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| "She," immortality, and marketing in Latin | Oct 23, 2013 10:27 AM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:I still have this tendency to resist going properly shadowy over relatively nice faces and stuff that I've drawn; Selenis' face was drawn at the pencil and early inking stages (I should'a taken a photo of the inked face, it came out pretty well)
and then it took me longer to ink the whole thing than it should have, because I was just sort of gradually hedging in around the interior details of the figure, not wanting to obliterate them--but they got obliterated just the same in the end in the name of proper lighting and shadow. Gotta get faster on the trigger on that sort of thing. ; )
Today I was watching an I think 1935 movie called "She" on Netflix--as often happens, this choice was dictated by finding that "She" and some other stuff in my list of things to watch is expiring at the end of the month : P--and it's very Flash Gordon-y (studly young male adventurer, runs into female love interest by accident on trip, they have dangerous excursions in exotic lands among "natives" (oy) and an upper class royalty in gargantuan palaces, accompanied by an older professor dude) which is no great surprise considering Flash had debuted to huge success the previous year. "She," though, has much nicer production values than the Flash serials; it's actually pretty neat how relatively seamless they can make some outrageous special effects--fairly simple exposure tricks and the like--look, because the film itself is pretty low detail that all the grain and contrast hid all the icky little production details, so in a way everything looks amazing and perfect and glowing on a truly grand scale. Anyway the reason I've mentioned the film is that it all has to do with a quest for immortality, and the problems immortality brings, which is also one of the main themes of A*; well and obviously it's a common theme in a lot of films, particularly fantasy and sci-fi, but I've never seen it dealt with quite as it is in "She," where it struck me as particularly A*-like in some ways, although some only I know I suppose since they haven't occurred in the comic yet. So anyway yeah, "She."
(Yesterday I watched another interesting expiring film, "Morituri," a 1965 black and white film about Marlon Brando, a rich WWII German expat who just wants to be left to himself, being induced into carrying out a sabotage mission against a German merchant navy vessel captained by Yul Brynner; Brando and Brynner are brawny and powerful, even with Brando's odd, sort of effeminate German accent in his SS officer disguise, the drama is sweaty (particularly down in the ship's dramatic engine room) and the cinematography quite good, especially the startling helicopter shots that pan along the whole of the ship as it steams along, zooming in on characters talking and walking across the decks, so it's just kind of a shame that the thing sort of derails in the final part, with the introduction of a whole boatload of new characters with their own dramas, and Brynner's character sort of checking out of the whole affair after he hears something upsetting on the radio. : P The film definitely has some good points, though. The title is Latin, the "we who are about to die" part of the old Roman salute to Caesar; not surprisingly, it confused audiences, who didn't attend the film in large numbers (the film was retitled to something more WWII-action-sounding in a later release); an early poster you can see on Wikipedia tries the odd marketing tactic of just saying "MORITURI must mean something unusual." : P)
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