UPDATE:You can also download a PDF ebook version of this comicright here.
Every so often, the nice folks at the Portland Opera invite a bunch of cartoonists (incl. yrs. truly) to come watch dress rehearsals and sketch whatever we want.
On Monday, the Opera invited us to the dress rehearsal of "Don Giovanni." (Everyone's Twitter posts from the evening are collected at #pdxgiovanni. The Opera posted everyone's sketches here.) As usual, I speed-drew a "live comics adaptation" of the show, during the show. When the lights came up, I put down my pen.
The resulting comic is after the jump. Click on any panel to enlarge.
So "Cloud Atlas" boldly jumps right off the damn cliff and the result is surprisingly beautiful and huge-hearted. We had a good long jaw about the movie during the Friday, Oct. 26 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast. (We even got into that whole "yellowface" controversy that's erupted in some quarters.)
It's frustrating that co-directors as solid as Curtis Hanson ("L.A. Confidential") and Michael Apted (who took over after Hanson took ill) can't quite crack the surfing movie "Chasing Mavericks."
The surfing scenes are gorgeous and overwhelming. But the rest of the film -- a biopic about the late big-wave surf legend Jay Moriarity -- never quite manages to feel like more than a surface-scraping, by-the-numbers sports flick.
Part of the problem is that newcomer Jonny Weston plays the movie version of the much-loved Moriarity as a eager, driven, nearly blameless protagonist, and it just isn't all that dramatically interesting. Movie-Moriarity's biggest challenge is that sports-movie staple, Learning to Face Your Fear, and his relationship with his mentor Frosty (Gerard Butler) -- who teaches him to surf the terrifyingly huge waves of Mavericks in northern California -- is almost entirely supportive and goal-oriented. (It's basically "The Karate Kid" with longboards.) Even Jay's love interest (Leven Rambin) seems more or less predestined, and Frosty's awesome wife (Abigail Spencer) is written mostly as a series of noble speeches and supportive nods.
So instead the filmmakers try to inject drama into these healthy core relationships from the outside, and each source of that outside drama -- including bullies, wavering friends, flaky moms, absent dads and sudden medical emergencies -- is depicted (and resolved) in a one-note fashion that to my thinking does a slight disservice to the people who lived this drama for real.
That said, when the colossal waves of Mavericks take center stage, you instantly understand what attracted the filmmakers. Cinematographer Bill Pope turns those waves into beautiful movie monsters, and there's real suspense toward the end in watching them threaten to engulf the tiny specks attempting to glide along their surface. ______
Made this raffle-prize sketch for "Women of Wonder Day" -- a costume-filled celebration of superheroines in which artwork and geek-merch are auctioned off to raise funds for local domestic-violence charities. It's set for this Sunday, Oct. 21 at Excalibur Books & Comics. Consider attending!
Special guest Ryan McCluskey joined us on the Friday, Oct. 12 "Cort and Fatboy" podcast to reminisce, hilariously, about the time he got punked by Stellan Skarsgård and Jonathan Pryce.
My contribution to The Oregonian's coverage of the Northwest Film Center's Reel Music festival....
'Under African Skies'
In 1985, Paul Simon, adrift after the failure of 1983's "Hearts and Bones," took a bold left turn.
He sought out an eclectic mix of South African artists to collaborate on 1986's "Graceland" -- exposing Western audiences to new world-music voices and, as David Byrne puts it in Joe Berlinger's celebratory making-of doc, rejoining American music with its African roots.
In the documentary -- which is packaged as a DVD in the 2011 rerelease of "Graceland" and can be watched on Hulu Plus -- Berlinger mixes '80s behind-the-scenes and concert footage with a 25th-anniversary reunion of Simon, the album musicians, and the critics who slammed Simon for ignoring the UN's anti-apartheid cultural boycott (even though Simon was helping their cause by exposing the world to South African culture).
Simon's 25-years-later discussion with one of the leaders of the 1986 critical charge, Artists Against Apartheid founder Dali Tambo, is polite but not necessarily peaceful.
The history (and passionate arguments about art and its obligation to politics) are fascinating -- though I do wish they'd at least mentioned the Los Lobos/Simon dispute over "The Myth Of Fingerprints" songwriting credit.
Also online: a commentary track for Cort and Fatboy's Oct. 5 Midnight Movie, "Poltergeist" -- featuring Cort, Fats, Erik Henriksen, David Walker & yrs. truly. Fun fact: It's Erik's first time seeing the movie.
Useful show-notes struggling with the true directorial authorship of "Poltergeist" can be found here.
As I wrote back in 2008, the power of Marjane Satrapi's memoir "Persepolis" -- both the two-volume graphic novel and the 2007 animated film -- can be found in the way Satrapi used simple pictures to make complex points. (She certainly painted a more sophisticated picture of Iranian culture in cartoons than most of the Western world's sputtering pundits could manage with words at the time.)
By contrast, Satrapi's follow-up film, "Chicken with Plums" -- which re-teams Satrapi with her "Persepolis" co-director Vincent Paronnaud -- uses more complicated images (and narrative devices) to tell a much simpler story.
The new film is nakedly artificial -- brazenly combining live actors, animation, old-school studio sets, storybook backgrounds, dream sequences and flashbacks and -forwards in contrasting styles (including a laugh-tracked spoof of U.S. sitcoms) to make a funny/sad fairy-tale collage out of the final days of Satrapi's real-life relative, professional violinist Nasser-Ali Khan (Mathieu Amalric).
The film begins in the fall of 1958, when a broken violin mysteriously saps the remaining passion out of Nasser's life. "Since no violin would ever give him the pleasure of playing," a narrator intones, "he decided to die." Nasser dramatically takes to his bed and selfishly waits for the Angel of Death to take him -- to the consternation of Nasser's arranged-marriage wife (Maria de Medeiros) and the relative indifference of his two children.
From there, a series of flashbacks (and an amusing appearance by Azrael, the literal Angel of Death) fill in the narrative gaps -- revealing compromises, injustices, aspirations and resentments that explain Nasser's failures as a family man and why a romantic death-swoon seems like such a good idea. Amalric does a wonderful job helping us understand a fellow whose deep passions and monomanical focus propel him to occasionally ugly behaviors. And gorgeously bittersweet moments abound, as when a departing soul is rendered as a cloud of smoke that alternately winds and lingers.
"Chicken with Plums" deploys all this complex narrative artifice to a surprisingly simple end: There's something sort of early-20s in the way the film mythologizes lost love, fate, melancholia, the soul and the pursuit of artistic truth, even at the cost of life, family and practicality. The movie's not an epic cultural and personal achievement like "Persepolis," but it's affecting as near-operatic melodrama (particularly during one heartbreaking, years-spanning late-film montage) and it's fascinating as an offbeat storytelling exercise. _____
(93 min.; rated PG-13 for violent images, sensuality, some drug content and smoking; currently playing in Portland at the Fox Tower) Grade: B
Longer cut of a movie review in the Friday, Oct. 5 Oregonian....
The first "Taken" (2008) was a lean-and-mean action flick that became an international smash for a few reasons.
First, it had this beautifully stripped-down action narrative. Man is adrift. Man loses daughter he had with ex-wife. Man finds daughter and sense of purpose (and semi-reclaims family) by throat-chopping every sex-slaver in Paris.
Second, the story tapped into the primal parental protective instinct. It made the hero's rampage righteously satisfying. Because his kid was under threat, Liam Neeson's Bryan Mills had Jack Bauer levels of permission to be as brutal as he damn well pleased, and the audience had permission to savor every torture he inflicted. The protect-your-cub angle also gave "Taken" broader-than-usual appeal (my evidence for this being that my mom liked it).
Third, sad-faced Liam Neeson found a real character to play in all that choppy editing and slight plotting. Bryan Mills was overprotective and sort of pathetic until you needed his particular set of skills. He was the perfect man-as-shark. *
Unfortunately, "Taken 2" has a lot less of the above, and it's much, much sillier.
This mediocre sequel doesn't share the first film's laser focus or high quality, but at least it starts with a pretty great idea: What if an Albanian hit squad comprising the families of the 40 billion people Liam Neeson killed in "Taken" got together for a little payback? And what if that happened at the same time Neeson was trying to reconnect with his newly separated ex-wife (Famke Janssen) while dealing with his daughter's (Maggie Grace's) driving lessons and blooming love life?
But the execution -- in a script by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, directed by Olivier Megaton ("Transporter 3") -- is far less focused and more cartoonish than the first film. It works as grimly frenetic B-movie stimulation and little more.
The sequel skips all over the place -- L.A.! Paris! Albania! Istanbul! Various neighborhoods in Istanbul! -- in a way that undermines tension. Neeson's overprotectiveness is more broadly played. (Remember how the domestic scenes in the "Lethal Weapon" flicks got more and more sitcom-y as the series wore on? It feels like that.) Janssen's damsel-in-distress act is rote, a thankless role. And the leader of the hit squad (Rade Serbedzija) is stuck with mustache-twirling lines that include the following: "You're a good mother and a brave woman. And for that, I'm going to send you home ... PIECE BY PIECE." I'm surprised he wasn't wearing a black stovepipe hat and tying Janssen to train tracks when he said that.
But mostly, the action in "Taken 2" is just silly in a way the first film's wasn't (or at least in a way the first film's forceful narrative papered over).
Neeson outsources a hilarious amount of action work to his daughter, including grenade-throwing and stunt-driving. The sequel's implausibility problem might be summed up by a scene in which a car smashes through an embassy barricade under a hail of bullets when it could just as easily have stopped at the entrance. Even worse, this gratuitous stunt is followed by a several-minute conversation between Neeson and Grace, both crouched down in the car's front seats -- leaving you wondering when the armed soldiers shown swarming the car a while back are going to at least tap on the windows or clear their throats or something.
The movie's excessive and logistically goofy, in other words, in a way the first film wasn't. (It operates more on the level of a B-programmer like "From Paris with Love.") It'll have a great opening weekend, but it seems a shame to have diluted "Taken"'s action-movie purity with a lame cash-grab. ______
* The"Man As Shark" action hero is the current vogue. Daniel Craig's Bond, Matt Damon's Bourne and Liam Neeson's Mills are all of a piece -- they're killing machines plowing video-game style through bureaucracies and phalanxes of bad guys until they get their answers, dammit. You could argue man-as-shark movie heroes are related to grimly forward-moving console-gaming protagonists -- but you can also trace their DNA back to Lee Marvin's Walker from "Point Blank," a malevolent ghost of a man killing his way up a criminal organization just so he can collect his money. ______
(91 min., rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, and some sensuality)Grade: C
