I sat through some awful films over the last few days. None of them were my own selections. I just arrived to find somebody else watching them. Inception (2010) I had to fast forward to make it more interesting. The Killer Inside Me (2010) I had to leave the room twice. If it had been a public cinema I'd probably have kept going till I was out the building. At the end (SPOILER) he's poured paraffin or petrol all over the inside of the house, and when the police come in, nobody's olfactory alarm goes off?
The only film that pleased me, and pleased me no end, was the humble little French film whose poster is at left, Shall we Kiss (2007). It is a masterful piece of honest storytelling.

This has been around at least a year so you may already have seen it, but I need something quick for today:


as to its origin, who knows, but Craig Ormiston saw it posted on the set where he was working in sept 2010. His blog is full of picked up down-home wisdom like You look stupid with too many hats on. (give a few away)

UK premiere of Real Steel, based on the short story Steel by Richard Matheson and starring Hugh Jackman. Good to see producers Don Murphy (From Hell) and my fellow Scot, the lovely Susan Montford, whom I haven't seen in about four years. Best of luck with it! It looks like a lot of fun.

Just announced at COMICA's site. I'm going to be "in Conversation" with Arnold Brown. he's a very funny fellow.



Tickets: £6 / £5 Concessions / £4 ICA Members
Where: Nash Room, ICA, The Mall, London
When: Saturday, November 7, 2009 - 7pm to 9pm

Another whisky ad. this one's a great piece of Irish blarney.


(link from Bob Morales, supplier to the blogging elite)

Firm seeks Glaswegian interpreter

A translation company is looking to recruit Glaswegian interpreters to help business clients who are baffled by the local dialect. Today Translations placed an advert in The Herald newspaper on Tuesday seeking speakers of "Glaswegian English". Successful candidates, who could earn up to £140 a day, must understand "vocabulary, accent and nuances".
The firm said, so far, 30 people had applied for the positions - some of them in Glaswegian.

(thanks to dr jon for the link)

i usually avoid carrying somebody else's advertising, but it's in the nature of our times that art of a sort is often made in the service commerce. Anyone who has ever tried to make a film will immediately recognize this one as exceptionally clever. Do not take my purloining of the video as an endorsement of the product.


Some of the Scottish names in the credits have got me all teary eyed. Alison McDonald... Annie McCredie... Shug McGurk...
(My pal Bob Morales brought it to my attention)

earlier this week a guy asked:" I don't understand how the goal of making a comic that's a good movie pitch or media property, is inconsistent with or divergent from the goal of making a good comic, period." Well, your blog is titled 'groovy age of horror,' so we may presume that it's all of a oneness to you. And to all the other folks who may be having trouble understanding, the fact is if you gear your project to be a good movie pitch, then you may feel secure in knowing there is not much that can be lost in the translation.

About the same time, I linked to the interview with Dan Clowes in which he said:

The executives would look at us as if we were insane. It's like saying, "We'd like to take $6 million of your money and shred it for an art project we're doing." The people who make the decisions in Hollywood are never the oddballs or creative types, so you have to tell them what they want to hear. It didn't take long for us to start saying things like, "We want to make another There's Something About Mary". We had no intention of doing that, but you must at least make the effort to be reassuring.

Twice in the last week or so, I've picked on Hollywood movies for being untruthful, either to the book or history. The problem with these movies is that everything about their style says that they intend to be taken literally. An example of the opposite tendency? Take Federico Fellini's Casanova. I never think while watching it that he is telling me what either the real or the folkloric Casanova is supposed to have said and done. I'm not even sure it's really 'about' Casanova at all, which this quote from Casanova actor Donald Sutherland, which I've transcribed from a filmed interview, supports:

"(Fellini) was using Casanova to try and make clear for modern audiences how this particular shallow fickleness, this inadequate perception of one's life, now seemed to be an epidemic among the nouveau riche in Rome. He wanted to attack a disregard for the future and a disrespect for the past. Casanova was his metaphor for this."

I get tired of hearing that Watchmen the book is about 'what if superheroes really existed?' and 'what if these superheroes were made appropriate to the cynicism of our times.' Any great book is not 'about' the contents of its plot. Moore's Rorschach is a brilliant artistic creation for what he has been emblematically made to represent philosophically, psychologically, politically, that is, the Objectivism of Ayn Rand. I find this 1964 Playboy Interview to be a handy summary of her ideas, perhaps the source Alan was using when he wrote the scene with Rorschach and the black and white mask (which I referred to in my critique of the Watchmen movie in which the scene is oddly missing, and I say oddly because it is the crux of the character, the scene that everything else should have been built around. In comic book terms, it's his 'origin'; who he is and how he came to be.):

PLAYBOY: "In Atlas Shrugged you wrote, "There are two sides to every issue. One side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil." Isn't this a rather black-and-white set of values?"
RAND: "It most certainly is. I most emphatically advocate a black-and-white view of the world. Let us define this. What is meant by the expression "black and white"? It means good and evil. Before you can identify anything as gray, as middle of the road, you have to know what is black and what is white, because gray is merely a mixture of the two. And when you have established that one alternative is good and the other is evil, there is no justification for the choice of a mixture. There is no justification ever for choosing any part of what you know to be evil."

Being superheroes, which are essentially graphic symbols, they adopt the appearance of the idea or ideas that they represent. But in the diminished world of the movie they simply represent superheroes, which in these videogame days means toys with interchangeable parts and an entry in a dossier itemizing their abilities and power levels. In Public Enemies, the movie I saw and wrote about last tuesday, Baby Face Nelson just represents Baby Face Nelson, and his violent death can be moved to an earlier time in his life for movie-making reasons because it doesn't mean anything. And I'm not talking about depth of intellect here. The fable of the Tortoise and the Hare means something more than two animals having a race. It's not too complicated. Anybody can get it.

The reason the X-men became Marvel's most popular comic book in the '80s is because the meaning inherent in it appealed to a large number of readers. Alienated and rejected people find purpose in joining an alliance of people like themselves. There are two such, one constructive and the other driven by vengeance, from which the series derives its dramatic conflict. This idea at the heart of the series allows it to be expanded metaphorically forward, sideways (the acceptance of those who are different, such as gays) and backward (the plight of the Jews in Auschwitz). It's an idea that demands consideration on many levels. This doesn't mean that every X-men comic book or movie makes the grade, but it does explain, I believe, why the first film was a success:

Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe praised the X-Men films as "more than a cash-guzzling wham-bang Hollywood franchise... these three movies sport philosophy, ideas, a telethon-load of causes, and a highly elastic us-versus-them allegory." (wikipedia)

went to see the new Johnny Depp with the wife of my bosom, whose idea it was. Public Enemies. It all feels very real. the action is particularly good, all murky and unclear, like reality instead of all that Sparta slo mo flying around on wires stuff. But as soon as I got home I felt the need to check the movie against the facts, not because I think a movie should be obliged to stick to them, but just to make sure I don't find myself spouting some baloney in public that I picked up only from this source. The real story of that odd era of 'public enemies' is even more interesting than I first thought. All of the major ones seem to have been shot to pieces within a very short, nine month period. Bonnie and Clyde, May 23 1934; John Dillinger, July 24, 1934; Pretty Boy Floyd, Oct 23 1934; Baby Face Nelson Nov 27 1934; Ma Barker and her boys, Jan 16, 1935. The problem is that for movie reasons they had to rearrange some of that. You see, in films bad deeds cannot go unpunished. It's a rule. One of the interesting things they did on the Sopranos was to upend this rule, though upending rules isn't automatically by itself a guarantee of the good stuff. Guys got away with evil deeds all over the place. Like real life. Since Depp is Dillinger, according to movie logic, he must get shot up last, meaning that as Floyd and Nelson are also in the movie, their demises have to be brought on early, otherwise the viewers might get the impression that they got away with their evil deeds. It might be a good thing anyway, since if you go in knowing your history this means you can still be surprised. I'm reminded of this exchange From the film Gladiator, which itself took enormous liberties with the historical record. In ancient Rome a big spectacle is being presented at the Colloseum, recreating the battle of Carthage, but it's started going awry:

"My history's a little hazy, Cassius... but shouldn't the barbarians lose the battle of Carthage?"
"Yes, sire. Forgive me, sire."
"No, I rather enjoy surprises."

Also, the Billy Holiday recordings he's listening to on the radio were made between 1939 and 1941, several years after Dillinger's death.
Wait a minute, it's the phone ringing.
Hi, honeybee.
what, yes of course I'm capable of enjoying a movie.
no, don't say that. I' am not one of those...
uh okay...
whatever...
anyway, thanks for roning.
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This traveling exhibition is in our town:
Welcome to The Leonardo da Vinci machines exhibition.

Historical documents reveal that Leonardo commissioned local artisans to create some of his inventions. Unfortunately none of these original machines have survived and many of his inventions were forgotten. However, the last fifty years has seen a revival of interest in Vincian technology, spearheaded by the Niccolai family who have been interpreting the designs and constructing fine models since the beginning of Vincian studies. This exhibition presents over sixty models grouped in themes: War machines, Flying machines, Nautical & Hydraulic machines as well as devices illustrating the Principles of Mechanics.

Leonardo would never have got up our hill on this bike.

who watches the Watchmen? Eddie Campbell finally gets around to it.

'Watchmen' dominates video charts

The action hit "Watchmen," from Warner Home Video, shot to the top of the national home video sales and rental charts its first week in stores, with 36% of its total unit sales coming from the high-definition edition.

Firstly, the hullaballoo about Mahnhattan's willy was completely unnecessary, and the product of small minds. It's no big deal and I wish I hadn't commented on the comments of the fanboy forums, where far too much was made of it. There are annoying things in the movie and that isn't one of them. And there are more annoying problems with the reviews of the movie, for instance this new one:

Watchmen is too faithful to Alan Moore's book, writes Paul Owen on the Guardian Film Blog

Zack Snyder told the Guardian earlier this week that his version of Alan Moore's comic novel was 'not really a movie, in the traditional sense'. I wish it had been
At times this labour of love seemed like a shot-for-shot adaptation of the comic, with as little as possible squeezed out during its lengthy running time. Does it work as a movie? Does it work independently of its source material?... my feeling is that it does not. Anyone putting Watchmen into the DVD player unfamiliar with the comic and what it was trying to do might well be left baffled by the plot and alienated by some of its imagery and themes. Enjoyable as it is to see Rorschach snarl at his fellow prisoners "You're locked in here with me", for example, this whole jail sequence could have safely been deleted without interfering with the plot.
Most importantly, some things that don't necessarily seem ridiculous in comics – superheroes' physiques, their costumes, capes, secret identities and underground lairs – seem much more silly on screen, when brought to life by real human beings. The leap of imagination or suspension of disbelief is much more difficult to make in films than in comics. And Watchmen does not do enough to make these aspects of the film credible to the general viewer.

Separating the points, firstly: It's a very smalltown reviewer who only concerns himself with what the commonplace viewer is likely to accept. A bigger person would lead the way and casually attempt to influence taste. I would certainly have expected more from a writer in the Guardian, whether online or off.
Secondly, there is a great deal of the book that can arguably be left to one side for the purpose of a movie; Rorschach in jail is not part of that. 'Springing' Rorschach is the hinge upon which the drama turns. His refusal to give in must be pushed to its very limit, even in the face of brutal murder in jail, before decisive action is taken by others to influence the course of events.
Third, the business about the exaggerations of the comic books not taking well to the screen is palpably untrue. All action movies now are comic book movies, even those that didn't originate in the funny books, such as Die Hard and James Bond. Even the Bourne movies might as well have strip cartoon origins for all that they respect the rules of physics. The comedies even moreso. Jim Carrey is a walking cartoon; so is Eddie Murphy. The fact is that movies, insofar as they are all about spectacle, are more likely to have their antecedents in the circus and street parades than in books. Costumes and tricks of the eye are the very essence of movies, or at least one strain of them, from Georges Méliès to George Lucas. Speaking purely theoretically, a comic book is as likely to provide the stuff of a successful movie as any other source material.

Now, as to the problems. In spite of all I've heard, if the movie is weak, it is categorically NOT because of its faithfulness to the original. I found myself continually wondering if the adapters had completely understood the original. For example they retain the line "(Blake) saw the true face of the twentieth century and he chose to become a reflection, a parody, of it. No one else saw the joke" but they do not, as does the book, combine those words with the image of the Vietnamese woman bottling his face. They do show that in its proper place in Manhattan's memory, and the result is a gash in Blake's cheek. But the whole point of the act of violence was that it transformed the permanent expression on his face into a cruel sneer. Blake does not have this in the movie. Small things like this say a great deal symbolically. Blake has changed from the arrogant jocular chancer of his youth in the gaudy yellow clown suit, to the vicious cynic of a politically more complicated time. A similar amount of thought went into Rorschach's mask in the book: "Viscous fluids between two layers latex heat and pressure sensitive. Customer young girl, never collected order, said dress looked ugly. Wrong. Not ugly at all. Black and white, moving, changing shape. But not mixing. No gray." Then it turned out the woman who ordered the special dress was real life Kitty Genovese. I'll admit this is perhaps much too complicated for a film, but the business about 'black and white, no grey' says a huge amount in a very small space, and they didn't really get into Rorschach's world view in other ways. It would have made the mask a potent symbol and carried more weight than adding in the completely new action of him putting a cleaver in the child murderer's head four or five times, which is no more or less meaningful than all the other acts of violence.
Then there is Rorschach's diary. In the book the diary has the first and last words. Perhaps a crucial scene has been eliminated, to be reinstated in the director's cut, in which we see him actually writing in the diary, or perhaps I just closed my eye and missed it. Otherwise his words exist only as a voice-over, so that when an actual book-diary turns up at the end, I was a little surprised. I had presumed from its absence that it was going to be one of things they were cutting out.
Then there's all the violent stuff that has been added in, as I referred to above. In the movie version of the fight with Laurie and Dan in the alley with five thugs, we now see ten thugs and they are all brutally dealt with. One has his arm snapped in two by Dan, another gets stabbed in the throat by Laurie. I must say I was shocked. In other places, Dan is horrified at the violent acts of Rorschach breaking a thug's fingers to get info and The Comedian's violent dispersion of protesters; it makes no sense. And why do the thugs attack one at a time, apart from the cinematic need for each act of violence to be clearly outlined? In the book the point of the scene was to create an oddly humorous sexual frisson, as they lean back against the wall and the first thing she thinks of is to light a cigarette. You'd need to be a nut job to be up for humour after seeing the guy with the knife in his throat. More added violence in the attempt on Veidt's life. Not only his assistant as in the book, but now three politicos also, as Veitd ducks behind them in what looks like a cowardly maoneuvre. In the movies, meaning will always be secondary to spectacle, and the favourite spectacle of our miserable age is the spectacle of hurt.

And this movie is very spectacular, in many places, especially the sequence on Mars, and the owlship in flight and it is also, I would say, the best adaptation of Alan Moore to the big screen. But all through it I felt ill-at-ease. You know that feeling, when you have a visitor in your house and he's going around manhandling all your things.

arf! you must watch!

i meant to write about the full length documentary film PROCEED AND BE BOLD much earlier than this, but I’ve been in a funk for a couple of months. I’m jolted out of it suddenly by noticing that there’s a connected exhibition in Chicago that only has a couple more days to run:

QUIT YOUR JOB AND BECOME AN ARTIST- Closing Party Saturday, June 27 from 12pm-6pm. Free and Open to the Public. Please join us at the Cash-and-Carry Poster Sale, where you will be able to meet Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. and purchase posters at $15 each. Posters can be signed by the artist. Enjoy beverages by Peroni and music from the Manley Diehl at this free event.

Amos Paul Kennedy is a very personable fellow who creates letterpress posters of immediate appeal, using type and colour in support of mottoes that are variously serious, utilitarian and mischievous.


The rise of letterpress as a small scale artform is a current that up till now has not caught my eye and I'm finding it full of charm and interest. The documentary, made by Brown Finch Films captures the spirit of this movement in flight, with several international practitioners commenting on Kennedy's work. You can view excerpts at the link.

Amos is particularly good at the Art of gentle disruption- see the sequence where he is called in by the university police to explain his provocative postcards and he takes his mascot lawn jockey along with him. “He enjoys being a social irritant,” says one commentator. As the film proceeds we see him obtaining an old machine and collecting printers’ unwanted type here and there. Intercut through the film, director Laura Zinger shows clips from an old black and white 1950s documentary on the history of printing. At one stage I suddenly realized she had just cut in a couple of shots of Amos in mock old-style monochrome.



Kennedy's work ranges from richly vibrant like the detail above, to simply practical like his job for a local night club (Proprietor, Tee, shown below with the poster):
“LADIES, NO FIGHTING IN THE BATHROOM. (This is a grown folks establishment)" – "I had a few left over," says Amos, "and mothers started buying them, mothers with two daughters- I need ThAT in MY bathroom!"


I love the Dvd and recommend it. It mulls over many questions about art in our times, such as who owns it and who has access to it, and why and why not. They're on sale for twenty at the producer's site and also at the event linked above. Also keep an eye on the Brown Finch news page for screenings and hopefully more to come.

i found this old five-minute tv item from 2002 while I was archiving stuff on my new back-up hard drive, a procedure i have come to find necessary after the collapse of my second computer in only two years. It was stuck at the end of the VHS tape of my Court-sketching stories recorded from the tv news, which my pal Mick Evans transferred to disc for me a while back. These items always turn out to be a little embarrassing, so i won't put the video up. It's not that i didn't give it my best effort. Instead of going to the comic book store, I insisted on walking into a regular bookshop, and picked Avid Reader in the lively Brisbane West End, where I had done one of my stand-up routines a few weeks before. As it happens I'd just done a deal with Random House to publish From Hell in Australia which made it difficult for the comic book shops to obtain copies (to do with volume discounts and the fact that the comic shops only wanted the one book... when I tried to get involved to help solve the problem i found that book publishers make a rule of not discussing such matters with authors, so it was all very frustrating and everybody was happy when Random sold out the 4,500 they printed, regarded that as a reasonable success and went no further, and I took back the reins).
The tv reporter and his camera guy and I spun down to the West End and it lived up to its reputation by being suitably colourful. Outside a fruit shop, a bloke in toytown yellow pants was juggling broomsticks...





My attempt at cool however was somewhat undermined by the voice-over, which characterized me as "Brisbane father of three, Eddie Campbell," which I guess is what I should expect of an afternoon show aimed at suburban house-folk. "Even in the colourful west end, Eddie Campbell stands out, perhaps it is the glow of pride." I'm supposed to be proud because Hollywood has just made a movie of the book.



Seeing the Random House edition nicely displayed like this reminds me of my desire to put the book on 'the main street of culture' (a ref to Alan Moore's metaphorical comment, just after the Watchmen success, of being caught on the main street of culture wearing his underpants outside his trousers). In the Random House catalogue we found ourselves finally free of the associations of the superhero comic books. However our lofty literary ambitions were held in check when we saw our book matter-of-factly illustrated between the Healthy Guide to Better Breast-feeding and the Dog Owner's Manual (perfectly useful books both).


The movie was soon to be released here, so this may well have been the first glimpse Australia got of it, from my dvd.


This kind of tv item is not complete without the performing seal routine, so I accommodated the request do a drawing for the camera. I guess at least it can be dug up later to prove Campbell didn't hire assistants to do everything.








I showed this drawing here once before, in its subsequent setting in a French magazine, but on that occasion I couldn't recall the reason I had drawn it.

this just caught my attention. The wife of my bosom and I watch Rebus on cable every week, as they are currently showing the filmic inventory in total, and I have often wondered if the oddly dismal view of human nature is a carry-over form the books from which the otherwise engaging series sprung (though it must be said that the post-John Hannah version with Ken Stott in the title role has been more uplifting). I see that the author Ian Rankin was interviewed this week at Newsarama, on account of his new gig at Vertigo, writing a so-called 'graphic novel':

"...a lot of people hated the film of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but I loved it! I think I went and saw it three times! I liked the characters, and the idea of them as the first superhero fighting team. That’s just a great idea. As a creative writer, that just really appeals to me, genre-hopping and playing games with them.
I loved V for Vendetta as well. I thought it was very true to the source material, very faithful. I thought, “being Hollywood, they’ll make him take off the mask, we’ll get to see his face.” Nope. Loved From Hell also. I think I liked it better than the comic book, which is very hard to follow in parts."

But we need not worry because he is actually really truly quite brainy. In figuring out how to write comic books, this is what he came up with:

"What I did was I got a copy of a book called Understanding Comics and the others by Scott McCloud. And I thought they were really quite cerebral. It was like, “What happens in the space between the panels is almost as important as the panels themselves, because time has passed, and you’ve got to imagine what has happened between these two panels.”

With any luck he'll fall through the space between the panels and we'll be spared. Meanwhile we'll get back to enjoying Rebus on the tv and wondering how much they had to change it to make it work.

watchmen review by A.O.Scott in the NY Times:

"Speaking of acts of congress, “Watchmen” features this year’s hands-down winner of the bad movie sex award, superhero division: a moment of bliss that takes place on board Nite Owl’s nifty little airship, accompanied by Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” (By the way, can we please have a moratorium on the use of this song in movies? Yes, I too have heard there was a secret chord that David played, and blah blah blah, but I don’t want to hear it again. Do you?)"

"The only action that makes sense in this world — the only sure basis for ethics or politics, the only expression of love or loyalty or conviction — is killing. And the dramatic conflict revealed, at long last, in the film’s climactic arguments is between a wholesale, idealistic approach to mass death and one that is more cynical and individualistic.
This idea is sickening but also, finally, unpersuasive, because it is rooted in a view of human behavior that is fundamentally immature, self-pitying and sentimental. Perhaps there is some pleasure to be found in regressing into this belligerent, adolescent state of mind. But maybe it’s better to grow up."

"so, has Snyder maintained the integrity of Watchmen, and is Alan Moore simply a grumpy old coot? Or has Snyder completely missed the subtleties and nuances of Moore’s media-specific creation, proving his theory that adaptations are "a waste of time"? Only audiences familiar with both can ultimately decide." says my local hip rag, RAVE.
"It's faithful" says my pal White.
"This is Sparta" says wee Cal.
And I trust his judgement.

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The title of the blog plus the title of the post made me larf

after watching the excellent Movie Chicago last night with choreography by the great Bob Fosse I found myself mulling over Beyonce's statement that her very striking 'Single Ladies' Video was influenced by a Bob Fosse piece from the Ed Sullivan show in the '60s. It got a few people trying to put the two together. These struck me as the most interesting:





The Fosse original is here. The central dancer is his wife Gwen Verdon. I recall having a minor crush on her after seeing her do 'Whatever Lola Wants' in Damn Yankees, which Fosse also Choreographed.
But for pure Fosse style, check this:

the cockeyed morality of 1950s tv westerns.

Quite often we have to admit that even the stuff we like is bollocks. It's been established in a previous episode of the old Maverick series I'm watching on the museum channel or whatever it's called, that things were pretty wild out there in the west. A citizen was gunned down in the street and there was nothing anybody could do about it. In today's episode, however, a woman's husband has been missing in Indian territory for some time, presumed dead. It's a particularly dangerous location, being the 'graveyard of the gods' to the natives. The woman desires to marry another bloke. And even though this is a near lawless place, it's still a near lawless 1950s America, and blokes and girls can't just go hitching up without due process. So they go into the badlands to establish whether the husband is dead or what, because it would be entirely immoral to remarry without ascertaining said position. The husband is also a condemned murderer, which is another reason he has to be got back, to face justice. In the course of the search Maverick casually murders a native American who is guarding the holy place. The purpose was to avoid bringing the whole tribe down on them so why he couldn't just get thumped on the head I don't know, because in movies getting thumped on the head causes you to slump down silent and unconscious instead of causing you to scream in agony as it does in real life. Next they have to shoot a dozen other native Americans who are justifiably angry about it, all just young chaps with aspirations and hopes and a sweetie back in the wigwam like thee and me. None of this evokes remorse or regret of any sort. It turns out the bloke she was going to marry is the one who committed the murder that the husband is wanted for in the first place, so he gets kilt by the injuns, the sanctity of marriage is preserved and all's well that ends.

related posts: The cockeyed morality of modern day comic books.
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meanwhile in the real world:
Woman loses hearing in passionate kiss

A passionate kiss ruptured a young woman's eardrum in southern China, state media reported on Monday, in what has been dubbed the "kiss of deaf".
The 20-something girl from Zhuhai city in Guangdong province was treated by hospital doctors after completely losing the hearing in her left ear, the China Daily reported, citing the Guangzhou Daily.
"The kiss reduced the pressure in the mouth, pulled the eardrum out and caused the breakdown of the ear," the treating doctor, surnamed Li, was quoted as saying, adding the woman's hearing would likely recover in about two months.

i've been enjoying the old reruns of Maverick on Foxtel, and I seem to have gotten in early enough to catch some of season 1 from 1957. I was two when these things first aired. I loved the cowboy shows as a kid, but managed to miss this one except in an occasional repeat. It would have been my favourite, though probably would have a bit over my head for a few years. Anyway, Callum is passing through the room, catches a glimpse of James Garner as Bret Maverick and says "Hey! Wouldn't he make a good Spirit!". (Cal is currently working his way through Will Eisner's complete run of the Spirit.) Coincidentally, Eisner himself thought Garner would have been perfect in the role. He originally, in the '40s, had Cary Grant in mind, but by the '60s Grant would have been too old, so the 30 year old Garner he saw as perfect.
Of course it's all academic now as Garner is himself too old, but discussing the issue would at least leave an impression of just what the character should be like on screen, relevant as Farnk Miller's version will be coming to our screens very soon. Thus In 2002 at the Will Eisner symposium on the graphic novel in Florida, at which I was a guest, I was having breakfast with Will himself and he confirmed his liking for Garner as a theoretical Spirit. In 2006 I was having a beer with Frank Miller in San Diego and I brought the subject up. I may be wrong but I got the impression that Frank was dismissive of the choice.
Garner has great presence and has to be watched on screen, but here are a couple of stills of him as Bret Maverick




Here is Eisner's Spirit:


And here's the second Maverick photo with a mask drawn on the face:


This remark on the wikipedia page linked above,
"Garner as Bret usually wore a black cowboy hat, often changing its placement on his head from one scene to the next,"
reminds me of the expressive ways that Eisner would use the Spirit's hat, changing it from sombre to resilient to comedic to jaunty, etc. etc. from panel to panel.

update as i just realised the release of the movie is closer than I thought:
Spirit stars at abandoned warehouse (13 hours ago)

The stars of comic book film adaptation The Spirit have appeared at an abandoned warehouse. Rather than a Leicester Square premiere, Samuel L Jackson, Eva Mendes and Scarlett Johannson graced the red carpet at the Old Post Office in central London, ahead of the film's world premiere in New York next week.

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Andre Rieu earlier in Melbourne:

Saccharine touches make Rieu mildly nauseating

Alongside "light" classical and popular 19th century Viennese dance music, a Rieu performance typically features staging, costumes and coiffures based on romanticised stereotypes of 19th century Vienna, with saccharine Disney studio touches and kilometres of taffeta thrown in for good effect. Add in sing-along, clap-along, whistle-along audience participation, pantomime jokes, sensory overload (large screens, ice skaters, dancers, horses) and the production values of variety television, and you have The Wiggles for grown-ups.

(thanks to Louise for the link)

this has all the earmarks of a publicity stunt, but here we go anyway:
130,000 inflatable boobs missing at sea

MORE than 130,000 pairs of plastic inflatable breasts have been lost at sea en route to Australia.
Men's magazine Ralph was planning to include the boobs as a free gift with its January issue.
The cargo is worth about $200,000, which is another blow for publisher ACP's parent company PBL, which is already in $4.3 billion of debt.
A spokeswoman for Ralph said the container left docks in Beijing two weeks ago but turned up empty in Sydney this week.

(link thanks to Michael Evans)
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Callum was looking at the Italian edition of King Bacchus, wherein you will recall that I illustrated a legendary meeting between Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore (one of many of course), and he has drawn my attention to the fact that they have translated 'Neil scary-trousers Gaiman' as "Neil pantaloni orridi Gaiman." I call upon my Italian correspondent, Nathalie, to opine whether this is a good translation or otherwise (or otherwise we shall all start using it).
Neil explains the origin of the nickname:


(ps the book was King Bacchus , but it is out of print, in English at least.)
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THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY May Yet Unfold In Live Action!

Two years ago, it appeared that Stephen Daldry was locked in to direct the long-awaited adaptation of Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY. His stars: Tobey Maguire as Sam Clay, Jamie Bell as Josef Kavalier and Natalie Portman as Rosa Saks.
Well, that didn't happen. In an April 2007 interview with DETAILS, Chabon, who also wrote the screenplay, lamented that "...it just completely went south for studio-politics kinds of reasons that I’m not privy to." Bummer.
But no project is ever completely dead in Hollywood...

saw Quantum of Solace, the new Bond movie, yesterday afternoon with the wife of my bosom. One thing I like about the way this last couple with Daniel Craig have gone is that the old style villain's lair has been discarded. The big showdown inside the lair was always the part of the movie that bored me. As soon as you realise they're into that part, you know it's strictly formula from here on, usually with the villain's monologue and all the usual fittings.

"They (these lairs) should be embedded in the material culture of the times - albeit with the resources of a meglomaniac millionaire or billionaire - and also able to reach a little bit beyond into a near-future as those resources allow."(link below)

Wired has a photo gallery: Bond Villain lairs revealed

As essential as the curvaceous leading ladies and not-so-subtle sexual innuendo, every James Bond villain has an impressive lair. Some are exotic, others chic. All are impressive locations for unsavory types to plot and scheme."

This article at Magical Nihilism explains the change with some insight:
Who Stole My Volcano? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dematerialisation of Supervillain Architecture.

"The modern Bond villain (and he might have added, villains in pop culture in general) is placeless, ubiquitous, mobile. His hidden fortress is in the network, represented only by a briefcase, or perhaps even just a mobile phone.
...for a “4th generation warfare” supervillain there aren’t even objects for the production designer to create and imbue with personality. The effects and the consequences can be illustrated by the storytelling, but the network and the intent can’t be foreshadowed by environments and objects in the impressionist way that Adam (Ken Adam, production designer of numerous Bond films) employed to support character and storytelling."

On the other hand, nowadays we have the video game:

The game's developer, Garrett Young, says Daniel Craig is a keen gamer who was excited yet nervous about how he would look in a videogame.
"But once he saw it, he was happy and much more comfortable," Mr Young said.
"Then he grabbed the controller out of my hand and just started running around and playing. He is a gamer, so he picked up the controls right off the bat.
"Then he started getting killed a lot, so I told him about cover. Once he started taking cover, he was really successful."