For today’s sketch I will say one thing in my defense… Pulp Fiction has way to many iconic scenes!
Ultimately I decided to go with the “miracle” scene giving Jules & Vincent a more shocked expression than they did in the movie where at that moment seemed to be more confusion.
Maybe I should have done the Jack Rabbit Slim’s Twist contest.
For today’s sketch the little slip of paper told me to draw Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times.
This one just came almost fully realized (barring a brief composition snafu) this scene doesn’t actually happen in the movie but this was one of the first films where drawing and image that says what the film is actually about actually worked!
I’m not as big a fan of Clint Eastwood‘s Unforgiven as a lot of my friends are but the last act made up for any problems with it. After his best friend is killed William Munny gives in to his inner demons and wreaks terrible revenge on the town of Big Whisky the most memorable image for me is Clint sitting with the lightning in the background. there like an angel of divine judgement waiting for the Sheriff to come.
Well for today’s entry, Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, I figured it was either the scene with the crop-duster or Mt. Rushmore and after a few fruitless experiments with different angles of the crossroad in the middle of nowhere that didn’t look like I was copying the movie poster I decided to go with Mt. Rushmore.
Short of having a big shot of the queen of diamonds, or Frank Sinatra holding a handful of queens of diamond card, which really doesn’t make sense in context, I really couldn’t think of a really think of what image to go with for Manchurian Canadate. I finally settled on the dream/exposition sequence where the Communist conspiracy is remembered by the brainwashed soldiers as a posh ladies flower club.
Much as this is one of my favorite John Frankenheimer films the actual conspiracy never made much sense to me. The master plan seemed like a waste of a valuable sleeper agent and could be handled by any lone gunman.
Though on the plus side, before ever seeing Sweeney Todd this was the film that cured me of associating Angela Lansbury with nothing but sweet little old ladies.
This one feels like phoning the whole thing in today. When the day’s scrap of paper told me I had to draw from Apocalypse Now, I suppose I could have drawn something with the patrol boat chugging up the river into the heart of darkness or I could have done something with a bloated Marlon Brando as the insane Kurtz. But I’ve been getting myself in a lot of trouble overthinking these things and on a low level the first thing I think of when I think of apocalypse now is the choppers.
From helicopters rising into the air with the morning sun to the sound of The Doors‘ “The End“ to helicopters attacking the Vietnamese village with rise of the Valkyries (or as my friends and I liked to call it “music to strafe villages by”) blazing on the speakers, the seem to a visual metaphor of casual and ultimately futile power. The kind of power that makes brutality easy. The attack on the village is the best example the fact that there were VC in the village hardly mattered. What did matter was there were some primo waves on that side of the river and “Charlie Don’t Surf.”
