February 2012

Hey, guys! Remember these fancy stencil shirts I made for some of my pals a long while back? Well, I finally made a few of those beauties to sell over on my Etsy site. Check ‘em out.

I only made a small batch to test the waters. If they sell well, I’ll produce some more.

(Image above is my friend Sarah, wearing her stencil shirt.)

Colored pencils! Haven’t touched these bad boys in forever. I gotta do a background behind this guy.

Navajo skinwalkers: scary in large part because people who believe in them believe so sincerely that they don’t dare to talk about them.

The full-size version of the image used in the latest issue of Brine Weekly, hot off the internet presses.

I’m working on a family tree for this weird family. I was just sketching out some ideas for funny relatives here.

Still workin’ on this guy. I haven’t even really thought of what I’m doing for AlphaBeast ‘S’ yet.

Work-in-progress for last week’s Alphabeast.

It was a week of Quentin Tarantino films at the film series this week, so that’s most of what I watched. They ran both Kill Bill movies today, too, but I opted to skip them. I love Tarantino, but the idea of four hours of his style of film sounded exhausting. So I went to watch a cartoon instead.

Reservoir Dogs (1992)

It’s famous for being a bloodbath, and it is, but most of the blood is from wounds we barely see inflicted. That famous torture scene is memorably disturbing but mercifully short. However the film is nihilistic. The wry sense of humor can’t mask our intuitive knowledge that pretty much everyone we see onscreen is going to die, and the most decent people will die the most horribly. Not that there are a lot of decent people. There are a lot of likable people, though.

Diablo (2011)

A Tarantino-inspired blend of dark humor and extreme violence. Not a bad film, but it suffers from a lot of the same shortfalls that Tarantino often does—-lagging the story pacing for the sake of clever dialogue, and violence that seems indulgent to the point of excess. I’m not familiar with the rest of the director’s work, so I’m not sure if his other films are half-imitation and half-love letter to other filmmakers. I hope they’re not. This one had very bright spots, but it got a little tiring.

Pulp Fiction (1994)

A familiar classic, and pretty much everyone’s favorite Tarantino movie, for good reason. Just enough crime-novel grindhouse grime, combined with humor and really fantastic stylized dialogue of the kind that writers have a lot of fun writing, actors have a lot of fun saying, and everyone has blast listening to. The choices of music are sublime. Tarantino’s visual and musical taste is great, but where he really shines is in overlaying multiple stories in a single movie. Pulp Fiction’s different stories are all told well, though they all seem sort of like tangents from a central plot that doesn’t exist. This movie is like an act of defiance against central plots. The characters are all pretty crummy people, but they live in a crummy world and exude a charm that makes you want to join them there (until they start killing people, at least).

Jackie Brown (1997)

The most straightforwardly functional of all the Tarantino movies I’ve seen. This is a variant on a heist movie: flight attendant Jackie Brown (played by the marvelous Pam Grier) wants to steal half a million dollars out from under the nose of the dangerous weapons-trafficker, Ordell (as played by the always-intimidating Samuel L. Jackson), for whom she’s been smuggling money into the country from Mexico. The plot threads are woven together in such a way that it’s hard to tell what’s really going on in Jackie’s head—-who is she really working for? Is she actually stealing the money, or is she up to something else? Is she working with Ordell? With the cops? Or is she just using them to get the cash for herself? I was still trying to puzzle it all out up to the climax. You can’t turn your brain off for this one. You need to pay attention if you want to have any idea of what’s going on.

Besides Grier and Jackson, the cast of the film also includes Robert de Niro, Michael Keaton, Robert Forster, Bridget Fonda, and Chris Tucker. Compared to Tarantino’s other films, this one seems economical even at a runtime of over two hours. It’s not the length, it’s the trim. He hasn’t left much in Jackie Brown that didn’t absolutely need to be there. Though Pulp Fiction is still my favorite from his canon, I think Jackie Brown is his best.

The Secret World of Arrietty (2010)

The trailer for this one makes it look really bad, but it’s not. Of course it’s not bad: it’s a Ghibli movie. It’s based on the children’s novel The Borrowers, but it spends a lot of time on the quiet, meandering wonder that’s common to Miyazaki’s movies. There isn’t a ton of plot, but the story is based around a sickly boy’s discovery of Arrietty and her family. Like pretty much every other Miyazaki movie, there’s a little too much spoken exposition, and like every other dubbed anime, it suffers a little when some of the lines veer off into corny. The voice talent, many of them tremendous screen actors (Will Arnett and Amy Poehler play Arrietty’s parents!), end up sounding like generic English dub voice actors, their comedic timing washed away by the needs of lip-sync. But a movie like this is mostly atmosphere and beauty, and in those it’s extremely successful. It’s not quite at the level of Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro, but it is very obviously their relative.

The Maybe List:

• The Descendants (2011) - This one is approaching the end of its theatrical run, so it seems likely I’ll miss it.
• Chronicle (2012)

Well, I did it. I finally drew fan art for horse_ebooks.