and smoking) Grade: B-plus

'Rango' (The Oregonian, Friday, March 4, 2011)

CORT AND FATBOY: 'Rango,' 'The Adjustment Bureau,' Ryan McCluskey and an 'Animal House' yack-track

During the Friday, March 4 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast, my old buddy Ryan McCluskey once again joined us in the studio and shared some hilarious war stories from his years as a UK-based professional actor. (Spoiler: He gets violent with one famous person and makes out with another.) I also reviewed "Rango" and "The Adjustment Bureau." Also: Roy Scheider molts furniture. It's a pretty goofy episode.

There's also a new "Midnight Movie Commentary," this time for "Animal House." Featuring Cort, Fatboy, Dave Walker, Erik Henriksen, yrs. truly and some absurdly expensive scotch.
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Cort and Fatboy (Friday, March 4, 2011)

The Midnight Movie Commentary: Animal House (CortAndFatboy.com)

[ subscribe to the show on iTunes ]

'Literature TV Murder'

 

Recently digitized. A short movie about stalky weirdness among the bookshelves. Shot in the University of Oregon library in Spring 1990, as part of a college class project. I was twenty. Production equipment: two off-the-shelf camcorders, tripod with wheels, skateboard, snap-on wide-angle lens, TV/VCR from my dorm room, barbecue fork.

TRIVIA: We were thrown out mid-shoot by an annoyed librarian and had to sneak back in to finish the job. Ah, youth.

'Before Sunrise' stalked my life. (Not really.)

I recently digitized some video I shot during a 1991 trip to France. I was 21, it was my first trip overseas, and I was traveling to Paris and Poitiers to visit a young woman I fancied. Heady stuff.

The best part was dorkily shooting arrows at a Rennaisance fair held in a 700-year-old abbey.

Revisiting that 1991 video* reminded me of the first and only time I ever felt like a movie was stalking me.

There was a moment in either Paris or Poitiers -- during the early, happy part of my visit -- when I was sitting in a café with the girlfriend. We'd spent the day looking at cathedrals and ruins.

Apropos of nothing, we had a fake telephone conversation.

Miming a phone receiver with my hand, I "called" a friend (played by her) to talk about my girlfriend. She then "called" a friend (played by me) to talk about me. It was a goofy game that allowed us to discuss our relationship in a playful way.

She came back to the States. We broke up a year later.

Fast-forward to 1995. I'm in a theater watching Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise." It concerns two twentysomethings (Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy) having an all-night conversation in Vienna. And then good Lord this happens.

 

It's a coincidence, of course. The particulars of the conversations differ. Every Gen-Xer who ever bought a Eurail pass can claim a scene from "Before Sunrise" as their own. It's a huge part of the movie's appeal.

But it spooked me. My ex even looked a little like Delpy. To this day, I (jokingly) wonder if Linklater and/or cowriter Kim Krizan were sitting at the next table. I interviewed Linklater in 2006 and failed to bring it up, mostly because it would have made me sound insane.

The spell sort of broke when the sequel, "Before Sunset," came out in 2004 and didn't parallel my own life as closely as the first film.

Here's a fantastic essay on "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset" by Dan Jardine.

UPDATE 11/25/2011: Thanks to my pal D.K. Holm, I finally got to read Robin Wood's terrific 1996 CineAction essay on "Before Sunrise," and it reveals the provenance of the movie's fake phone call. Wood quotes Linklater from the liner notes on the "Before Sunrise" laserdisc: “The fake phone call came from something Julie [Delpy] did with her girlfriends as a teenager.... I thought it was brilliant, so we just worked out the scene from there....”
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* It was sobering to watch the video today and realize how much I was cluelessly annoying the crap out of this poor woman with my omnipresent '80s-vintage camcorder, especially toward the end. The tradeoff being that now I have this neat time capsule of adventure and failure.