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GOODBYE CRESTFALLEN (PAGE 020)
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May. 7th, 2008 @ 02:39 pm
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It just occurred to me that I should probably be posting links to the new Serenity pages here in the ol' LJ.
So here's PAGE 20!
NEXT INSTALLMENT: WEDNESDAY, MAY 14th.
Click here to own this page. (Or a different one, maybe. Lots of stuff in there.)
Leave all your filthy comments over there (or in the FORUM, why not). |
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VEN-GEANCE FROM THE GRAVE...
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May. 5th, 2008 @ 02:15 am
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...KILLS THE PEE-PULL HE ONCE SAVED.
Iron Man was great! Pretty much every human being with a blog has already told you exactly why it was great, though, so I won't belabor the whole thing TOO much. I'll just say the designs were beautiful, Robert Downey Jr. is America's greatest living genius (take THAT, Nobel-Prize-winning quantum physicist Murray Gell-Mann! ), the action/humor balance was just right, and The Dude had a beard to end all beards. And that final moment before the credits was just brilliant, too... I've always wanted to see a scene like that.
BUT. I was talking to a friend of mine earlier, and he had a serious problem with the movie. He just couldn't get past the weakness of the villain. And, you know, it's true, the villain isn't quite as compelling as everything else in the movie. It didn't bother me as much as it bothered him, but I could see where he was coming from. The actor (Is it a spoiler to say who it is? It's kind of obvious...) does a great job with what he was given, but honestly, he wasn't given a whole lot. And maybe that was unavoidable; In this new batch of superhero movies, there's so much time spent setting up just who these heroes are, their origins, their powers, their inner conflicts, relation to the supporting cast, etc., that the bad guys and their plots often get sidelined a bit. Spider-Man Number One and Batman Begins both had that problem, I think. Maybe the issue is just that great villains and "origin stories" have trouble fitting in the same movie... You have to get past all that before you'll have time to develop a really strong, memorable movie bastard.
Then again, as my friend pointed out, tell that to Clarence Boddicker.
Anyway, the discussion did bring up the question, "Who are your favorite movie villains of the past few years (say, 10)?" So here's the list of bad guys I've seriously enjoyed hating over the past decade (not really in any order, except maybe the first two):
1. Anton Chigurgh (No Country for Old Men)
2. Captain Vidal (Pan's Labyrinth)
3. Stuntman Mike (Death Proof)
4. O-Ren Ishii... and Elle Driver and Budd and GoGo (the Kill Billses)
5. Agent Smith (The Matrix)
6. Tyler Durden (Fight Club)
7. Mrs. Carmody (The Mist)
8. Kroenen (Hellboy)
9. Dr. Octopus (Spider-Man 2)
10. Sadako (Ringu)
I guess I felt sorry for Dr. Octopus more than I hated him, really, but still, a solid character. And, yeah, Kroenen is more of a cool visual than a cool character ("A slight case of the bobafetts," as his physician would say). But he's got an interesting backstory, so he stays. Davy Jones is pretty much in the same boat as Kroenen in that sense, but it's important to cut lists like this off at 10, lest we risk angering the Great Gods of Arbitrarium.
Who's on your list? (Just the past 10 years, I mean. Apologies to Mr. Boddicker.) |
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Commissions: ROUND THREE.
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May. 1st, 2008 @ 02:35 am
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I can't believe I've never drawn Death before. I drew Delirium for the SDCC souvenir book a few years ago, but never Death. Or any of the other Endless, actually. It might be fun to do a whole lineup someday...
HORDES of commissions this time around, folks. I can't thank you enough for all the requests. (But here's one at least: THANK YOU!) I posted a couple of my favorites below, but you can see a few more in the commissions gallery (including, oddly enough, a drawing of noted action transvestite Eddie Izzard).
 
Black Canary came out best, I think. Surprised the hell out of me!
If you'd like to commission your own famous DC comic character sketch (or, y'know, something NOT owned by the Time/Warner corporation), send your requests to serenity@heartshapedskull.com. The base price is $50, and $30 for each additional character on the same page.
And since I'm shilling my wares...
Did you know nearly every page of Serenity Rose Vol. 2 is currently available in the Heart Shaped Shop? SR Vol. 2 pages are $50, the dwindling supply of SR Vol. 1 pages are $30 each, and all the Kimmie66 pages are $20 (they're kinda small). There's some other stuff in there, too, every stitch of it perfect for gift-giving. I'm sure some sort of holiday is coming up... In fact, it's the Gofflin's birthday on Friday. Why not buy my wife the gift of her husband's artwork, to hang on the wall of the home we share? It's gotta be better than the crap I bought!
BTW, we're probably going to go watch Iron Man and have tapas. Consider that a sort of advance "twitter" in blog form.
Thanks again for all the great commission requests! I've already got some cool stuff lined up for next time, but don't be afraid to send some more:
serenity@heartshapedskull.com |
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Thanks For Happy #2: Guillermo Del Toro.
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Apr. 29th, 2008 @ 03:54 am
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Guillermo, why did you sign up for The Hobbit?
Well, okay, I know why he wants to direct The Hobbit. He thinks it'll be fun. And "it'll be fun" is pretty much the best reason for any artist to do anything. ("I have something to say" is up there, too, of course... but honestly, if you don't start with the fun it's pretty much all over before frame one.) So good for him, really. All those dwarves and furry feets will probably make it easier for Guillermo to get big money for his personal projects down the line, too, so that's cool.
But man... Hobbits, huh?
Two movies worth, even. Four years PLUS before we'll see At the Mountains of Madness. Or that crazy-ass clockwork Monte Cristo thing. Or the "kid witnessing the apocalypse on his way to pick up milk" one. Or The Left Hand of Darkness, or Hellboy 3, or... anything, really. And all for hobbits.
I have to admit, I'm slightly depressed.
But this is "Thanks for HAPPY," not "Dude, harshin' my buzz," so I shouldn't dwell on my slight depression. Guillermo Del Toro without a doubt my favorite of all the directors to come flopping up out of the vast primordial director stew in the past decade, and that fact completely snuck up on me. (Wordpress tells me "snuck" isn't a word, but I'll be damned if I write "sneaked" instead. We write like we talk on THIS blog, Wordpress!) Let me explain...
Mimic (1997): I knew nothing of Guillermo Del Toro when I dragged my dad to see this one with me. I wanted to see Mimic on the basis that (A) it was a theatrically-released giant killer insect movie (a true rarity in those days), and (B) I had an enormous crush on Mira Sorvino. My dad took issue with the notion of an insect colony evolving so quickly over such a short amount of time (a solid, if not a little needlessly crabby, criticism), but I, for one, had great buckets of fun watching great buckets of insect guts go splattering all over the place. I was absolutely enthralled with the creature designs, the creepy dark atmosphere, the attention to detail in the locations, the weird kid with the spoons, all of it, really. But the thing that really grabbed me (and pretty much the only thing anyone remembers about that movie anymore) is when those two standard-issue plucky street urchin kids -exactly the sort of lovable moppets that live to save the day in the end- get horribly mauled to death by the monsters. "This Del Toro," I thought, nodding sagely to my 19-year-old self, "is a fellow to watch."
I haven't seen the movie in years, though. Most people kind of hate it, it seems (including, well, Guillermo Del Toro), so maybe I should just let it sit there all cozy in my memory and never watch it again.
Cronos (1993): I rented this right after seeing Mimic. I'm pretty sure I got it at Blockbuster, but don't quote me on that because I don't quite believe it myself (A foreign film at Blockbuster? With subtitles? And it's 4 years old? Didn't they need that shelf space for While You Were Sleeping overstock?). It has Ron Perlman and a clockwork scarab that turns people into vampires, which sounds like a can't-miss combination, but I remember being slightly disappointed by it. The premise just seemed to promise more craziness than the movie ended up giving me. That's right: 10 years ago I was the guy who liked Mimic more than Cronos. This opinion is clearly psychotic and must be altered by new screenings of one or both films A.S.A.P.
I kind of forgot about Guillermo for a while.
The Devil's Backbone (2001): In 2001, my friends and I went to see practically every art-house/foreign film available (usually at the Pasadena Playhouse 7, but if we happened to be in the mood for dilapidation and sadness, the Rialto). I distinctly remember seeing a movie about gay assassins in Colombia, and another one about Eskimos that run really, really fast. I'm pretty sure I knew The Devil's Backbone was by the Mimic guy, but I probably wouldn't have seen it theater-style if not for the arty binge we were on. I liked it quite a bit, but... oddly enough, the ghost was the thing I liked least. I loved the characters (especially the villain, all drippy with skeevy machismo), and the setting was fantastic. I didn't know much about Civil War-era Spain, so seeing one little corner of that world so beautifully recreated was... well, one of the best reasons to go to the movies, really. (Maybe that's why I was so drawn to the gay Colombian assassin scene, come to think of it.) But the ghost didn't quite work for me. He certainly looked cool, what with his veiny skin and floaty blood-trail, but I never really felt scared of him. Visually, I mean; the staging, editing, backstory, etc., were all spot-on. Maybe he was just too "designed" looking or something. Too CG. I guess ghosts are scarier to me when they're just sort of "people out of context." Like in the Sixth Sense, you know, where all of a sudden there's just someone walking around the house that should not be there. And they kind of fade out. Or just stare at you.
-Jesus, for some reason just typing that here in this dark room made me look over my shoulder. What a humongous weenie.... But the point is, typing that stuff about the Backbone ghost made me think "cool effect!" instead of "what was that behind my humongous weenie shoulder?"*
The movie definitely reminded me how cool Guillermo could be, though.
Blade 2 (2002): Being kind of iffy on the first Blade movie (Sunscreen? Seriously?), it was a little odd that I even went to see the sequel theatrically. But the same friend who dragged me to the Colombian assassin and young footballers in Irish prison pictures had this inexplicable soft spot for Blade, and had no one else to go with, so there I was. Enjoying it. I don't even remember the story, but the thing was just bulging with amazing design work, crazy action scenes, and Ron Perlman galore, so I got what I paid for. I mean, those weird jaws on the super-vampires were worth the price of admission alone. I distinctly remember thinking "This isn't all that great, but it sure is well-directed. Somebody CARED about this thing." It seemed like Guillermo Del Toro was one movie away from being the best guy ever.
And then Hellboy came along.
Hellboy (2004): Hellboy is my favorite superhero movie. Nothing else is even close. It's a big, roiling mass of gorgeous pulp silliness, and I love it all to pieces. I felt like Guillermo Del Toro had a schematic showing all the happy buttons in my brain and decided to carefully press all of them. A lot of it comes from the comics, yeah, but he brought it to life so vividly... The movie was like a humongous, Hollywood recreation of the kind of crazy, elaborate stories I'd make up for my action figures when I was a kid.
El Labertino del Fauno, or "Pan's Labyrinth" for those of us in America who insist on having the names of Greek dieties wedged into film titles for no discernable reason, apparently (2006): Better than Hellboy. The best fantasy film since... well, let me think about that one. And my favorite kind of fantasy, too, full of strange worlds with strange rules intruding on our own. Genuinely scary worlds, too. The ghost in The Devil's Backbone didn't really work for me, but the Pale Man sure did. Maybe it's the sheer "wrongness" of it all. I mean, who is this skeleton with the floppy skin sitting in this room waiting for somebody to eat his grapes? And why is that ceiling in the hallway so low? Why is a low ceiling so unsettling? There's less "BOO!" to it than the Backbone ghost, I think, and much creepier for it. Amazing stuff, and good throughout. And heartbreaking. Not just at the end, but consistently, and with enough hope cut through to make it all the harder and more beautiful.
I would say Captain Vidal is the best villain of the past decade, but then Anton Chigurgh showed up the next year and take it away from him. Still amazing, though. Sort of the living embodiment of the total madness of crisp, pretty little uniforms.
So yeah, at this point, after several years of sort of half-assedly stumbling into every Guillermo Del Toro movie ever made, with the last two movies he's become one of my very favorite directors. I was super excited to hear about all the stuff he had planned for the future. Hellboy 2 looked good, ridiculous fun, and everything beyond sounded even more amazing...
...
Then hobbits happened.
I didn't really like The Lord of the Rings movies that much.
I mean, I have HUGE respect for them technically, and the actors are all great to watch, for sure. Gollum is an absolute landmark in the effects world. Peter Jackson will probably show up in his own "Thanks For Happy" one day, but man... all that wizard and sword and pointy hat faux-medievalism stuff, it just leaves me cold. The whole genre, I mean, not just LotR. The whole "High Fantasy" thing. The Middle Earth movies are actually my favorite of all that stuff... but I'd still sort of prefer they keep their distance.
It wasn't always that way. When I was a kid, I liked The Hobbit so much I drew sketches of every single character in the book on construction paper. I had a whole stack if"Art of DragonLance" books, despite having no idea what "DragonLance" was (then or now, actually). At some point I just went sour on the whole Sword 'N' Sorcery thing, though. Maybe it's something to do with the fact that the whole genre feels like a gussied-up, whimsified version of, frankly, the most horrendous era in all of human history. It's like, when I'm looking into a fantasy world, I want to feel as though I could live there for a while, y'know? Wizardy worlds don't do that for me. You can keep your dwarves and chain-mail. Give me airships and the scientific method.
And now one of my favorite guys is making one of these elf pictures.
Oh, come ON, Guillermo! At Comic-Con a few years back I heard you say Pan's Labyrinth was the cinematic equivalent of your balls dropping. GUYS WITH DROPPED BALLS DO NOT PLAY IN MIDDLE EARTH, GUILLERMO. Guys with dropped balls do not go play in Peter Jackson's sandbox, they make their own goddamn sandboxes and fill them with awesome clockwork demon pulp sand! Anyone could make a decent Hobbit movie with Peter Jackson and co. looking over their shoulder. It's all there already. The style is set, the tone is set, Weta is ready to go and the two key actors have long since established their roles... God, Brett Ratner could make a passable Hobbit movie under those conditions!
...Okay, maybe not him, but, y'know, some up-and-coming kid itching to make a name for himself under Weta tutelage probably could. Give little Timmy a chance, Guillermo! Step aside and make us some Antarctican Elder Things!
BAAAAAAAHHHRG!
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Aaaaaaand... scene.
Thank you, folks, for attending my one and only fanboy entitlement flailabout of the year. In all honesty, I'm sure this Hobbit movie will end up being really cool (how could it not be, with Misters Del Toro and Jackson all teamed up and stuff)? Will it be cool enough to make me like faux-medievalist wizard swordy dungeons, though? Cool enough to get me to play WoW, even?
No, probably not on that second one.
But I am looking forward to a GDT Smaug.
*"Humongous Weenie Shoulder" will be my first album.
(cross-posted from the site.) |
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Thanks For Happy #1: JUNO
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Apr. 22nd, 2008 @ 02:46 am
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(Cross-posted from the site.)
BLAWWWWGGGG! Enough of this crap, time to get down to some bloggin'! Blog it out, folks! BLAWG!
One of the very few and - as far as I can tell - totally unique creative downsides to being a comic book writer/artist is that the ratios are all wrong. On average, it takes about ten times as long to pencil, ink and tone a page as it takes to write it, which means only 10% of my time goes to develop my skills with the ol' "written word." This is frankly unacceptable. I could write some stream-of-consciousness short stories or compose haiku beneath the sakuranbo tree, but instead I'm going to blog. (BLAAAWWWWG!)
Unfortunately, it is a matter of public record that I often have trouble getting blog entries started. I just don't know what to write about most of the time. (It feels oddly like trying to strike up a conversation with a total stranger.)
So I'm just going to go ahead and start listing the things that make me happy.
Thanks For Happy #1: JUNO (the movie)
I just saw this thing a couple days ago. I meant to go out and see it at the theater, but uh... didn't! I did read lots of glowing reviews, though, which really got my hopes up, and then a lot of horrible backlash reviews, which really got my hopes down, so by the time that little red DVD envelope arrived, my hopes were just all out of whack. All I could be sure of was that the movie won two Oscars and the writer has a bikini girl tattoo. A bikini girl in bondage, even.
Now, I have to be honest, the first 10 minutes or so of this movie kinda worried me a little. "Honest to blog?" Really? All the forced quirk and made-up slangtalk in the dialogue just made my blood run... well, not cold. But tepid. Definitely tepid. ("Could that Something Awful spoof be right on the nose?" I tepidly wondered.) And look, I love Rainn Wilson. I love him like candy. But his whole character just seemed like it came staggering in from the darkest recesses of Napoleon Dynamite.
It was tough going, friends. "FUCK YOU, MOVIE!" shouted my couch-buddy over her math homework.
But then... it got better. It got LOTS better. I'm not sure if I just got used to the peculiar rhythms of the dialogue or if that first little chunk was an aberration (I'll have to watch it again), but by the end I really loved this little movie. It really is one of the best bits of 2007.
A tremendous lot of the movie's charm has to do with the way Diablo Cody's script consistently turns left when you expect it to turn right. Very few things play out the way you expect them to, but that's not just some stupid gimmick; it's all completely believable, totally real, and very, very... human. I read a lot of websnark that said Juno was a ridiculous screenwriter's fantasy version of a teenager, way too smart, way too cool, way too mature for someone so young, but I didn't feel that way at all. She seemed totally real to me. I've MET teenage girls like Juno. I've gotten MAIL from teenage girls like Juno. Teenage girls like Juno have left COMMENTS ON MY BLOG POSTS. They definitely exist, Mr. Smartypants Internet Movie Reviewer Guy. In fact, I bet you could find at least two or three Junos in the little clique of artsy honor students behind that group of cheerleaders you've been ogling.
What I found most interesting about the character of Juno, though, was that she most definitely was not "mature beyond her years." Far from it. Just look at the scene where she first meets Mark and Vanessa. She keeps up this running patter of sarcastic little jokes and comments throughout the whole meeting, and yeah, it's meant to be funny (the "t-shirt gun" is maybe the best line in the movie), but there's much more to it than that. Juno is nervous. She's out of her element. She's flailing around blasting witticisms shotgun-style every whichaway to make the Lorings think she's cool and to cope with her own nerves. She's not really even thinking about what she's saying. At one point Juno tells the slightly desperate, infertile but "born to be a mom" Vanessa she ought to be "glad it isn't you" who has to deal with being pregnant. It's just a throwaway comment, not intended to hurt, just part of the patter, and the screenplay is smart enough not to dwell on the moment... but it speaks loads about Juno. No one "mature beyond her years" would've said something like that. It was brilliant.
But as great as the script is, I'm not sure the movie would be half as good without Ellen Page as Juno. It's funny, when I first saw her in Hard Candy a couple years ago, I thought, "That girl would be a great Serenity... if, y'know, someone were mean enough to do Serenity Rose live action instead of with Balinese shadow puppets like I want." I have to say, seeing Juno paired up with a loud, obnoxious red-haired best pal was... sort of surreal...
I really liked this Michael Cera guy as the boyfriend, too. I haven't seen Superbad or Arrested Development, so this was pretty much my introduction to the future Scott Pilgrim. He's not exactly how I pictured Scott Pilgrim in live action, but then... I'm not exactly sure what I was picturing anyway (BALINESE SHADOWN PUPPETS). He's a funny actor, though, and about the right age, so it'll work. And with Edgar Wright directing it should be... um...
Yeah, I should probably save all that for another post.
Anyway, if you haven't seen Juno yet, you should. Just please don't flee in terror when you hear the phrase "Honest to BLOG!"
BLAWWWWGGGG! |
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