Comics in Film: Lola (1961), directed by Jacques Demy.
French schoolgirl Cecile and American sailor Frankie discuss the idea of a “mysterious planet” from Meteor, a monthly science fiction comics magazine that features the long-running bande dessinée “Les Conquérants de l'Espace” by cartoonist Raoul Giordan and writer Robert Lortac. In this scene, Cecile has been sent to get a few groceries by her mother with the incentive of also picking up the latest issue of her favourite comic. Frankie has bought the last copy, but charitably gives it to her, and the two form a brief friendship. Cecile is on the cusp of her 14th birthday and has a teenage crush on Frankie, on leave from his U.S. Navy ship but almost finished his tour of duty and on the verge of returning to his exotic far-away home of Chicago, Illinois. Set in the port city of Nantes, Lola is a beautiful film about arrested adolescence and liminality, with people always on the threshold of departure and change, all wrapped up in myths of romance, escape, travel, coincidence, circularity, movement, ritual, repetition, nostalgia, impermanence, death, rebirth, transformative space, and reinvention.
Professional toilet cleaner Hirayama (Kōji Yakusho) listens to his collection of classic cassette tapes while driving in his van to work and in his meticulously clean home on a small ghetto blaster. His feckless young co-worker Takashi (Tokio Emoto) takes him to a record store (Tokyo’s Flash Disc Ranch) to get a valuation on some of his tapes, including Lou Reed’s Transformer which the record store clerk describes as rare. Hiragana refuses to sell, and instead gives Akashi some cash so he can impress a woman. Earlier, Takashi had introduced Hirayama to his girlfriend Aya (Aoi Yamada), who borrows Hirayama’s cassette of Patti Smith’s Horses after she hears the track “Redondo Beach.” This music, mostly meticulously-curated English-language classic rock from the 1960s and 70s, and Hirayama’s use of outdated, mostly analog tech, is central to the themes of Perfect Days, a film that fetishizes and nostalgizes certain outmoded aspects of Japanese working class life and celebrates a zen-like approach to living simply, seemingly outside of history, presented without comment or curiosity, although sometimes contrasted with images of industrial ugliness and social anomie and alienation. It’s a beautiful film, filled with many moving scenes and images, paired perfectly with some of my favourite music that actually had me crying like a little baby at key moments.
Just saw the first Dick Tracy movie (1945) on TCM. The villain is Split-Face, played by the great Mike Mazurki. He's a new creation for the movie, not from the comic strip, created by the screenwriter Eric Taylor, author of many B-movie crime pictures. The Batman villain Two-Face debuted in 1942. In a shocking twist, it looks like Dick Tracy is taking a page from Batman. In another shocking twist, Bob Kane is actually credited with his creation (although Bill Finger of course wrote the first appearance in Detective Comics #66). In a twist that will surprise nobody, Kane stole the idea for Two-Face from this poster for the 1941 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starring Spencer Tracy
The Devil's Hand aka Carnival of Sinners aka La Main du Diable (1943), directed by Maurice Tourneur.
Charming fantasy about a bohemian artist who buys a "Monkey's Paw" totem and makes a Faustian bargain for fame, love, and riches. The hero is pursued by a cute little devil who dresses and thinks like an accountant (or an SS agent), and there are some impressive spooky-looking shots and sequences. A cute satire on bourgeois art and commerce, directed by Jacques Tourneur's father! Made under German occupation, it's very French, very modern, and I've read it characterized as an anti-Nazi Resistance allegory.
I recently had the pleasure of watching Blast of Silence, the brutal, existential 1961 film noir written and directed by and starring Allen Baron. Baron was born in Brooklyn and fell into making movies after a hardscrabble early life that included stints in the U.S. Navy, driving a taxi and working in the comic book industry of the 1950s. The story of the guerrilla production of Blast of Silence, shot on the streets of NYC without permits and with equipment "liberated" from Castro's Cuba, is the stuff of legend and makes for interesting reading. Baron went on to Hollywood and became a well-known tv director. Genre and comic fans may be interested in work he did on some science-fiction and fantasy themed shows like Kolchak the Night Stalker (he also directed more mundane fare like Barney Miller and The Brady Bunch), and he was nominated for a Hugo Award for the 1969 pilot episode of the short-lived The Immortal tv series. But it's his short stint as a comic book artist in the 1950s, directly preceding his first film, that I was curious about.
A scene in Blast of Silence seems semi-autobiographical: when the ruthless antisocial assassin played by Baron meets a chum from his days in an orphanage, the friend tells a story about getting out of the army, going to art school, and getting a career in commercial art. This is the same path followed by Baron in real life. It looks like he did a batch of romance comics for Lev Gleason and at least one horror story for ACG, the haunting "Bride of the Swamp Monster" in Forbidden Worlds #9 from 1952. While the writer of the story is unknown (perhaps Baron himself), the story is notable for its Hollywood film setting with scenes of a small crew shooting a movie in the swamp.
Sometimes a film just speaks to you, you know? Records is Alan Zweig’s sequel and self-described “bookend” to his legendary 2000 documentary Vinyl. In that first film, part of Zweig’s curmudgeonly “Mirror Trilogy” in which he turns the camera on himself at the same time as he projects his anxieties and foibles onto his subjects, looking for clues to his own loneliness and depression, Zweig managed to find some of the worst examples of record collectors. Alongside collecting heroes like Harvey Pekar, Don McKellar, and Jello Biafra, Zweig dredged up a gaggle of misfits with various personal issues and hoarding tendencies, almost uniformly single men, who shared his conflicted attitudes about collecting and seemed to be engaged in filling an inner void with the habitual accumulation of records.
In this new film, Zweig is seemingly in a much better space, both mentally and in terms of physical location. Twenty years later, he’s traded in his dark, rat-infested apartment for a bright, sun-dappled house in a middle-class Toronto neighbourhood. The aimlessness and self-recrimination of his earlier film(s) has been replaced with some semblance of joy and contentedness; Zweig’s young daughter appears off-camera in the film and the sense we get is she is key to this newfound solidity and balance. His record-collecting has changed, too. Instead of binging and purging indiscriminately, he now seems more focused on buying records for enjoyment, living with some records for only a short time while keeping a core collection that brings him happiness. Likewise, the bulk of collectors he interviews come across as well-adjusted and artistically-inclined music lovers who collect records as an outgrowth of that passion. Many of his subjects use music and collecting in a wholesomely self-directed, therapeutic manner, and several seem to have found their collecting central to long-term relationships and romance. The climax of the film focuses on a happy hetero couple that have that rare thing, a MERGED record collection (gasp!) and, pointedly, two healthy-looking straw-haired tykes who share their parents’ love of tastefully obscure vinyl.
The film is full of stimulating insights into the collector mentality, tempered with Zweig’s patented wry humour. Where the original film took place at the tail-end of vinyl’s long reign as the world’s primary music format, where the sadsack collectors on display seemed like relics of another age, pathetically hanging on to a dead medium, Records comes to us in the middle of the much-touted vinyl resurgence and a newly-thriving industry of deluxe reissues of classic albums and boutique record stores. In a world where you can find a plethora of documentaries about record shops and watch tens of thousands of Youtube videos of record collectors showing off their latest finds, Zweig’s new film nevertheless serves as a timely coda to that bygone era and a fresh way to think about our obsession with “things”. For myself, Zweig’s original film was less a cautionary tale and more of an inspiration. As a confirmed collector from my early years, his exploration of the collector psyche and his Quixotic, haunted quest for the Louvin Brothers’ “Satan is Real” mirrored my own conflicted approach to my vast accumulation of stuff. My wife and I now co-own a record store and have watched Vinyl many times over the years to the point its crusty characters seem like old friends and yes, we also have a large merged record collection (full disclosure: we have met and are on friendly terms with several people in this new documentary and have actually sold at least one record to the director. Zweig had even asked Kara to be in Records, but she demurred since the prospect of having a strange film crew in our tiny home during the pre-vaccine days of the Covid-19 Pandemic did not excite us). The callbacks and self-referential aspects of this new film make it seem like the continuation of a conversation begun two decades ago (these are our people!) and anyone who enjoyed Vinyl or is just curious about why someone might line the walls of their house with thousands of pounds of cardboard-jacketed plastic discs in the era of streaming and digital will find Records a satisfying, and maybe even comforting, experience.
The Electrical Life of Louis Wain (2021), directed by Will Sharpe.
An Emotional Portrait of the Superstar Cartoonist
by BK Munn
There aren't many serious films about cartoonists, are there? My wife and I have been lifelong admirers of the delightful cat art of Louis Wain, collecting old postcards and children’s books with his images for decades now, so it was a no-brainer that we would rush to see this film, despite our general antipathy towards biopics in general, and twee British artist biopics in particular. I have to say, though, contrary to our misgivings, the film proved to be a moving chronicle of Wain’s unique hardscrabble life and transformation into the superstar cartoonist of Victorian England, his efforts as the sole supporter of a household of five precocious sisters and their mother, his generally tragic circumstances, and his later descent into a form of madness. We were teary-eyed through much of it. Benedict Cumberbatch continues his streak of portraying lovable British eccentrics and geniuses, but I found I could forget about his fame and get lost in his character here. Claire Foy is also affecting as Wain’s wife Emily. It’s a bit too precious at times for what is essentially a tragedy, but the film’s overarching “life is beautiful and silly” theme is solid and quite in keeping with the nature of Wain’s art.
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We saw the film after a day browsing antique shops (we bought an old British children’s annual (the 1923 Pip and Squeak) with some cat cartoons, although none by Wain. The world really could use a collection of Wain's comic strips, like those he did for Hearst's Journal-American and associated papers.
There's an interesting echo of the origin of Steve Ditko’s Dr. Strange in one of the more famous episodes of Seinfeld, 1993’s “The Puffy Shirt”. In the episode, written by Larry David, sad sack George rockets to the top of the hand model game, but just as he feels his life is turning around, his brief career is cut short when his hubris is rewarded with inevitable destiny in the form of a carelessly-placed clothes iron.
George’s vanity is reminiscent of that displayed by high-flying surgeon Stephen Strange, who destroys his precious hands in a car accident and subsequently wanders the world searching for a cure that can restore his skill and dexterity, until he eventually winds up at the hidden Himalyan monastary of the Ancient One who trains him in the mystic arts.
George’s doom is foreshadowed by the tale of a hand model whose story is eerily similar to Stephen Strange’s and also contains a callback to another famous Seinfeld ep, “The Contest”. At his first (and last) photo shoot, George learns of the mysterious “Ray McKigney” who had “the most exquisite hands you've ever seen.”
As the unnamed hand model agent tells it, McKigney fell victim to self-love:
MAN: Tragic story, I'm afraid. He could've had any woman in the world.. but none could match the beauty of his own hand.. and that became his one true love..
(Long pause)
GEORGE: You mean, uh..?
MAN: Yes. he was not.. master of his domain.
GEORGE: (Makes a gesture saying he understands. The man nods) But how.. uh..?
MAN: (Quick, to the point) The muscles.. became so strained with.. overuse, that eventually the hand locked into a deformed position, and he was left with nothing but a claw. (Holds hand up, displaying a claw-like shape) He traveled the world seeking a cure.. acupuncturists.. herbalists.. swamis.. nothing helped. Towards the end, his hands became so frozen the was unable to manipulate utensils, (Visibly disgusted by this last part) and was dependent on Cub Scouts to feed him. I hadn’t seen another pair of hands like Ray McKigney's.. until today. You are his successor. (George looks down at his hands) I.. only hope you have a little more self-control.
GEORGE: (Smiling to himself) You don't have to worry about me. (Nodding, gloating) I won a contest.
The egotistical Ayn Randian superman who is humbled and must painfully learn the lessons of true heroism is a Marvel Comics mainstay, from Peter Parker to Tony Stark to Dr. Strange, and the story of a professional man who suffers the loss of his hands must have had a special resonance for a cartoonist, but the Stephen Strange/Ray McKigney story has other precedents in popular culture. “The Hands of Orlac” is a 1923 silent film that popularized the medieval legend of The Hand of Glory --the disembodied body part of a dead criminal endowed with magical powers. In the film, a concert pianist loses his hands in an accident and has the hands of a murderer grafted on by an experimental surgeon. The film was remade many times, with two versions appearing just before the origin of Dr. Strange was published in Strange Tales #115 in 1963: 1960's “The Hands of Orlac” (with Mel Ferrer as Orlac and Christopher Lee as the magician “Nero”), and 1962’s “Hands of a Stranger”. It’s entirely possible that Ditko and/or his editor Stan Lee saw or read some version of this story before penning the Dr. Strange story. The film was even remade by Oliver Stone in 1981 as “The Hand”, with Michael Caine as a cartoonist (!) who loses his drawing hand in a car accident, only to have the hand return to haunt him as a murderous appendage. The cartoonist’s art in the film was supplied by real-life Marvel veteran Barry Windsor-Smith. Did Larry David encounter any of these iterations before concocting his tale of the masturbating hand model? Who can say...
by BK Munn Saw Roma (2018) last night. Beautiful film. I think I know the secret to its success: a hidden cameo by Nancy and Sluggo in the film’s final minutes. Part of the film’s metacommentary on movies and childhood, the issue is Periquita #200 (Periquita and Tito were the Spanish-language Nancy and Sluggo), one of several comics seen fleetingly in Roma. I think this issue is an anachronism from 1975 OR 1976 (the movie is set in 1971 around the Corpus Christi massacre in Mexico City). Published by Editorial Novaro, it appears to be reprints of the U.S. Dell comics series, with John Stanley stories. There is a great line in the film when a young couple is about to go to the movies for a make-out session, and the young woman says “I prefer to play in the dark.”
The monthly series began publication in 1960 and each issue consisted of 32 full-colour pages. The dimensions of the comics changed beginning in March 1975 due to the rise in the cost of paper, forcing the publisher to reduce the size of its comics by almost half to 19.5 x 13.5 cm from 25 x 17 cm (this is when the "Eagle Series" logo appears). Some stories may have been written and drawn by Mexican creators.
The writer and cartoonist Dick Siegel died June 22 in Manhattan after a short illness.
Richard "Dick" Siegel was born May 27, 1955 in Los Angeles and attended Parsons School of Design in New York. A lifelong fan of comics and science fiction, some of his earliest work was as a writer and designer of several books packaged by Push Pin Studios. These include Alien Creatures and Fantastic Planets, illustrated with stills and posters from classic science fiction films and tv shows. He wrote and drew a comic strip parodying classic film called "The 4:30 Movie" for The SoHo Weekly News and was the author of two satirical works of fiction. He was for many years a chief contributing writer to the Weekly World News, where he also created the comics features Spy Cat (with artist Ernie Colon) and Matthew Daemon, Seeker of Obscure Supernaturals (with artist Mike Collins). Siegel had an extensive low-budget filmography as an indy cinematographer and director, produced and directed interviews for The National Enquirer, and wrote the screenplay for Shadow: Dead Riot, among others. He was the creator of the webseries, Smash Moron, Intergalactic Dolt.
Besides freelance work for a number of outlets as a journalist, humour writer, and pop culture historian, Siegel worked as a senior writer and the online editor for The National Enquirer from 2008 until 2015. For many years a resident of Staten Island, Siegel is survived by two sisters. ___
A 2010 GQ profile of the magazine's staff, from around the time the Enquirer was seriously being considered for a Pulitzer for its coverage of the John Edwards political scandal, focused on Siegel and his boss Barry Levine, and establishes Siegel's comic book fan bona fides:
Edwards was the first major story the Enquirer broke online. "We're the last of the Mohicans in terms of discovering our Web site," Levine says. They caught Edwards at the Beverly Hilton after that week's paper locked; worried that Edwards would attempt to spin the story before next week's edition, they posted the story on the Web site on Tuesday morning.The Enquirer's full-time Web staff consists of one guy. Dick Siegel is in his fifties, works out of a cubicle decorated with colored comic-book covers from the '60s; the fact that he's an obvious pop-culture junkie ("I was able to write Fess Parker's obit, or 90 percent of it, off the top of my head, which is scary") makes him the ideal man to run the Enquirer's Web site, where Old Hollywood types—Natalie Wood, Ingrid Bergman—tend to get more hits than Justin Bieber and the Jersey Shore kids. (By way of illustration, he pulls up a recent blog post, sourced to Carrie Fisher's Twitter, about speed fiend eddie fisher.)
"My forte is not journalism," Siegel says. "I'd be fired. I had been working at the late, lamented Weekly World News. That was after my film jobs—I'd been an independent-film cinematographer. Really bad horror movies. Including one that I wrote, about zombies at a women's prison."
He tells me that the Weekly World News gig was good training for what he does now. You learned to write short stories, in AP style, even if they concerned the travails of Bat Boy, "and present them in a serious manner, even if the punch line was a joke."
But it makes sense that someone with Siegel's background wound up at the Enquirer. The tabs are a form of rogue pop culture. They're vehicles for celebrity adoration, but they burrow, termitelike, into the sanctioned narratives of American fame. They're camp—a form of fantasy that revels and resists. They're a comic-book, zombie-movie draft of Hollywood history, right down to the zingy sobriquets.
"It's like professional wrestling," Siegel says. "When we wrote about Tiger Woods's wife, we always described her as 'livid,' so now she's always 'livid Elin.' And Rielle Hunter is 'the New-Age Temptress.'"
"Heroes and villains, in primary colors. That's what separates the giant scandals from the everyday scandals," Levine says, explaining to me why Tiger Woods and Edwards, stepping out on his cancer-stricken wife, were tabloid rocket fuel. "If somebody is a hero and they do something unthinkable, something unconscionable, if the betrayal is so overwhelmingly dirty and sickening, that's what makes what we do."
Peter Wyngarde as Prof. Norman Taylor in Burn, Witch, Burn (1962) looks like Steve Ditko’s Dr. Stephen Strange as seen here in “The Origin of Doctor Strange” (Strange Tales #115, 1963).
A crew from the upcoming Hollywood remake of Total Recall were in Guelph yesterday shooting a scene for the movie. Most of downtown was closed off while the film crew shot takes of actors walking across a street --pretty exciting, I know, but a fascinating window into the drudgery of big budget movie production. Despite several fierce rainstorms, it seemed like everyone in the city came downtown to check out the action and try to catch a glimpse of one of the stars. Although I heard from a restaurant owner who heard from someone involved that some of the leads were going to be in town (the film stars Colin Farrell, Ethan Hawke, Kate Beckinsdale, and Jessica Biel), apparently none of the mains were actually here. I certainly didn't see any celebs when I ambled down to who check out the goings-on. I did encounter a few crew members and one stunt double in my antique store late in the afternoon. Although none of them bought anything (boohoo!), the stunt double seriously considered a $2 purchase of a Guelph souvenir postcard.
I enjoyed the original Paul Verhoeven-directed Total Recall when I saw it in a theatre in 1990, despite the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger was already starting to irritate my delicate teenage sensibilities. Since then, the movie has attained a sort of cheesy cult status but is still among the best of a generally lacklustre bunch of post-Blade Runner adaptations of Philip K. Dick stories. Total Recall was adapted from Dick's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale".
Total Recall major film shoot shakes up downtown Guelph
GUELPH — Eric Repaci and his son Brandon picked the right day to try a downtown eatery for the first time.
The pair had a front-row seat as film crews moved wrecked cars into place and set up a scene from the Hollywood blockbuster Total Recall.
“It’s a unique experience in Guelph because we don’t see this kind of thing too often,” Repaci said as he and Brandon sipped coffee on the patio at Van Gogh’s Ear. “I’m a driver for Tim Horton’s so I get detoured around these things all the time in Toronto.
“It’s neat to see it close to home.”
Alternating, and at times quite heavy, rain chased away some onlookers throughout the day.
But John Milne of Hamilton stuck it out most of the day, capturing some of the action – or lack thereof – on his cellphone camera.
Milne heard about the shooting and decided to come to Guelph to visit a friend and hang about the set for a while.
“It’s incredible the number of people and the amount of gear they need just to film a few people crossing the street,” he said.
Total Recall, set for release next summer, is an update of the 1990 Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi classic. It stars Colin Farrell as a factory worker who begins to think he’s a spy for competing nations in a post-Apocalyptic world.
To the disappointment of some onlookers, no major stars featured in the scene filmed here Sunday.
The action took place at the intersection of Macdonell and Wyndham streets, which was littered with wrecked and burned vehicles and decorated with street signs suggesting the film is set in Britain. A double-decker bus and several London taxis — painted to look like they were covered in dirt and ash — were among the props used in the filming.
Business owners near the intersection were paid to stay closed for the day, close early or simply keep their lights off.
At the nearby Apollo 11 family restaurant, co-owner Cathy Agelakos said business was down slightly because the street was closed, but added some of the film crew came in to eat in the morning.
“The workers are pretty nice,” Agelakos said. “Maybe this will bring some people downtown who wouldn’t normally come here and they will come back another time.”
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