I’ve been having an extremely productive week so I decided to give myself a treat and play cookie this afternoon and go to the zoo. I’d mostly going on Fridays but I’d been cutting it a little too close with winter closing time so I figured I’d see if I had other options for good quiet drawing times during week days.
Regrettably this wasn’t really one of them there were plenty of kids around though when coning in it looked like I just missed a field trip.
As I had in the last few times I did this I focused on all my favorite hominids. The Gorilla enclosure had a little too much going on so even though I got a few good sketches of Leo the Silverback sleeping, there were too many kids around to get a good look at the females, and the kids had them a little too pumped up anyway.
I had better luck at the Orangutan enclosure where I did this sketch. Unfortunately this guy left right after I got the basic gesture down, but I was able to get most of the key details in from memory. Therefore what we have here is a halfway decent cartoon of an Orangutan, but a lousy portrait.
I just did my fourth Dune event Tuesday. So here’s last month’s entry.
I didn’t have any ideas for a comic this time so I did a pen version of an idea for an up date Illustration of “The Walrus and the Carpenter. The basic idea behind this was having the Carpenter being dressed as a modern day contractor, and as for the Walrus well when you’re dealing with an animal twice the size of a human, and can easily see someone eye to eye, you don’t have to anthropomorphize it.
I’m pretty happy how it came out with the sun and the moon fighting it out in the background. My only regret is I wish i’d gotten a better look at a Walrus’s head.
With Valentine’s Day taking place over the weekend I decided to base my selection on that greatest of romantic stories (or as some might argue greatest failure of Romance) Romeo and Juliet. I’d seen most of the straight adaptations so I went with the looser versions and when I say that boy do I mean loose. To the point that neither of them had anything to do with the play beyond being about a pair of lovers from rival groups.
The first on my list, Romanoff and Juliet is a fun little film based on a play by the same name by Peter Ustinov. If I’d known more about it as something to do as a double feature with A Mouse That Roared as they are both light hearted Cold War satires featuring tiny imaginary countries.
Romanoff and Juliet is all about the country of Concordia, a country so poor that it’s only international trad is counterfeiting collectible stamps and so small it’s listed in the United Nation’s roll call as a footnote. This becomes very important when it’s discovered that they have a tie breaking vote in the general assembly which both the United States and the Soviet Union want… just as soon as they can find out where Concordia is!
In the middle of this diplomatic wrangling the son and the daughter of the American and Soviet ambassadors (it’s best not to ask how Concordia has American, Soviet and British consulates if nobody knows where they are.)
What makes this entertaining is Ustinov as the president of Concordia. He serves as this hilarious trickster figure exploiting the fears and paranoias and gleefully playing them off each other so as to get everyone to leave Concordia alone.
The next on my list, Romeo Must Die, plays slightly more lip service to the source material but not that much. For the most part it’s an American version of a standard Hong Kong crime film staring Jet Li. When Jet Li’s characterHan escapes from a Hong Kong prison when he finds out his brother was killed, seemingly in part of a gang war between Chinese and African American gangs. When he arrives he joins forces with the daughter of one of the gang leaders Trish, played by late singer Aaliyah. From there they uncover a conspiracy that is taking out gang members from both sides as well as local businesses as part of convoluted plan to buy up waterfront properties so as to build a new stadium for a new NFL team.
For the most part the action in this film is entertaining, and Jet Li’s fight scenes are at their usual level of quality, but the rest of it is just embarrassingly silly.
For this week’s Rhapsody we have Köçekçe, dance rhapsody for orchestra by Ulvi Cemal Erkin. Erkin was part of the Turkish Five a group of composers who were trying to help create a national identity for the new Turkish Republic by fusing Turkish folk music with the classic western orchestral style. If this is a standard sample I have to check more of their stuff out.
At first I had the idea to do Lucador films since I’d been interested in the phenomenon of the status of Mexican wrestlers outside of the wring most notably wrestlers like El Santo… but since I didn’t want to torture myself and hadn’t gotten around to researching if any of these films were bearable, I decided to do roller derby instead.
The first film on my list was Kansas City Bomber starring Raquel Welch.Welch plays roller derby star and single mother K.C. Star who has just been traded from Kansas City to her home town of Portland Oregon where she can be closer to her children.
Things start out well, except for rivalry with the other star player and a male teammate with wandering eyes and hands. She starts to have a relationship with the team owner. Out of jealousy and possessiveness he starts to separate her from her teammates by trading her best friend and ruining the career of another player who is close to her. This gradually leads to the inevitable finally.
Despite the fun of the actual derby this film was kind of dull. While I won’t comment on just how much of real Roller Derby is most of the bouts seemed extremely fake and was alway treated as if it was all the real thing. I found myself wanting scenes where players were laughing about it in the locker room and K.C. hugging the heel who beats her to cover up her trade to Portland.
The next on my list was Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut, Whip It starring Ellen Page. Page plays Blaze Cavender a high school student from Bodeen Texas and reluctant beauty pageant contestant. By sheer chance she discovers the joys of roller derby and tries out for the league and put on the worst team.
She quickly discovers she has a knack for it and hiding her double life from her parents under the stage name Babe Ruthless. The rest of the film deals with the way her life changes, her relationship with her teammates, (hiding the fact she’s underage) and her parents which becomes increasingly strained as she’s forced to lie to them while stretching her schedule to the breaking point, and a new boyfriend.
For the most part all of this a quiet but enjoyable film and of course the matches are really fun to watch.
