A very happy 85th birthday to John Coltrane! And what better way to celebrate than with one of his signature pieces, “Favorite Things”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0I6xkVRWzCY
Comments Off on Happy Birthday John Coltrane!
This week’s Rhapsody is Claude Debussy‘s Premiere Rhapsody for piano and clarinet with Adam Eljasinski on the clarinet.
Comments Off on Tuesday Rhapsodies
I thought I’d take a brief break from the Museum stuff and share another exercise with you. That is when watching your favorite DVD always remember that the pause button is your friend. Once you remember this every single DVD becomes a useful visual reference often giving you ideas for composition and camera angles that might not have occurred to you going about it the normal way. I like drawing character actors the best. After doing this for awhile you’ll find yourself coming to the conclusion that “Star Quality” translates to bland and featureless.
As an example of this, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’ve recently discovered and fallen in love with HBO’s The Wire. It provides wonderful opportunity to discover a seemingly endless list of fantastic actors that I’d never heard of before watching. As just one example for today Gbenga Akinnagbe as Chris Partlow has one of those utterly fantastic faces you just can’t draw enough times.
Comments Off on Friday Sketches
I’m becoming more and more a fan of Bill Bailey so I just had to share this:
Comments Off on Deliverence…Indian Style
For this week’s selection we are doing the first of George Enescu‘s Romanian Rhapsodies performed by the Cernauti Symphony Orchestra conducted by Liviu Buiuc.
Comments Off on Tuesday Rhapsodies
Well with the DVD release this weekend I finally got around to seeing X-Men: First Class. I don’t know why I didn’t bother with it in the theater. Probably a combination of having been burned by X-Men 3 and Wolverine: Origins along with an unwillingness to reward bad behavior in my favorite genres… and by the time I heard it was actually good it was all a matter of inertia.
So now that I’ve seen it I’m happy to say that I liked it a lot. I thought the X-Men worked very well in the period setting (Not surprising as the comic originally came out in 1963.) Of course the downside of this is that a lot of the anachronisms were glaring to the point of being distracting. I’m not just talking the small mistakes in fashion and military ordinance, more obsessive history fans then I have already pointed those out. I’m talking about the way it felt that every actor was acting like someone from now. Apparently this is an alternate universe where Jim Crow never happened. While there was sexism it was the dumb frat-boy variety, not the borderline religion of the time. So taken for granted that even the victims believe it, (and none of the female characters acted like they had lived through this.) Due to my personal prejudices, I suppose I can forgive nobody smoking, but that was pretty obvious too.
Otherwise I enjoyed it a lot. Hardly a masterpiece, but well acted with a tight script that made it feel like there was far more going on than just the main plot while not being loaded down with all of the badges that most superhero films focusing on an origin story have to deal with. The effects were good and convincing but happily, due to the character driven script, for once this was not important.
Comments Off on X-Men: First Class
