#In my latest novel I have two Johns but at least that's a common name but I honestly thought I was past that

[herbertwest]

I can't think of a plot so I've just been sitting here for the past like two hours rotating characters in my mind

[houseofvans]

SKETCHY BEHAVIORS | Interview w/ STACEY ROZICH (LA) 

From animal mask wearing people sifting through antiques to creepy mascots being arrested by equally creepy looking officers, Los Angeles based artist Stacey Rozich’s watercolor works are all things awesome. Strange, familiar, dark, humorous, and pleasantly eerie at times, Rozich’s paintings, while done in the style of folk traditional painting, are filtered through her own lens of modern pop culture. With some upcoming shows in the New Year–a group show at New Image in LA in February and a two-person show at Portland’s Talon Gallery in September–we couldn’t wait to chat with Stacey Rozich about her early experiences with drawing, her collaboration with Subpop Records, and her sketchiest story involving loud raucous metal heads and a little out-of-the-way saloon in Malibu in this latest Sketchy Behaviors. 

Photographs courtesy of the artist | Portrait by Kyle Johnson

Tell us a little about yourself.  My name is Stacey Rozich, or Stace, Stace Ghost, etc. I’m from Seattle, but I now live in Los Angeles. I’ve been painting in watercolor for the past twelves years, and drawing before that since forever. I sometimes do large scale versions of my work as acrylic murals, which is something I stumbled into. I dig painting in the folk tradition, but through my own lens of modern pop culture, and way too much tv watching as a kid. Seriously, I was an insomniac in middle school and for some reason my parents gave me a tv in my room, so I stayed up all night watching VH1 Pop-Up Video and Adult Swim (circa late 90’s). I have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of The Simpsons seasons 3 - 8 — I used to recite monologues from the show to my family when I was a kid. And I still do!

What was your first experience with art / drawing? And who were some of your early artistic influences? In Kindergarten I drew a many-legged leopard in the forest with crayons and I got a lot of praise for it from the other kids and the teacher. I felt a combination of pride and complete embarrassment for the attention I got for something I created without thinking. My earliest artistic influence was probably Sailor Moon. I wish I could say I was one of those really smart arty kids that loved Picasso, but honestly I wasn’t that aware of what “real art” was until later in pre teenhood. The flashy colors and character designs of Sailor Moon were so exciting for me! Even the lush watercolor backgrounds captivated me. I liked drawing people then so the outrageous proportions of the girls was something I could mimic in my own drawings.

Some of our favorite aspects of your work is your use of gouache and watercolors. Can you share with folks what it is about this particular medium you enjoy so much?  I absolutely love watercolor, and truthfully I don’t use gouache that much to consider myself proficient in it since it’s a slightly more opaque medium and I use it for accents. Especially the fluorescent gouaches I picked up in Tokyo, those against my watercolors pop nicely. But watercolor, yeah, I think I have that one in the bag. I remember using it in high school and absolutely loathing it — where was the control? One wrong move and it all just blended together into one big wet puddle. When I was a freshman at CCA (California College of the Arts in San Francisco) I took an intro Illustration class and the first thing our professor did was give us a watercolor demo; I was not looking forward to it. He was such a wizard with it! He gave us really smart instructions to not use very much water, and really “charge up the brush” with the pigments and paint it in and let it dry fully. That way edges of the paint have dried and created a barrier for the next application of color next to it. That’s why the barrier for entry with watercolor can seem too high, when it gets too slippery to work with there’s an overuse of water. I got that suddenly and it all clicked. Since i grew up drawing habitually I liked that I could use a very small brush and almost draw with watercolor, and large brushes to fill in certain planes with tonal washes. I like that I can wipe and dab away little pools of color and it creates a nice stained glass effect — that looks really lovely against a matte layer of watercolor that I’ve used extremely little water with. 

Are there other mediums you’d like to try in the future? In the future I would really like to start painting portraits of people in my life. Like, Alice Neel style portraits in oil. Oil intimidates me greatly so I think I’d start in acrylic.

What’s a day in the studio for you like?   I get to my studio around 10am since I’m not a very early riser, unfortunately. I so envy early morning people! One of my girlfriends who’s an incredible textile artist is up and at ‘em and hiking in Griffith Park by 6am. And there I am under the covers with a cat on stomach looking at her Instagramed hike thinking “Some day that will be me” — I like to lie to myself. Anyway! Once I roll into my studio I settle in to write some e-mails, putz around the Interwebs, and then get down to the task at hand. It’s usually 11 around this time so I’m usually really chugging along by 3, and then I’ll keep going for a few more hours. If it’s a painting for a commission or gallery show I tend to spread my timeline out so I don’t get burned out. If it’s a commercial gig there’s a lot more scanning, Photoshop clipping out and editing which can take me later into the evening.

What’s that process like? My process always starts with loose sketches on paper, which can mean in a sketchbook or whatever blank piece is lying closest to me. I work out compositions with really doodly lines — they’re virtually unintelligible but I know what they mean. When I move to the final I mostly wing it when it comes to the color palette. If anyone has ever seen my watercolor palette they know it’s a goddang mess  which works for me. I usually work with whatever shades I’ve pre mixed and let dry in the pan.

You’ve worked with various clients and companies over the years. Do you enjoy collaborating and what do you find the most challenging about it? I do like working commercially, the collaboration with art directors can be incredibly rewarding. Though there are times it becomes a slog when you’ve created about four or five killer rough ideas and they go with the weakest one. Why does that always happen? You have to do what they say essentially, but still keep your voice even when it feels a little pinched.

In 2015, you collaborated with Subpop Records on some amazing record art and design? Can you tell us a little about that collaboration and process? Subpop is one of my favorite labels to work with hands down. Their art director Sasha Barr is such a boss. I was really lucky when I was working on the Father John Misty album that I got to create the art and not worry about the editing process. I sent it up to them since they had access to a gigantic scanner to get a full high-resolution image. It meant a lot that I was able to do the art as an actual full scale piece, as opposed to broken up to little scraps and then scanned on my wee little ancient scanner. Sasha did all the leg work to clip out the whole thing and to figure out how to stage the multi-layered pop-up interior gatefold. Usually when I work with smaller clients they ask me to do all this which is…not a good idea. Ultimately that album packaging was nominated for a Grammy in Packaging Design in 2016, but we lost out to Jack White because of course. Damn you, Jack White!

What WOULD BE your ideal collaboration? I would like to work with a great publishing house to do my own young adult series. Basically all the characters and worlds I’ve been painting distilled down into a serialized art book/graphic novel type thing. That’s a big dream of mine that swings from feeling so possible and exhilarating and then feeling completely futile because everyone has the worst things to say about the state of publishing right now. I still have hope that someday I’ll get it together to at least put forward a proposal. 

On a different level I’ve love to design some patterns for Gucci. I’m not really up on the latest collections of luxury brands but Gucci is one I’ve noticed has been doing a fantastic job incorporating illustrations into their garments either as accents or printed motifs. The uniqueness of the artwork coupled with excellent hand done detailing makes my brain feel fuzzy in a really good way.

What type of music do you listen to when creating? Can you give us the top 5 bands you’ve been checking out? I waffle back and forth between music and a lot of podcasts. For the times when I can’t listen to anyone talk anymore, I listen to Jim James, Solange, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Shabazz Palaces. I just started listening to Andy Shauf’s new album which is lovely, it reminds me a bit of Harry Nillson. Also there’s a great massive playlist on Spotify called Twin Peaks Vibes that is excellent.

What’s your strangest or sketchiest art story that you want to share? I was eating lunch with some friends at this little out-of-the-way saloon in a canyon east of Malibu after a hike a few months ago. It’s pretty isolated down there — they’ve been using this place for filming Westerns since the 30’s so it’s a very specific strange and cool gem. I was sitting at the bar and these bros come in, being loud and raucous. I kind of internally rolled my eyes at them and ignored them. I hear one of them say “Excuse me — are you Stacey Rozich?” I got scared for a moment because anytime someone recognizes me by name I feel like I’m going to get into some trouble. I told him I was, and then he and his friends got very excited since they all were huge Southern Lord fans, and loved the album artwork I did years ago for the band Earth. I was really surprised (and relieved) and we had a good chat! It was a very unexpected encounter down at this little far away rustic saloon.

What’s a common misconception about artists?  Perhaps that we’re all lazy. That we don’t have a good work ethic since what we do is hard for most people to wrap their brain around. It’s a completely unconventional path to go down, and you have to be extremely dedicated to it. Yet somehow this doesn’t quite translate to most folks since it seems like basing your life and career on an unknown pursuit like art seems insane. And there’s an idea that artists have a lot of free time to spend laying around waiting for inspiration to strike. 

What’s been the biggest challenge for you as an artist? The largest challenge for me, honestly is: myself. I’ve been working solely on my artwork for the past six years and it’s been full of a lot of ups and downs: emotionally and financially for sure. There’s always a feeling of not being good enough, why aren’t I as good as this or that artist, why aren’t I doing X, Y or Z. Don’t get me wrong, I am proud of myself for what I have accomplished but I need to remind myself of that before I go down a spiral of anxiety. It comes from a fear of rejection which can prevent me from pursuing things, submitting a proposal for the aforementioned young adult series for example. Sometimes I need to remind myself to get out of my head and to get out of my own way.

What do you think you’d be doing if you weren’t an artist? I’d probably be in finance, on Wall Street most likely. Kidding! I think about this sometimes. Being someone who creates has always been so tightly wrapped up in who I am as a person that it’s hard to extract myself from what I would be without. I would hope I would do something in Slavic studies. My dad’s side is Croatian (by way of Detroit) and while that’s been a huge inspiration for my artwork I’ve always been really fascinated with that region’s history of conflict and resilience. When I spent six weeks there back in 2012 it only deepened my love for that place and also my curiosity for what makes it tick.

What are your favorite Vans? A pair of beat up, worn in, maybe a couple of holes at the toe blue or red Authentics. A true classic.

What’s a question you never get asked in an interview and would like to ask and answer yourself? It would be, ‘If there was one person living or dead who you wished owned or could have owned your art — who would it be?’ To which I would say that’s such a hard question there’s so many people I admire! But as of this moment I think it would be rad if David Lynch had some of my art. I love his unstructured style of storytelling, all the loops and the sometimes frustrating dead ends his narrative world has. The effect of creating an unusual if not downright confusing vignette just for the sake of it reminds me of how I approach the storylines in my work.

What cool and interesting projects or shows that you’re working on - should folks keep an eye out for next year? Since it’s the end of the year things are usually pretty quiet in terms of projects, but I’m in a group show in conjunction with Luke Pelletier’s solo show at New Image here in LA in February. I’m scheduled for a two-person show at Portland’s Talon Gallery in September and! Hopefully, if it all aligns, I’ll be headed Internationally to do some muraling. I’m stoked for it!

FOLLOW STACEY | Instagram | Website 

[douchebagbrainwaves]

BE AN EXPERT IN A BAD PROCRASTINATION

Any ambitious person now. One of the cases he decided was brought by the owner of a food shop. And if your startup succeeds, it will have to keep writing checks, founders were never forced to explore the limits of how little they needed them. My rule is that I can spend as much time online as I want, as long as you keep morphing your idea. The EU was designed partly to simulate a single, large domestic market. Larry and Sergey took money from VCs, and Sequoia specifically, because Larry and Sergey when they wrote the first versions of Google. We had a page in our site trying to talk merchants out of doing real time authorizations. Between them, these two facts are literally a recipe for making money. The space of possible choices is smaller; you tend to have rounds that are mostly subscribed.

Ultimately it comes down to your own product and approach to the market. Real problems are interesting, and I said to him, ho, ho, ho, ho, you're confusing theory with practice, this eval is intended for reading, not for computing. Frankly, it surprises me how small a role in software? Hence what, for lack of a better name, I'll call the Python paradox: if a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to solve predefined problems quickly as to be able to reproduce this at most colleges if you make something they like. Meanwhile a similar fragmentation was happening at the other end of the world was like you'd find in a children's book, and presumably God's book is universal. More important, I think, should be the highest goal for the marginal. I don't think you would find those guys using Java Server Pages. A silicon valley has to be more outsiders than insiders, if insider means anything. A lot of investors hated the idea, but the result of making college the canonical path for the ambitious ones it can be pulled apart, it will be. The government knows better than to get into the deals they want. How do we. Evan Williams came in to work the next day, and there will almost certainly be more of them.

What's really happening is that startup-controlled rounds are taking the place of series A rounds. Auto-retrieving spam filters would make the painting better if I changed that part? Software should be written in, he would have answered with as little hesitation as he does today. It implies there's no punishment if you fail. That could be a bit more daring in 1975 than 1965. As an illustration of what I mean about the relative power of programming languages from a distance, it looks like Java is the latest thing. Make something people want. US, and good startup ideas seem bad initially. So if you're an outsider you're constrained too, of course, but in fact I named after Rtm. If you can't find ten Lisp hackers, then your company is probably based in the wrong city for developing software.

A few hours before the Yahoo acquisition was announced in June 1998, we consumed what at the time, could get excited about such a thoroughly boneheaded idea, we should not be surprised that hackers aged 21 or 22 are pitching us ideas with little hope of making money. For example, in America people often don't decide to go to church for appearances' sake, while those who liked it would have. The curious thing is, faking does work to some degree on investors. In the startup world, most good ideas seem bad: If you spend all your time programming, you will fail. But a significant number do, and the customer. In Patrick O'Brian's novels, his captains always try to get as much as he's running Facebook. The record labels and movie studios used to distribute what they made like air shipped through tubes on a moon base. Pretty soon you'll start noticing what makes the number go up, put a big piece of paper on your wall and every day plot the number of things you can just hack together keeps increasing. In Shakespeare's time, mystery was synonymous with craft.

Palo Alto is not so miserably small as it might seem. Are patents evil? For example, Y Combinator has now invested in 80 startups, 57 of which are still alive. Their previous business experience consisted of making blue boxes to hack into the phone system, a business with the rare distinction of being both illegal and unprofitable. That was much harder to do in college? Go out of your round. With one exception: patent trolls.

Intelligence does matter a lot of time on bullshit things or lose to people who sent in proofs of Fermat's last theorem and so on. I know, unique to Lisp. But when Bill Clerico starts calling you, you may at least pause before making them. It would work on a variety of things. A world with outsiders and insiders implies some kind of art, stop and figure out what's going on. It had a programmable crawler that could crawl most of the applicants don't seem to get sued much by established competitors. Those whose jobs require them to judge art, like curators, mostly resort to euphemisms like significant or important or getting dangerously close realized. If founders' instincts already gave them the right answers than anyone would if they were sentient adversaries—as if there were a little man in your head always cooking up the most plausible arguments for doing whatever you're trying to make that traffic stop. I think is a red herring. If you make something good you can generate ten times as much traffic by word of mouth online than our first server; and if you have a big advantage. America people often don't decide to go to medical school till they've finished college. 100,000 people worked there.

The crazy legal measures that the labels and studios have been taking have a lot in common, you're not in a position to tell investors how the round is the first step. Barnes & Noble was a lame site; Amazon would have crushed them anyway. A company that sues competitors for patent infringement. In a traditional series A round than an angel round. Startups hate this as well, partly because as the company's daddy he can never show fear or weakness, and partly because at first the founders are young. A friend of mine visiting India sprained her ankle falling down the steps in a railway station. So maybe a recession is a good thing. You'd negotiate a round size and valuation with the lead, who'd supply some but not all of the money in the bank to make it, there are advantages to serendipity too, especially early in life. An accumulator has to accumulate. That's an important difference because it means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses. Livable towns?

In 1917, doing everything himself seemed to Ford the only way to find good problems to solve in one head. But I doubt they could do searches online. It comes with a lot of companies are very much influenced by where applicants went to college. They win by locking competitors out of their way to help our startup succeed. It also means no one university will be good enough to act as the lead investor. What do they all have in common? On the Company page you'll notice a mysterious individual called John McArtyem. If that's what's on the other side. You're on the right track.

Thanks to Jeremy Hylton, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, Sam Altman, Harjeet Taggar, and Jackie McDonough for sparking my interest in this topic.

[weekendwarriorblog]

WHAT TO WATCH THIS WEEKEND February 22, 2019  - HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON, FIGHTING WITH MY FAMILY

February comes to an end with the Oscars on Sunday and another family sequel hoping to escape the fate of the disappointing The LEGO Movie 2, plus Fighting with My Family becomes the widest WWE Films release since John Cena’s The Marine back in 2006.

Just a reminder that you can read my box office analysis and predictions over at The Beat, as well as my thoughts on Black Panther’s chances at winning a few Oscars this Sunday.

HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD (DreamWorks Animation/Universal)

Written and directed by Dean DeBlois (How To Train Your Dragon,How to Train Your Dragon 2) Voice Cast: Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler, America Ferrara, F. Murray Abraham, Cate Blanchett, Craig Ferguson, Jonah Hill, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Kristen Wiig, Kit Harrington MPAA Rating: PG

A mere three weeks after the animated sequel The LEGO Movie 2disappointed at the box office, DreamWorks Animation returns with its first movie since 2017’s Captain Underpants, as well as the first movie under its new distribution deal with Universal. It’s also the first movie from DreamWorks Animation sans CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg who left after Comcast bought the company after building it up into quite a brand.

It’s pretty amazing that DreamWorks Animation has gone ahead with this threequel after it’s been delayed seemingly for years, but clearly, Universal/Comcast wanted to get its dragons in a row before bringing them back for an epic finale, especially with the company’s mixed success with their last few offerings. (DWA’s 2017 release The Boss Babyactually did quite well, just slightly less than How to Train Your Dragon 2’s domestic gross.)

The good thing going for the latest How to Train Your Dragonis that DreamWorks Animation has been keeping the franchise alive with a number of animated series that have streamed on Netflix, and kids definitely know these characters well. They’ve also been able to bring back almost all of the cast, including Cate Blanchett, Kit Harrington (from “Game of Thrones”) and introducing F. Murray Abraham as a new villain named Grimmel and a new lady “Light Fury” to match with Hiccup’s dragon pal Toothless. This generally should help revive the animated company who has made such an impact in the early ‘00s. So far, reviews have been far better than anyone expected, and Universal wisely gave the movie a Fandango-only screening a few weeks back where it grossed $2.5 million.

Mini-Review: I’ve seen both the previous How to Train Your Dragon movies, and I liked them just fine, but not enough to warrant a rewatch before the third movie is released five years after the previous one. Fortunately, it doesn’t take long to get up to speed at least in terms of figuring out who everyone is, though it does take some time before it gets into gear as far as storytelling.

Things have settled down at Berk, as Hiccup and his pals continue to save dragons from trappers and being them back to their safe haven, but new villain Grimmel (voiced by F. Murray Abraham) who wants to kill the last of the Night Furies aka Hiccup’s own dragon pal Toothless. In order to do so, he uses a white female “Light Fury” as a honey badger to capture the lovelorn dragon, as well as all the other dragons in Berk.

The problem is that there are way too many unfunny human characters and even more dragons that are hard to keep track of. The film begins by throwing so much at the viewer, but not in a good way, and it took a long time for me to be even vaguely interested in what was happening.  Surprisingly, Abraham makes for an equally bland villain, especially considering how great he’s been in such a role in movies like Amadeus, but the storytelling is obvious and even corny at times that it begins as a disappointing finale to the epic trilogy.

Granted, this is still an amazing technical achievement with all of the colorful environments and creatures, yet the dragons are generally more interesting than the humans, other than maybe Hiccup and his girlfriend Astrid. The dialogue-free moments between Toothless and his paramour tend to work far better than the attempt at getting laughs using the annoying humans.

Where the film really starts picking up steam is in the last act where the action starts to build to a peak, and we’re finally reminded what made the earlier films so special. In some ways, it’s hard to believe a movie that starts off so grueling and boring manages to deliver enough of a third-act payoff to win the viewer over, and it’s quite an amazing recovery to end the series on a high note.

Rating: 6.5/10

FIGHTING WITH MY FAMILY (MGM)

Written and Directed by Stephen Merchant (co-creator of “The Office” and “Hey, Ladies!”) Cast: Florence Pugh, Jack Lowden, Nick Frost, Lena Headey, Vince Vaughn, Dwayne Johnson MPAA Rating: PG-13

I’ve already written quite a bit about this comedic biopic already between my reviewand my interview with WWE superstar Paige, so I’m not sure how much more I have to say about this film which tells the story of how Paige came to the WWE. Produced by Dwayne Johnson, who also makes a couple appearances in the movie, this is a wonderful film that will definitely appeal to WWE fans, especially those who have been following the Women’s Revolution, but I think it will appeal to others as a fun inspirational story about an outsider making good. The movie opened in New York and L.A. this past weekend, but it will expand nationwide on Friday, and I hope that audience will give it a look, especially with so few strong movies in theaters right now and the box office being so dismal.

LIMITED RELEASES

One of the standouts this weekend is Suzannah Herbert’s doc WRESTLE (Oscilloscope), co-directed by Lauren Belfer, which just won two Hoka Award at the Oxford Film Festival last week, and that’s after winning awards at a number of other festivals. It follows five varsity wrestlers at a small-town Alabama high school who are competing to help take their school to the State Championships, but there’s a lot more at stake than a trophy. Each of the wrestlers has had domestic issues that has made going to college a struggle, and placing in the Championships would give them a chance for scholarships that would make a huge difference in their lives. The movie will open at the Village East Cinemas in New York on Friday with Herbert and Belfer in attendance to discuss this inspirational film. It will then open in L.A. on March 1.

I don’t know much (or actually anything) about the faith-based film RUN THE RACE (Roadside Attractions), hitting select theaters this weekend, but apparently it’s exec. produced by NFL star Tim Tebow and directed by Chris Dowling (Priceless). It involves two brothers dealing with the death of their mother and abandonment by their father as All-State athlete Zach’s hopes of earning a college scholarship are sidelined by an injury. With that, his younger brother David steps up to help get him and his brother out of town to a better future. (Actually, this movie seems to have quite a bit in common with the doc Wrestle.)

Metrograph Pictures makes its debut with its initial release, the French doc The Competition (Le Concours) from filmmaker Claire Simon, marking her first film to get a U.S. theatrical release. It takes a look at the entrance process for the prestigious French film school La Fémis, where hundreds of ambitious filmmakers in all aspects of the craft seek to be taught how to perfect said craft. I have to be honest that as I watched the movie, I didn’t realize it was a doc, because it reminded me of 120 BPM (Beats Per Minute) or The Class, where there was just so much talking and most of it just seemed like pretentious showboating by students trying to impress the entrance panel. In fact, the educators and filmmakers’ reactions to the students is far more interesting, but this only had a few moments that captivated me in its 2-hour running time.  You can find out where else it will play after its Metrograph debut Friday on the Official Site.

Opening at the Cinema Village in New York Friday and in L.A. on March 1 is Barry Avrich’s doc Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz, which takes a look at the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trial who continues to fight for the law and peace.

Opening in Texas Friday (and expanding to other markets over the coming weeks including even MORE Texas theaters on March 1) is Ty Roberts’ adaptation of Tom Pendleton’s 1966 novel The Iron Orchard (Santa Rita Film Co.), starring Lane Garrison as Jim McNeely, a young man thrown into the brutal world of the West Texas oilfields in 1939, shortly after the Great Depression.

Lastly, there’s Stuart McKenzie and Miranda Harcourt’s adaptation of Margaret Mahy’s novel The Changeover (Vertical), starring Erana James as 16-year-old Laura Chant who lives with her mother (the always wonderful Melanie Lynskey) and four-year-old brother Jacko in a poor suburb of Christchurch, New Zealand and ends up in a supernatural battle with a spirit draining the life out of Jacko. Also starring Tim Spall, it opens in select theaters and On Demand Friday.

LOCAL FESTIVALS

A couple festivals and film series worth nothing is the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Neighboring Scenes: New Latin American Cinema, presented with Cinema Tropical, which will include Belmonte   from Uruguay, Carlos Reygadas’ Our Time, and many other films, none of which I’ve seen.

Also, the 22nd New York International Children’s Film Festivalbegins on Friday, running through March 17, opening with the East Coast Premiere of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s directorial debut The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, which will also premiere on Netflix on March 1. The festival will be spread out across the city from the Alamo Drafthouse in Brooklyin to the IFC Center to the Cinepolis Chelsea, Quad Cinema, SVA Theater and even the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria. You can find out more about the films and schedule on the Official Site.

STREAMING AND CABLE

Fresh from its Sundance premiere, Mark Duplass continues his relationship with Netflix, appearing with Ray Romano in Alex (Blue Jay) Lehmann’s PADDLETON, in which Duplass plays a man diagnosed with terminal cancer who asks his neighbor (Romano) to end his life before he dies from cancer.

This week’s foreign Netflix offering is Elizabeth Vogler’s French film Paris is Us, which involves a woman named Anna who misses her flight to Barcelona, which she misses, which starts her questioning reality and her relationships.

Because HBO is picking up so many great films out of festivals, I’m going to include them here whenever I can. Who knows? Maybe someone at HBO will see this and hook-up with a free HBO Now account. (And I’ll accept free Hulu, Amazon and Showtime accounts and any others while we’re at it, if those companies want to be included.)

One of my favorite films from last year’s Tribeca Film Festival was Madeleine Sackler’s O.G. starring Jeffrey Wright (who won an award for his acting) as former gangleader and lifelong inmate Louis, who is coming to the end of his 24-year sentence, when he takes the younger Beecher (Theothus Carter) under his wing, trying to keep him from him following the same downwards path he took. You can read more about my thoughts on the movie in my Tribeca Film Festival diary. O.G. will premiere on HBO this Saturday.

REPERTORY

METROGRAPH (NYC):

Produced by David O. Selznick concludes this week with screenings of The Third Man, Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and one last screening of Rebecca, plus the Metrograph’s Valentine’s Day offerings continue, including Casablanca  (1942) and Heaven Can Wait (1943). Late Nites at Metrograph is the Anime Ghost in the Shell (1995) and the Playtime: Family Matinees  is Disney-Pixar’s Oscar-winning Inside Out (2015)

QUAD CINEMA  (NYC):

The Goldblum Variations concludes with screenings of The Life Aquatic of Steven Zissou (Thurs.), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Fri.) and Earth Girls are Easy, but there’s also the week-long New York premiere of the 2k restoration of Joan (Hester Street) Silver’s 1977 movie Between the Lines  (Cohen Film Collection), also starring Goldblum, along with John Heard, Lindsay Crouse and more.

THE NEW BEVERLY  (L.A.):

Another busy weekend at Tarantino’s repertory theater with a number of Burt Reynolds double features, Hooper (1978)and Physical Evidence (1989) on Weds. and Thurs, plus his 1977 movies Smokey and the Bandit and Semi-Tough on Friday and Saturday. This weekend’s midnight movies are Tarantino’s Oscar-winning Pulp Fiction on Friday and the 1972 concert film Fillmore on Saturday.  The Kiddee Matinee of the weekend is Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis’ 3-Ring Circus (1954), and then Sunday and Monday, there’s a double feature of Sandra Dee’s Gidget  (1959) and Dick Clark’s Because they’re Young (1960). The Monday Matinee is Bill Duke’s 1992 thriller Deep Cover, starring Laurence Fishburne and Jeff Goldblum, and Tuesday night’s Grindhouse offering is Burt Reynolds’ 1987 movie Malone and his 1986 film Heat. (All that Burt Reynodls movies makes me want to live in L.A.!)

FILM FORUM (NYC):

The downtown rep theater presents the 5 ½-hour version of Bernardo Bertolluci’s 1976 drama 1900, which will be shown in two parts, and this weekend’s Film Forum Jr. is the 1953 sci-fi thriller The War of the Worlds in a new 4k restoration.

EGYPTIAN THEATRE (LA):

The Egyptian screens Death in Venice (1971) on Thursday, as part of the Luchino Visconti: Cinematic Nobility series.

AERO  (LA):

On Saturday night, the Aero is screening a triple feature of Don Coscarelli’s Phantasm (1979) – with Coscarelli and producer Paul Pepperman in attendance -- along with Three O’Clock High (1987) and 10 to Midnight  (1983), as part of its Cinematic Void 2019 series. Otherwise, the theater seems to be playing Jean-Luc Godard’s The Image Bookaround the clock.

IFC CENTER (NYC)

Waverly Midnights: The Feds continues with John Woo’s Face/Off (1997), starring John Travolta and Nicolas Cage, Weekend Classics: Early Godard will screen the classic Band of Outsiders  (1964) Friday through Sunday, while Late Night Favorites will once again show Ridley Scott’s Alien. (It really IS a Late Night Favorite!)

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART  (LA):

On Friday at Midnight, the Nuart will show Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy, starring Nicolas Cage.

FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER(NYC):

Sergey Bondarchuk’s epic 1968 film War and Peace continues to run (in four installments) through Thursday.

BAM CINEMATEK (NYC):

Starting Friday, BAM starts its ten-day Living with the Dead: The Films of George Romero, commemorating the life and career of one of the greatest horror filmmakers of all time, the late George Romero. It will be held together by a new 2K restoration of his 1968 film Night of the Living Dead, which will screen Friday night, Saturday afternoon and on Feb. 28. Other movies in the series include Dawn of the Dead  (1978), Day of the Dead  (1985), The Crazies  (1973), Monkey Shinesand some of Romero’s newer films. The series will also have special guests like Romero’s daughter Tina Romero and producer Richard Rubenstein over the course of the series.

MOMA (NYC):

Modern Matinees: Sir Sidney Poitier offers Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night  (1967) on Weds, Blackboard Jungle  (1955) on Thurs and Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones (1958) on Friday.

That’s it for this week… next week, Tyler Perry’s Madea is back in Tyler Perry’s A Madea Family Funeral, presumably the last Madea movie ever… be afraid and glad at the same time! Also, Neil Jordan returns with the psychological thriller Greta.

[mastcomm]

They Escaped an Infected Ship, but the Flight Home Was No Haven

TOKYO — The ground rules were clear. A day before 328 Americans were to be whisked away from a contaminated cruise ship in Japan, the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo told passengers that no one infected with the coronavirus would be allowed to board charter flights to the United States.

But as the evacuees began filing onto reconfigured cargo planes early Monday for departures to military bases in California or Texas, some noticed a tented area in one of them that was separate from the rest of the cabin.

Then reality hit: After 12 days stuck on the cruise ship as more and more people tested positive for the virus, they would now be sharing a plane with those carrying the same pathogen they were desperate to escape.

“I didn’t know until we were in the air,” said Carol Montgomery, 67, a retired administrative assistant from San Clemente, Calif. “I saw an area of plastic sheeting and tape.”

While the planes were aloft, the State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services said in a joint statement that the results for 14 passengers who had been tested two or three days earlier came back positive just as they were boarding buses to the airport. After consultations with health experts, the U.S. government decided to let the infected evacuees, who were not yet exhibiting symptoms, board the flights.

The reversal was the latest chaotic turn in a two-week quarantine of the ship that has become an epidemiological nightmare.

Even as the Americans were flying home and countries like Australia, Canada and South Korea were preparing to evacuate their own citizens, the Japanese Health Ministry announced on Monday that 99 more cases had been confirmed on the cruise ship, bringing the total to 454.

Among them was the third Japanese public health official to contract the virus while tending to passengers and crew members aboard the ship, the Diamond Princess.

The unstinting rise in infections raised questions about how the Japanese authorities would handle the offloading of passengers in two days when the quarantine period is supposed to end. Health officials have already raised the possibility that the quarantine could be extended for some passengers.

“The quarantine on the ship ended up being an unprecedented failure,” said Eiji Kusumi, a doctor specializing in infectious diseases at Navitas Clinic in Tokyo. “We should learn from this lesson that a quarantine on a ship is impossible, and we should not repeat this in the future.”

Updated Feb. 10, 2020

What is a Coronavirus? It is a novel virus named for the crown-like spikes that protrude from its surface. The coronavirus can infect both animals and people, and can cause a range of respiratory illnesses from the common cold to more dangerous conditions like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

How contagious is the virus? According to preliminary research, it seems moderately infectious, similar to SARS, and is possibly transmitted through the air. Scientists have estimated that each infected person could spread it to somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures.

How worried should I be? While the virus is a serious public health concern, the risk to most people outside China remains very low, and seasonal flu is a more immediate threat.

Who is working to contain the virus? World Health Organization officials have praised China’s aggressive response to the virus by closing transportation, schools and markets. This week, a team of experts from the W.H.O. arrived in Beijing to offer assistance.

What if I’m traveling? The United States and Australia are temporarily denying entry to noncitizens who recently traveled to China and several airlines have canceled flights.

How do I keep myself and others safe? Washing your hands frequently is the most important thing you can do, along with staying at home when you’re sick.

The U.S. authorities had strongly encouraged American passengers to accept the offer of a flight out. Getting them off the ship took several hours as they were screened, their passports were checked and they were loaded onto buses that took them from the port of Yokohama to Haneda Airport in Tokyo.

The State Department said the infected passengers “were moved in the most expeditious and safe manner to a specialized containment area on the evacuation aircraft to isolate them in accordance with standard protocols.”

The American passengers were taken to either Travis Air Force Base in California or Joint Base San Antonio in Texas, and they will remain under quarantine for an additional 14 days.

When one of the planes landed in California, a line of officials from the military, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Homeland Security welcomed the passengers with banners that read “Welcome home.”

After being ushered through an isolation tent, they were assigned to apartments on the base. “They have flown in specialists from across the country,” said Sarah Arana, 52, a medical social worker from Paso Robles, Calif. “It’s a phenomenal amount of resources. I’m kind of blown away.”

Epidemiologists said U.S. officials had made a difficult decision to allow infected passengers onboard the charter flights.

“The degree of difficulty in getting someone sick home is much greater than repatriating people who are otherwise well and possibly incubating,” said Dr. Allen Cheng, an infectious disease specialist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Dr. Cheng added, “You don’t want to expose anyone on the plane who hadn’t otherwise been exposed before on the boat.”

Australia is planning to take approximately 200 passengers off the Diamond Princess on Wednesday. Dr. Cheng said that Australia had decided that “anyone who is sick or becomes sick in the next 48 hours will stay in Japan and stay in the hospital.”

With Australia and other countries preparing to help transport their citizens off the boat, the captain told the more than 2,000 people still on board that the Japanese health authorities could swab everyone for the coronavirus by the end of Monday and begin letting guests leave the ship on Wednesday.

“This disembarkation will be an ongoing process” until Feb. 22, the captain said in an onboard announcement.

The captain said the cruise line was “coordinating closely with your embassies to understand the arrangements for you once you are cleared from the quarantine on the Diamond Princess and how we can best support you.”

In a briefing on Monday, Shigeru Omi, president of the Japan Community Healthcare Organization, said that Japan had made the right decision to put the ship in quarantine based on the information available when the ship arrived in Yokohama on Feb. 3. “At that time, the international community was trying to contain the virus,” Mr. Omi said.

According to the Japanese Health Ministry, at least 55 Americans on the ship were infected with the coronavirus. Many of them remain in hospitals around Japan.

John Haering, 63, a retired operations manager for Union Pacific Railroad who lives in Tooele, Utah, was taken to a hospital in Chiba Prefecture last week with a fever and tested positive for the virus. He said he felt stranded as he lay in an isolation room.

His wife, Melanie, left on one of the charter flights. “I’m happy for her that she got out of here and that she’s going to get some attention in the U.S.,” said Mr. Haering, who retired in November and was about a third of the way through a six-month trip around the world. “But at the same time I’m sad. You feel that loss of somebody leaving.”

Mr. Haering, who said that he no longer had any symptoms or a fever but that a CT scan showed signs of pneumonia, said he was not sure how much longer he would have to stay.

“They did swab me today again, and I’ll get my test back tomorrow,” he said. “I asked the doctor if the swab shows that I’m negative, and he just shook his head and said, ‘I don’t know.’ There’s a lot of stuff that they don’t know.”

Mr. Haering said he had not heard from anyone at Princess Cruises, the company that operates the Diamond Princess, since he arrived at the hospital. Until Sunday, he had not heard from anyone at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, either.

He received a call and a follow-up email urging him to get in touch with the cruise ship company for further information about how he will get home.

“It’s very scary,” he said. “It feels like a little bit of abandonment.”

The spread of the virus on the ship was illustrated by one extended family.

Tung Pi Lee, 79, a retired physician, was left in a Tokyo hospital with a coronavirus infection while his wife, Angela, flew to California on one of the charter flights. Several of her siblings and their spouses were among the 14 infected passengers who flew home. Two were taken to Nebraska, and another was in California for treatment.

“I am glad for my aunts and uncles to be in the U.S. and to be receiving treatment here,” said JoAnn LaRoche Lee, one of Mr. Lee’s daughters. “Had they been left in Japan, I wonder what would have happened to them.”

Trying to coordinate her father’s care in Tokyo with her siblings in the United States, she said, “feels like a never-ending nightmare.”

Hisako Ueno, Eimi Yamamitsu and Makiko Inoue contributed reporting.

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[swipestream]

Sensor Sweep: Celtic Fantasy, Donald Wollheim, Creepy Magazine, Hideous Creatures

Popular Culture (Men of Violence): Historical fiction special! Vikings! Roman soldiers! Pirates! Swash-buckling soldiers of fortune!68 pages, all colour, packed with reproductions of rare and unusual paperbacks.Articles, reviews, interviews and features on Casca, Gardner Fox, Henry Treece, Talbot Mundy, Rosemary Sutcliff, Rafael Sabatini and forgotten cover artists.

        Fiction (DMR Books): Awhile back, Dave Ritzlin here at the DMR blog asked me to recommend some good Celtic fantasy fiction. Today being Celtic New Year’s Day, it seemed appropriate to start off the New Year with a list of quality Celtic fiction.

To be honest, I can’t say that I like the vast majority of the fantasy which has been marketed or labeled as “Celtic.” As the late, great Steve Tompkins noted long, long ago, “cheapjack Celticism” has reigned o’er the land of Celtic fantasy since at least the 1980s. Languid, matriarchal tree-huggery tends to be the order of the day in most “Celtic” fiction, with the authors in question either being pig-ignorant of Celtic history and culture or cherry-picking to suit their (boring) take on the subject. 

  Fiction (DMR Books): Don Wollheim died on November 2, 1990, leaving behind him a sword and sorcery legacy that has never been matched. In the rarefied Valhalla of S&S editors/publishers, Wollheim sits enthroned at the high table. He debuted or “broke out”–as in, “their first big splash in the paperback market”–more enduring and important characters in the S&S

  pantheon than any other editor/publisher. It is as simple as that.

  Anime (Walker’s Retreat): Any Space Opera taking queues from Japan will not fail to acknowledge the Macross franchise. Starting in 1982 with Super Dimension Fortress Macross (which many of you known as the most popular part of Robotech), this is the #2 Real Robot franchise in Japan and has been since its debut (following the king that is Gundam). The consistent presence music as a power unto itself, the love triangles that drive the relationships, and their combination in the form of music that has now had inter-generational influence in anison and J-pop (and brought about the rise of Living Goddess Yoko Kanno).

  Lovecraft and Gaming (Yog-Sothoth.com): My latest scrape of the internet reveals that Hideous Creatures: A Bestiary of the Cthulhu Mythos for Trail of Cthulhuhas been released. Kind of. Hideous Creatures… is officially on pre-order at Pelgrane’s web site, but an article comment reveals that you’ll receive the PDF as soon as you place the pre-order for the print edition. – That means it’s out. – The content is there for you to purchase and peruse now; the fact it’s digital bits rather than the 352 page hardback doesn’t alter the content (just the way it may be consumed). If you’re after a new bestiary of Cthulhoid creatures then have a look at Hideous Creatures… Pelgrane promises you something a little different.

Books (Atomic Junk Shop): Your Favorite Book Cover:

Oh my God that is an awful question for someone like me. I can’t decide. It really depends on the genre and the artist and what kind of mood I’m in that day. The best I can do is narrow it down to a few favorite artists. I think the artist that perfectly captured the spirit of the story more than anyone else is Gino d’Achille with his covers for the Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars books.

Fiction (Frontier Partisans): I was in the mood for some fun, for a read that strums the right chords but isn’t related to a project or anything that feels like work. That can be a problem for me. I tend to put way too much weight on my choices of fiction. Pondering this in preparation for Running Iron Report podcasts, I realized that I kind of expect a novel to rock my world, always seeking that visceral hit that I got when I was young and a novel would go to my head like strong wine. Chasing the high and most often finding myself dissatisfied.

It’s why I read very little fiction these days. I really don’t read just for funanymore. And that’s just stupid. I needed to get out of my own way and simply enjoy a yarn.

Over the weekend, I kept running across an author named Jonathan French and a book titled The Grey Bastards.

  Comic Books (Paint Monk): Robert E. Howard is best known, and deservedly so, for Conan of Cimmeria, but he was a prolific author who wrote in several genres. While he arguably created the sword and sorcery tale, he also hammered out a staggering amount of pulp fiction, including westerns, boxing stories, detective yarns, and horror tales.

One of his best horror works was “Out of the Deep”, posthumously published in Magazine of Horror #18in their November 1967 issue.

  Fiction (Tellers of Weird Tales): Before Spider-Man and Superman, before Marvel and DC, even before comic books, there was the word superhero. (1) My hypothesis is that the word and the concept originated in the 1890s, give or take a decade, just as so much of our popular culture originated at that time. In order to test my hypothesis, I have used an online search engine/database/index of newspapers dating to the nineteenth century. I can’t say that the newspaper articles I have found were actually the earliest occurrences in print of the following words. Even if they’re not, my guess is that they’re close, as ideas, concepts, and memes seem to arise at a certain time, often in a certain place, and in a certain society or culture.

  Cinema (Sacnoth’s Scriptorium): John Boorman’s Lord of the Rings

In 1970, The Lord of the Rings was everywhere, its eco-friendly escapism dovetailing neatly with the communal mindset of the post-Woodstock era. A film was inevitable, and rights-holder United Artists turned to John Boorman, a British director with a passion for Arthurian fantasy and – more importantly – a moderate hit under his belt in Point Blank. Joining forces with the young screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg, Boorman turned out a script that covers all three books, runs to 178 pages and is, without question, one of the weirdest documents in existence.

  Comic Books (Pulp Archivist): In 1947’s Writer’s Digest, Stan Lee, then editor of Timely Comics, writes in his “There’s Money in Comics”:

One point which I can’t stress too strongly is: DON’T WRITE DOWN TO YOUR READERS! It is common knowledge that a large portion of comic magazine readers are adults, and the rest of the readers who may be kids are generally pretty sharp characters.

  Comic Books (Paint Monk): Few comics had the impact on me that Creepy did. The first issue I got my hands on was issue 4 of the magazine, dated August of 1965. I hadn’t even been born yet when this issue dropped, but I happened upon it at a flea market we used to visit when I was a kid and remember vividly seeing that Frank Frazetta cover for the first time.

  Gaming (Niche Gamer): Publisher Skybound Games has announced they’ve cancelled the planned physical release of Hollow Knight.

The August-announced retail version of the game is now longer happening. Here’s a statement from Skybound:

“We are saddened to share that we’ll no longer be working with Team Cherry to bring Hollow Knight to new platforms. We absolutely love the game and wish Team Cherry continued success. We look forward to seeing what’s next for them.”

Here’s a rundown on the game:

  Popular Culture (Kairos): Author JD Cowan offers a grim prognosis on the fate of pop culture based on Hollywood’s manifest inability to connect with its audience.

The Predator is a shallow, spiritually dead movie of stolen imagination and rehashed ideas with a message that could only have been thought up by someone too pathetic to grow up beyond adolescence. And it was written by someone who was there when the original film was being made. And not a talentless man, either. He wrote the original two (and best) Lethal Weapon films as well as Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. He knows action and how to give the audience what they want.

    Sensor Sweep: Celtic Fantasy, Donald Wollheim, Creepy Magazine, Hideous Creatures published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames