For today’s picture, we go near the beginning of Game of Thrones, before Bran wasn’t crippled and things still looked like things were all right for the Starks.
“There was a shout from the courtyard below. Prince Tommen was rolling in the dust trying to get up and failing. All the padding made him look like a turtle on it’s back. Bran was standing over him with upraised sword, ready to whack him again once he regained his feet. The men began to laugh.”
Inktober’s coming soon, and I’m very much looking forward to it. Since in my experience it has taken me about a week to get into my grove in past sketch challenges, I thought Id’ start warming up a bit with a little side project. In this case, I’ll be doing illustrations from the first book of George R R Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones. Picking a page at random for illustrations. Since A Song of Ice and Fire is loosely based on the War of the Roses, I’ll use the fifteenth century for most of my references, With any luck, this will mean it won’t look anything like the show or any of the other versions.
This isn’t an official Challenge. I’ll try to stick to it but I’m not going to beat myself up if I skip a few.
So anyway the first one is from chapter 50 with Catelyn returning to Riverrun where she runs into Theon While looking for Robb.
“Theon Greyjoy was seated on a bench in Riverrun’s Great Hall, enjoying a horn of ale and retailing her father’s garrison with an account of the slaughter in the Whispering Wood. “
I’ve been considering checking out Blaxploitation films, ever since Cartoon Network’s animated version of Black Dynamite came out. I knew that, while it certainly was a very fun show, I didn’t have the vocabulary to know why it was utterly hilarious. Rather than start with many of the classics my friends recommended me, I decided to take some baby steps and watch the works of Jim Kelly.
My only experience with Jim Kelly’s was his co-starring with Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. Regrettably, in that film, he was one it was one of the most egregious examples of the trope black man dies first I had ever seen at the time. So I was very interested in seeing films where he got to be the leading man rather than the film’s sacrificial lamb.
In the first film on my list, Robert Clouse’sBlack Belt Jones, Kelly plays the eponymous character, a local hero. When the Mafia has his old friend Pop Byrd (Scatman Crothers) is killed, in order to buy the building his dojo is in. Jones teams up with Boyd’s daughter, Sydney,(Gloria Hendry) to take them on.
This film was… okay.
Of the three films, I watched it was the only one that fit my definition of Blaxploitation in that it was the only of them that took place in the inner city with Jones being very much part of the community.
For the most part, the action was pretty good and the film never took itself too seriously (whether this was on purpose or not is anyone’s guess) Scatman Crothers seems to be having a lot of fun hamming it up.
On the same DVD was Oscar William’sHot Potato which pretty much is for all practical purposes Black Belt Jones II. Jones and a team of mercenaries are hired to rescue a senator’s daughter who is being held prisoner in an imaginary Indochinese country.
This was the weakest film of the lot getting very close to so bad its good territory. I spent a lot of time wondering if it was actually a comedy or not.
Finally, I ended my marathon with Al Adamson’sBlack Samurai. Kelly plays Robert Sand agent of D.R.A.G.O.N. He has his vacation interrupted by his boss to rescue the daughter of an eastern ambassador, who happens to be Sands girlfriend, who has been captured by a cult leader. It’s up to Sands to stop him before his plan comes to fruition.
That is all there is about all there is to the plot. It’s pretty much an excuse for Kelly to have fights with just about anyone his enemies have to throw at him. This includes dwarfs, African tribesmen, and a vulture. Still, this was the only one of the films with decent choreography allowing us to see just how good a martial artist Kelly is.
This week I took another look at films about Hustlers.
The first film on my list, Ron Shelton’sWhite Men Can’t Jump starring Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson, tells the story of Sidney Deane (Snipes) a fast-talking streetball hustler who works the courts all over LA. He’s very surprised one day when he gets beaten by Billy Hoyle (Harrelson) a seemingly easy mark of a white chump ready to be taken but is actually an ex-college basketball star who’s been using his exceptional basketball skills to try and pay back some debts.
Wesley recruits Billy to be his partner in a series of scams. Using Billy to draw in potential marks, because everybody knows that white men can’t jump, they hope to win a local competition.
I remember this movie tripping my radar because it was the first time I’d ever seen Harrelson in anything besides Cheers. For the most part, this movie was okay but not particularly memorable.Still, it had its good bits. Snipes and Harelson have good chemistry (I’m always embarrassed that I keep forgetting how good an actor Snipes is.
It is twenty years later, and Fast Eddie Folsum (Newman) has quit pool and is making a fairly good living selling liquor (while sort of managing some pool hustlers on the side). One night he runs into a young charismatic player named Vincent Lauria (Cruize). He’s a fantastic player with “natural flakiness” and Eddie sees him as having the makings of a truly great pool hustler. He offers to train and manage cruise, taking him on a six-week training trip before competing at a tournament in Atlantic City.
I won’t say this will be my favorite Scorsezzi film but it is definitely my favorite Newman performance. In comparison, Tom Cruise is just there to be pretty.
This week I return to Shakespeare again, specifically Hamlet. Just to clarify, neither of these are technically adaptations of the play, as in they are not using the original script in any way. They are just modern versions… sort of.
This tells a story about a company mired in corruption. Soon things get worse as breaking news stories appear, board members are being arrested and committing suicide. It is not clear what is behind it. But most of the evidence points towards the Chief Executive’s secretary Nishi (played by Toshiro Mifune), who is gradually revealed to be the son of the company’s murdered founder, Who is now seeking revenge.
This film was only very, very loosely based on Hamlet. With Kurosawa only using the broadest strokes of the play to write a story about corporate corruption and revenge. However, the story beats that he uses work quite well.
I won’t say this will be my favorite Kurosawa film. To be honest none of his modern-day films have really worked for me so far.
But still, Kurosawa shows off his craft brilliantly with wonderful camera shots that rival all of his great films. I especially liked the scene in the middle where Nishi makes one of his targets believe they are haunted by the ghost of a colleague who is believed to have committed suicide. The way the Kurosawa stages this fake haunting makes me wish that he tried his hands on horror. (Depending on whether Throne of Blood counts or not)
The next film on my list was Let The Devil Wear Black. This one is much closer to the original material and does an excellent job of translating most of the notes of the play into the modern day. Now Jack, the Hamlet figure played by Jonathan Penner is a grad student with a history of mental illness inheriting his father’s company after his death and noticing something fishy going on in all of the usual places.
For the most part, this was a pretty good retelling, most of the elements of Hamlet work well enough in the modern day. I especially liked how a lot more screen time was put on the Hamlet/Ophelia relationship.
