Well the Halloween season is on us again and so it’s time for another Halloween sketch challenge and to keep things interesting I decided to participate in Inktober! I figure it should be good practice as I’m not particularly good at inking freehand so it should be good practice.
For the first drawing, I really don’t know why I put Thunderbird on the list. It”s not really a monster at least not in the scary halloween way, I think I was going for the cryptid version but for some reason drawing what would look like a large pterosaur didn’t seem right and drawing Rodan instead would be just breaking the rules.
After doing Bollywood rip… er… remakes of Hollywood thrillers last week I decided I really needed to clear my palette. I decided to do this with the films of Charlie Kaufman. I’d seen Being John Malkovicth and enjoyed the whacky surrealism of it so seeing a few more of them that I’d heard good things about.
I’d put off seeing an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind for a long time for numerous reasons. I think the big reason was Jim Carrey. Based on the kind of films he’s usually in I have a tendency to assume it’s a comedy until told otherwise. The other reason being while I try to keep the individual separate from their works there are a few things that make them cross the line for me… being a spokesman for the antivaxxer movement is one of them.
So despite all of this I eventually heard that it was not a comedy and it was indeed the kind of hard science fiction that I like the kind I like the kind that people don’t realize is science fiction due to the absence of space ships. Films like another Carrey Film the Truman Show…. The Truman Show’s science fiction? People ask when I say this. It has an Arcology you can see from orbit; of course it’s science fiction.
Eternal Sunshine deals with the story of Joel Barish a shy dull man and the love of his life Clementine, played by Kate Winslet, a manic, self-destructive free spirit. When she breaks up with him she then has her memory of him wiped by a psychiatric clinic specializing in a form of laser guided amnesia. (okay no lasers involved but you get the idea. Out of spite he decides to have the same process used on him from there we witness an inner journey through his memories of his relationship as they fall apart around him. As this goes along he realizes he wants to keep these memories and struggles to keep even the slightest memory of Clementine even if based on their personalities they’re relationship may be the same disaster a second time.
The next on my list, Adaptation, starts as a story about writer’s block. Charlie Kaufman had been hired to write a film adaption of “The Orchid Thief “. Getting nowhere he ended up writing the story of not being able to write about it. This culminates into a quest for meaning in a story that is pretty much just about flowers and if you can’t think of that adapt it into something more shallow and visceral.
What we get is a very self deprecating self portrait of Kaufman, played by Nicolas Cage in what I think is one of his last performance, as a neurotic mess trying to find meaning in his life and his art. Cage also plays Kaufman’s fictional free spirited twin brother, who I kept having the sneaking suspicion was also a figment of Kaufman’s imagination within the film as well.
The play also goes back and fourth to the text of the Orchid Thief with a story of a New Yorker reporter played by Meryl Streep getting a story from the titular Orchid Thief wonderfully played by Chris Cooper. But as Kaufman’s writers block on the subject this plot turns into a weird thriller, which the Kaufman brothers are drawn into as well.
I’ve been meaning to do a better job getting some variety into my cuisine for a long time with mixed results.
In theory I’ve been trying to follow a relative’s advice of making a menu for the week and base by shopping around it but other than picking up cookbooks at the library every now and again I’ve mostly stuck to the dull fare of frozen chicken breasts, rice and a vegetable. But every now and then I’ll take a step in the right direction.
This week I was pretty much shopping for my staples when I picked up a butternut sqash on a whim. I’d pretty much intended to bake and mash it but little more than just that. About the same time I’d picked up a book on slow cooking by Heather Whinney mainly because I’d wanted to do more than just oatmail with my crockpost, and while thumbing through it I found this recipe for Squash, sausage and pecorino cheese. This sounded a lot better than the bake squash with brown sugar.
So anyway I think it came out pretty good without many complications the only emergency being when the time to add the wine came I couldn’t find my corkscrew. Otherwise two hours later all was good. The flavor is complex and dare I say it… nutty? (and here I thought butternut was named for the color) Based on how I usually cook it I had never really considered Butternut squash part of a savory meal. My only concern is I can’t really taste the sausage, but otherwise a r
Now that I have my museum membership back I’ve been putting in a half hour or so when I’m down town. When I was there on Thursday I was lucky enough to catch the opening of a new exhibit, Samuel F.B Morse’sGallery of the Louvre.
As you can guess from the name, I’d always had a degree of pride in Professor Morse, at least over the “he invented the Telegraph bit, and at the very least he was useful when you had to tell thick people how to spell a five letter last name. (since Morse Code hasn’t been used officially for over a generation that’s not as useful as it used to be.) Needless to say this is where having relatives who are into genealogy are a bad thing when I inevitably discovered I wasn’t actually descended from him.
Anyway this was a piece done when he was teaching art in Paris. It does a nice job showing the students in period dress copying the great works which Morse catalogues in the painting (somehow I doubt they were ever all in the same gallery like this) I stuck to drawing just the figures.
This week I took a chance and tried something different. Bollywood rip… er remakes of Hollywood movies. This was very much a risk since I had heard horror stories about some of the bad ones but at the same time I’d had a few of them recommended as guilty pleasures most notably one of Mel Brooks’ The Producers.
I made a large list of possibilities since I had no idea what Scarecrow Video would have but I intended to stick to one genre depending on what I found. Regrettably they did not nave the Producers film but they had a number of the films on my list and I ended up choosing thrillers, specifically remakes of two very similar films, Reservoir Dogs and Usual Suspects
My First film Kaante is mostly an adaptation of Reservoir Dogs though the way it starts out with the main characters meeting in a police precinct when taken in for questioning on a trumped up charge it at first seems to be an adaptation of Usual Suspects until the second half of the film when the caper they plan together goes terribly wrong.
All in all this isn’t a bad film though I think it’ll be a long time before I ever get used to the pacing of these films both longer than what I’m used to. The other thing is the singing. Obviously I’ve known about the musical numbers in Bollywood films but I didn’t know they were in ALL of these films so seeing the cast break into a musical number in something as serious as this film came as a big surprise. .
The next film on my list Chocolate was a remake of Usual Suspects though an extremely loose version. It had the same framing device, and the same ending mostly as well as a mysterious master criminal (though in this case a terrorist) Everything else was completely different, the main characters are a group of friends and musicians who turn to crime and the two surving members are interviewed by their defense attorney and a reporter. All in all this gives the film a tone of a general romp, but all in all entertaining… as were the musical numbers.
