Click to embiggen.

This is a storyboard-ish inspirational drawing I was working on tonight for our short. I’m really happy with it - I can look at it and say “this is what I want the short to feel like,” nevermind that the colors won’t work on an actual person and the drawing only bears vague resemblance to the actress playing our girl.

It FEELS to me like driving in the country at night, the patches of hot asphalt air mixing in through the car window with the cool breeze off the fields. The smell of alfalfa. Moths hitting the windshield. None of these things are going into the short, but they are what anchors me to it. If I’m thinking of them and how to make the footage we shoot feel like that, I’m on the right track.

Filed under: short film, film — Emma @ 9:28 pm

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As per my goal of watching one movie heretofore unseen by mine eyes for every day last month, here are the films of the second week.

For A Few Dollars More
The second movie in the Man With No Name trilogy. Clint Eastwood continues his magnetic performances, stopping bank robbers, helping bank robbers, and trying to get one over on Mortimer, the man who loves pocketwatches (and shotguns).

The Godfather 2
I liked the flashbacks to the rise of Vito Corleone a lot more than the fall of Michael Corleone - it’s nice to have at least one character to sympathize with. Ultimately the type of stories Coppola likes to tell just don’t connect with me… and he takes such time and tells his stories so carefully that it’s a long way between interesting bits that are still interesting even if you’re not on board with the story.

This Is England
A great little film from England about skinheads in the 70s. The main character is a little boy who falls in with a group of skinheads, and it’s a really gripping look into the issues of poverty, reaction to immigration, and ill-expressed patriotism that led to skinhead and punk culture. They’re all just angry people - but still people. I recommend this movie.

The 400 Blows
I had this idea of French New Wave being a super boring disconnected film movement, so I avoided it like the plague. Apparently it was the answer to the super theatrical and plotted films coming out of Hollywood. 400 Blows is a slice of life populated with flawed characters and a wandering story. The other new wave stuff I’ve gone through afterwards hasn’t got me as much… the others seem to have a lot of adults having circular conversations about love (which is maybe a slice of new wave directors’ lives?).

Zodiac
Focusing on the Zodiac killings in Northern California, Fincher really takes the opportunity to scare the crap out of you. I liked it a lot… I suspect that having a true story he was trying to stick to limited him in a lot of ways, but he does a good job of tying a lot together and keeping the story clear.

Match Point
Only the second Woody Allen movie I’ve seen - it’s a daunting task to catch up, because Woody Allen has made one movie per year since probably 1905. Thoroughly entertaining… but one of those movies where I don’t like anybody in it, I only kind of pity a couple of them.

Papillon
Kind of a Cool Hand Luke type movie - Papi is just this guy who can’t stand being behind bars. Cool Hand Luke did it better - was more focused.

The winner for Week Two was The 400 Blows, followed closely by This Is England. I have a serious soft spot for movies starring kids (who don’t mug).

Filed under: film — Emma @ 11:32 am

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Like I said earlier, I set a goal for September: watch one movie per day. Falling behind real early on, I reset the goal to: watch one movie FOR every day in September. That let me catch up by watching two, sometimes three movies in a day. Not as enjoyable as a leisurely movie night, but still entertaining!

The seven movies for week 1 were:

A Fistful of Dollars

The classic Sergio Leone film, the first Spaghetti Western and also the first in the Man With No Name trilogy (Fistful, A Few Dollars More, The Good The Bad And The Ugly). Also a wholecloth lift from Yojimbo. Apparently Kurosawa was pissed as hell when Leone remade Yojimbo as Fistful, but Leone pointed out that Kurosawa had himself lifted the story from a book called Red Harvest, so THERE.

Oliver Twist

Features Alec Guinness as Fagin… beautiful shots and amazingly clear staging. The acting is a bit too theatrical and big for my taste, but that comes with the times and Sykes is subdued and terrifying compared to everyone else’s mugging.

Terminator

Terminator was reasonably entertaining - I think only the very end really holds up after 20 years. The effects, hairdos, and colored lights are pretty garish up until that point, and I felt like the Terminator could have been taken in a way more terrifying direction. I mean, he is coming for you and he will never stop. That’s dread for you!

Terminator 2

Somewhere in between Terminator and Terminator 2, James Cameron figured out the concept of the Awesome Shot. Terminator was shot pretty unremarkably, but T2 has five bazillion ‘whoa awesome’ shots, 98% of which involve people driving, running, or walking menacingly out of billowing smoke. It’s dippier than the first one, and the chases are all five million years long, but you can tell Cameron really knows what he’s doing now.

Youth Without Youth

This is Coppola’s most recent film, and it’s about Tim Roth, who gets superpowers, sleeps with spies, escapes from Nazis and sucks the life from his girlfriend, all while accompanied by his split personality. That sentence makes this movie sound like popcorn, but it was really baffling actually. A very personal thing for Coppola, I think… it shows through, really indulgent in places. Beautiful, though!

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

This is the winner of the week. It had soul to it, and even though it’s depressing and claustrophobic, it is at the same time liberating and hopeful. Meaningful.

Fail-Safe

Like Oliver Twist, Fail-Safe is hugely theatrical - it’s essentially an essay. Each character is a couple of paragraphs, there are assertions and rebuttals and a thesis and conclusion… I didn’t feel for anyone in it, maybe because I knew the ending, and maybe because it was so transparently about the situation and not the characters… I DID care about the situation. Success!

Filed under: september, film — Emma @ 6:59 pm

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Sitting on the couch watching Titus - up until now I’d only seen the last ten minutes of it, which was pretty awesome, but the rest of it is lots awesome too. It’s the perfect film for half-watching while drawing, because I don’t think I would had a clearer idea of what was going on if I’d been giving it my full attention, and the visuals are gorgeous and crazy. Also the characters talk about what they’re doing before they do it, and what they just did afterwards, so you don’t really have to look up at all!

The cats wanted me to think that they just wanted to be as close as physically possible to me, but the crazed look in their eyes betrayed their love for the crackers that were my dinner.

Filed under: cats, film, value, armor, sketching — Emma @ 11:05 pm

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