For this week’s Tuesday Rhapsody we have yet another American Rhapsody. This one by Efram Zimbalist.
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The theme for this week’s film selection was jerks. Insufferable self centered, self destructive jerks.
I got the idea for this week’s selection when I heard that comic writer Grant Morrison had based an urban sorcerer he created (because he was not allowed to use DC comic’s main urban John Constantine in Doom Patrol) on one of the main characters in the dark Brittish comedy Whithnail and I. Obviously I had to check this out.
Whithnail and I tells the story of two out of work actors, “I” a relatively normal neurotic and his best friend Whithnail a down on his luck, upper crust, pompous, self centered drunk, who spend their time in their squalid London apartment waiting for their dole checks and going to the local pub to get drunk and stay warm.
In an attempt to get away from it all they go on an impromptu vacation in the lake country, staying in a cottage belonging to Whithnail’s uncle, and failing miserably at it almost starving to death and having to break up most of the house’s furniture for firewood.
I liked the two central characters but despite the outrageousness of the two main characters I’m not sure I’d consider this a comedy despite it’s darkly humorous overlook. After a fashion it felt like what Young Ones would be like if it took place in a more real world and was a little more serious.
Because a few of my friends who had seen it described Whithnail and I as “Fear and Loathing in Britain” I realized I was past due in watching Terry Gilliam’s adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.. I confess I only made it about two thirds though the book the one time I tried (though I’m comfortably sure that was because I was listening to it on and audio book and I’ve found that not all books work in the format) For the most part my views of Hunter S Thompson are unfairly based on the caricature of him in Doonesbury (which Thompson hated) and I’m afraid a lot of my viewing of the movie were though the lens of Doonesbury’s Uncle Duke.
Still this story of Thompson’s alter ego Raul Duke, played brilliantly by Johnny Depp with Benicio del Toro as as his sidekick and attorney Dr. Gonzo, rampage through Las vegas in a drug fueled three days.
This has quickly become part of my Terry Gilliam top five list. He turns Las Vegas into a hallucinogenic nightmare fairyland almost as much of a fantasy as many of his other films.
Depp and Del Torro have great chemistry together with Depp virtually channeling Thompson and Del Toro going back and forth between drug addled clown and truly scary monster.
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For this week’s selection of tuesday rhapsodies we have the Bothnian Rhapsody by Jukka Viitasaari.
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I had to make an emergency milk and cookies run this morning (literally, and yes I was making all of the inevitable jokes to myself all the way up to Trader Joe’s) and to make things even more interesting due to some differences of opinion regarding coffee hour policy I was buying the milk and cookies seperatly.
Anyway, when i got their I found myself with a bit of culture shock looking though the dairy isle (albeit not thinking straight due to sleep deprivation and being in a rush) the fact that couldn’t find any cream. Sure there was heavy cream for whipping and there was half and half but there was nothing I would have called cream growing up for coffee. Even weirder to me, glancing down the isle, it was interesting that the vegan alternatives had become so ubiquitous I found myself consciously looking for dairy cream.
I ended up getting the half and half
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One of the many selling points of the exhibit.
I finally got around to seeing the Settle Art Museum’s “intimate Impressionism” exhibit as something to do for two hours while waiting for another event (it was something I wanted to do, honest) Anyway when I got there the place was packed. This meant I planned to do the initial scan of the exhibit and then come back on a nice quiet weekday to take it all in at my leisure, preferably with a magnifying glass.
Still the whole thing just blew me away. I recognized a lot of the pieces either from the few times I went to the national gallery or from textbooks, but still this was amazing. Lately I’ve found myself drawn more and more to the “craft” of art and the brush technique of a lot of these paintings were amazing making me really wanting to stare at each painting for fifteen minutes. Looking at what some of what some of these artists did to get definition in white dresses not to mention showing slight with single brushstrokes.
I found myself falling in love with Renoir all over again, especially in one of his paintings, The Mussel Harvest 1879, where he does some absolutely fascinating things mixing greens and purples which briefly had me thinking about painted opals.
Ultimately I left far earlier than I would I have liked but honestly the place was that crowded. While I obviously don’t begrudge people the privilege of seeing art I really can’t get into my zone if there’s more than five people in a gallery. Besides my other event was about to happen.
By that I mean that Big John’s PFI, one of Seattle’s best kept culinary secrets,was having it’s annual food and wine tastings. This can not be missed since everything that Big John’s has from salami, the best selection of cheeses in the city, meatballs, stuffed tomatoes, Italian wines, cookies… all to the accompaniment of a guy playing old standbys like “That’s amore” and “Oh Marie” I left feeling quite full.
So all in all a pleasant afternoon and evening. (with the small exception of avoiding crashing on the Burke-Gilman on the way home when I got a face full of wet tree branch in my face.(Don’t worry, it had leaves.)
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For finishing up this year’s october halloween theme I went with two films I’d been wanting to see for years but had not been aware of their availability. These adaptations of the H.P. Lovecraft stories done by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society with the conceit that the films were done on the same year that Lovecraft wrote the stories.
The first of these two films, Call of Cthulhu was done in the style of a German Expressionist silent film. As with the book it follows an unnamed scholar as he researches a world wide plague of dreams while being drawn towards the terrible truth of the dread sleeping god Cthulhu.
You can tell the crew is in the process of learning their craft and it’s easy to spot technical errors if you’re in full critic mode, an obvious blue screen here some off lighting there… but this is just nitpicking. Otherwise they do a wonderful job capturing the mood and the period and any of my complaints of the other mistakes are easily forgiven by the way they were able to turn Thomas Street, in my home town of Providence Rhode Island, into a 1920s version of itself using a combination of masks, clip art and model cars.
The rest of time the style they are cribbing does wonders, allowing the team to do the non euclidean architecture of R’lyeh in cardboard and even the cheap stop motion animation of the Cthulhu puppet works to make it look like it’s something that exists outside of our perception.
Their next project, Whisperer in the Darkness brings us to the golden age of the Universal Monster. Telling the story of an academic who is contacted by a Vermont farmer who is fighting a loosing battle against an alien presence known as the Mi-Go, Whisperer in the Darkness has always been one of my favorite of Lovecraft’s stories because it was the first story that transformed the mythos for me from something that was just a monster of the week, which I found mildly derivative of Edgar Allen Poe, to the disturbing cosmic horror that he’s known for.
The movie does a very good job following the story abandoning the harrowing correspondence that makes up much of the original short story’s narrative but at the same time embellishing not story extensively This is all well and good. If I have one main problem with Lovecraft as a writer is that while a master of building up the mystery and tension would frequently, for lack of a better word, blow the punchline. While this is certainly a constraint of the magazines he was writing for it usually spoiled the story for me. Here the writers give Whisperer in the Darkness, which suffered from one of those endings, a third act which makes for a more exciting and sit on your hands terrifying climax.
As mentioned before the team behind the HPLHS have done have improved their craft exponentially. The cast does a wonderful job in their roles and the look of the thing is spot on. The 1930’s vibe allows for realism to be a very relevant thing to the point where you are able to fudge quite a lot since things are supposed to “look fake” therefore they were able to hide a lot of the budgetary constraints in this format. Because of this The Mi-Go Look great looking like well made puppets when they are really fairly reasonable cgi. It also allows for very convincing makeup effects allowing for a very convincing Charles Fort to be a supporting character
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