Today’s Rhapsody is Careless Rhapsody with Eric Micheal Gillett. I’m finding this one interesting since it’s one of the few songs I’ve come across that call themselves a Rhapsody and really is one!
Well I watched last night’s Oscars expecting nothing and enjoying despite everything. I generally don’t pay much attention to the Academy Awards that much generally finding them little more than an aging old boys club that publicly pats itself on the back once a year. But at the same time I frequently find the business of Hollywood almost as fascinating as the art of Hollywood so I find it interesting to guess what little political choices that were being made.
Unfortunately this frequently makes me question the choices that are made throughout. Was Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance in The Revenant that good, or was it a case of “Oh Leo’s been in the industry for over twenty years and while we didn’t give the little whippersnapper anything for some great performances we think he’s due now” or “Sure we gave Ennrio Morricone a lifetime achievement award a few years ago but wouldn’t it be great to give him a real one?” (please forgive my cynicism for that last one, I thought Morricone’s win was the best one of the night)
Which really makes the whole controversy about the all white nominations confuse me all the more. It wasn’t a matter of the racism to me, it was the utter cluelessness. (which to a certain extant almost makes it feel worse than that they did it on purpose.) I have images of certain higher ups staring blankly at the reporters when the question was brought up and say “but Twelve Years a Slave swept the boards two years ago we’re paid up.” It would have been easy to play the usual political tricks of nominating individuals only to not vote for them. The Academy has played these tricks in order to look relevant before.
Still it was fun to watch Chris Rock rip them a new one in his opening monologue and watch everybody try to do damage control for the rest of the night.
As for the actual awards it was really cool to see Mad Max: Fury Road sweep all of the technical awards, though it was a bummer that George Miller did’t win best director (regrettably I’ve found in the continuing quest for relevance Genre films never win), or, for similar reasons,Inside Out was only nominated for best animated feature and original script. I regret that in my normal habit of focusing on said genre films I hadn’t even heard of most of the nominees. Though now I might consider seeing The Revenant in the theater.
As a way of getting my watercolor chops back in order, as well as visualizing more realistic versions of the cast, I’ve started doing watercolors of everybody.
To start with here’s Paul & Nancy.
I finally got around to watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It was about what I expected, stupid and fun at the same time with some good special effects. In short I found myself comparing it to a nice big piece of chocolate cake, very tasty but in the end nothing but carbs.
Nevertheless this inspired me to look into the glut of space operas that tried to cash in on the success of the first Star Wars film.
Space Opera has always been my favorite subgenera of science fiction. Though these films definitely put a crimp on that.
The first film of my selection, Galaxina, was also the worst. It’s the story of a the incompetent and useless crew of of the Intergalactic Space Police cruiser Infinity and the ship’s android, Galaxian. They are sent to a prison planet to retrieve a priceless gem… and other than a few jokes about ugly alien prostates, restaurants with humans on the menu and Harley worshiping barbarians that’s about it.
Galaxina claims to be a parody but anything I found humorous were definitely not intentional and what was apparently intended to be funny were just tired overused tropes. As for the rest of it, The production values and acting was so bad I kept being surprised there wasn’t any gratuitous sex.
My second film,, Battle Beyond The Stars, I had nostalgic memories of the half hour I’d seen in my childhood. This Roger Corman production recreates the Magnificent Seven in space making it different and much more interesting than most of the boiler plate Star Wars ripoffs that came out that year. (Faint praise I know, but it made watching it bearable.)
For the most part the film did a good job in the first act of the film gathering all of the mercenaries together to protect the village planet of Akir from mutant invaders, with special mention given to George Peppard as the Space Cowboy and Robert Vaughn almost literally repeating his performance as Lee from Magnificent Seven but after that it falls flat, with the battle for the planet in the second act falling flat.
But all in all the effects were fairly good for it’s budget and it had charm and I suppose my choices could have been worse… I could have picked the Turkish version of Star Wars.
I think I just tapped into a new source for this series in Haydn Wood! This guy wrote nearly as many Rhapsodies as Liszt (okay, I admit that was hyperbole, half, but that’s still plenty to work with!)
So let us start with the Seafarer… A Nautical Rhapsody
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.
