#chekhov draws comics

[thechekhov]

if you think about it, every time we tranquilize animals to transport them safely to another place, we are the sleep paralysis demon

[redbootsindoriath]

I’ve finished the third Fëanorian Week drawing.  Only four more to go....  In the meantime, here’s another Star Trek post for you because 1. it’s April Fool’s Day which makes me want to post something funny, and 2. I just recently finished the third TOS season and am in denial about having run out of new episodes.  But now it’s on to the movies!

I’m sure this joke has been made before, but I can’t believe this was literally a plot point in an episode.

Transcription:

[Garth as Kirk:] “Shoot him, he’s the clone!” [Spock:] “The real Kirk would never pass up an opportunity to die!”

[vazelinacocomix]

A gnarly churning machine is what produced this comic, and a grinding 🔥 out time it has been since my last post. The Theatre of Youth premiered Chekhov's The Seagull according to director Christian Benedetti's vision, merging spaces and disturbing expectations.

While I was away confronting my demons, somebody asked ( @mme-patate ) what my top 5 favourite tracks might be. I kept rattling my brains and came up with a top of radio shows I listen to, since music seems an endless pursuit: Turtles Have Short Legs, 150 session, Big Road Blues, Kranky and every once in a while either the Opera Show or RebelUpNightShop. Hope it helps.

Between the end of February and late April I took part, alongside Micul Haos's Maria Mandea and George Marian Preduț, in an artist in residency program taking part in the vicinity of Hermanstadt. Monica Dănilă, the coordinator of the Șona AIR project, through Fundația Ștefan Câlția asked us to explore the possibilities available in this small village, home to the painter and to the foundation's restoration projects. Besides the workshop we did with 21 local kids, the residency gave me the chance to work on my upcoming book. You can read more about the macabre and my churning state of mind in the May issue of Elle magazine, in which Ioana Ulmeanu was kind enough to squeeze me in with a very elegant take on what a burnt out artist turns to in times of despair.

[thechekhov]

[ask-whitepearl-and-steven]

The AU public posting will resume on December 29th, Friday, at 6pm PST as usual.

If you can't wait that long, both EP 1 and EP 2 are available NOW on my Patreon:

(I would like to thank in advance all those who already DO support me on Patreon - your generosity makes it possible for me to actually draw these comics! 💛 Without Patreon support, I'd likely have to pick up another job, which would mean no time for comics.)

[comicaurora]

What are your thoughts on guardians vol.3? (If you have watched it) I went into it, expecting it went to the garbage like the rest of the mcu, but I was pleasantly surprised by its creativity, trope subversion, and how it wrapped up the previously unresolved arks of its characters.

That's what I've heard!

The thing is, Guardians 3 could be the most transcendent work of cinema ever made, and I'd probably still feel little to no motivation to watch it at this point. It's not Guardians's fault - it's just suffering from the same problem that superhero comics have been struggling with for decades: no matter how good an individual arc or run is, absolutely nothing good lasts or matters in the long term, and the stories are shaped in such a way that "the long term" is the only thing anyone gets to build towards.

Whenever I complain about the MCU I get a handful of people loudly complaining about my complaining, with the general thesis that if I don't like it I shouldn't watch it or talk about it - if I'm not having fun, just stop engaging with it. And the thing is, I have. I am intellectually interested in why this massive franchise is fumbling the bag so hard, which is why I still check in on it sometimes, but I've long since stopped turning to the MCU for uncritical entertainment. And even the good movies or shows with a lot of interesting ideas - good character arcs, fun concepts, interesting planting for future payoff - don't draw me in anymore, because they're hooked into a massive moneymaking machine that will scrap and squander anything if they think it'll make them more in the quarter. It doesn't matter how good the writing is, because the writers are not allowed to tell a complete, finished story, and they have no control over what happens to their characters outside of their own script.

Captain America's arc was set up from literally minute one to answer one burning question at the core of his character: does a world without a war still need Captain America? After that incredibly basic tee-up at the end of First Avenger, half a dozen movies failed to come up with a reason to say "yes," and now Steve is retired for good after getting fumbled through four different storylines that couldn't even pretend that they needed him (the unused Chekhov's Phone from the end of Civil War still haunts me). The foundational arc of his entire character never happened because nobody bothered to keep track of it past a single movie.

Taika did something interesting with Thor in Ragnarok - take away Mjolnir, force him to recognize what it means to be the god of thunder, give him a very Odin-y missing eye - and the very next movie undid all of it. Just kidding, never mind, here's an eye and a new weapon and also his old weapon again, and in one more movie we're even gonna give him his hair back, probably as an apology for all the completely unironic fatphobia we're gonna slather him in for two and a half hours. I'm not even surprised Love And Thunder was such an overblown mess that barely took itself seriously - why would Taika bother trying to give Thor another arc when the powers that be will just roll it back in six months anyway?

I hear Rocket Raccoon has a fantastic arc in this movie. That's great, and demonstrates that he's being written by a writer that deeply cares about him. But he's part of the MCU, and the MCU doesn't let anything end, so if current patterns hold, Rocket is going to continue to serve as quippy plushie-bait for the next dozen movies and none of that depth is going to come through in the long term. Hell, since they're making Kang noises for the Next Big Threat and Kang's entire gimmick is rewriting timelines, literally none of this is guaranteed to matter. By next year, it might not have even happened anymore.

The MCU has successfully shaped itself into a paradigm where the bright spots of good writing are overridden and lost as soon as the writers room turns over, and that makes it really hard for me to muster up the enthusiasm to watch even a really good movie that's locked into the exact same grist mill as everything else. I'm glad people liked it, I hope it gets to stay good this time - I just have no desire to watch it.

[electrozeistyking]

I definitely had a lot more fun behind the scenes with Never Be Alone than I did with She's Gone. So here's the sillies, and some notes.

This is a guide video I made in cause I either forgot how I was rendering it, or I want to make a comic using this style again. I used Panel 3 because it was the original first panel. There is no audio, so you don't need to worry about unmuting it.

I did this with the flats for Panel 2 because it reminded me of a drawing featured in one of my earliest MD posts. This quote has had me in a choke-hold ever since I made it (by the way, I named that drawing I mentioned: "Heyyy Biiitch!").

I wanted to make sure a few panels in this comic looked right, so I drew them with my finger (because I wanted to and I felt like it). N's face looks so derpy here and that's by choice.

I made this because SolverUzi looked like she was accusingly pointing at N. The Solver does seem petty to me, so I feel like It'd do this. Fun fact, that's why It's wearing Uzi's face and why It didn't heal her hand: just so It can rub salt in N's wounds and call him "big brother" like Cyn does to SERIOUSLY fuck with him.

Pre-Gaussian Blur on the dialogue! This is another panel I drew with my finger to ensure it'd look right later on. The "BASICALLY HIGH AS BALLS" note was added because of his face. It's actually sad in context of the comic, seeing as this is one of the few moments where N genuinely smiles.

TESSA FOR THE WIN, BABY! I made this because I said "Whoa, suddenly Tessa!" at one point while working on this panel. As for the "Chekhov's stabby stick" part... I mean, come on. There was a closeup of that blade for approximately two seconds. If that's not a surprise tool they can use for later, I don't know what is.

There is no reason for this one beyond "I thought it was funny." It just exists and there's nothing we can do about it.

Imagine if I actually went with either this quote or "Well, that could've been a whole lot worse." I had to pick between them for a sillier take on this panel, but imagine if Tessa ACTUALLY said "Well, shit" after all that?

Anyway, that's all the sillies and the notes! :D

[twiniverse]

So here's the thing.

I'm jealous of other creators. Surpassing me in likes, comments, follows... getting recognition, getting all kinds of kick ass fan projects... and I hate being jealous, because there's no reason to be. All of my issues boil down to 'I would be more popular if I tried with my art and posted more often.' That's 100% on me and has nothing to do with other creators!

That's it. That's all I have to do. And I would like to begin actually trying on this comic more after. But now we get to THE THING. The early comics are bad. Like, really bad. Because I didn't care! I just wanted to get the story out and move on. But the beginning comics are supposed to draw in your audience. Seeing just a bunch of blobs with no real effort put into them... that's a turn off. I wouldn't read a comic like that!

SO. I'm going to be redoing a lot of them. Maybe all of them, maybe not Mirror Gem and Desert Dance because those are both decent... We'll see. I'm still going to try to do actual story updates. If all goes to plan I will alternate between an actual new episode and redraws of the old ones. Of course some of the old ones are really small updates, so I can knock out more of those in a shorter amount of time.

I'm just asking that you all bare with me here. I know this is frustrating, waiting all this time between updates just for me to go back and redraw a bunch of stuff I already drew... but I think this is what I need to do to be happy with myself. Because right now, I'm not. I'm disappointed. I know I can do better, I've been proving that for years with various other works I've done. And Twiniverse deserves better.

So, yeah, that's the thing.

I hope you all keep sticking around, and I'll try to be more attentive and definitely try to update way more often. I know it doesn't seem like I've been working much, but I've actually been finishing the references for almost every major non-human character. Gonna do the humans, too, at some point. So I've been hardcore focusing on the designs. I know you don't get to see them yet, but I just need you to know I AM working on this comic all the time in various ways.

I'm also jealous of Chekhov's dog. I love Wensy so fucking much.

[lethalhoopla]

currently thinking about how fun and common it is to write Things You Are Into/Knowledgeable About into fics (or draw into art/comics, etc) but how quickly wild it can get depending on the level of niche interest

eg, i remember to this day a fic that was quite solid across the board, an entertaining though not mind-blowing ride— but it had the most in-depth and fascinating descriptions of *specific* leather tooling techniques. Leather work was not at all the focus of the plot. Just deeply worked in via a hobby or side necessity of the adventure that had the most loving descriptions ever and it was really clear what hobby the author had- and I loved it haha.

my current personal example is Oops, I Am an Aerialist Now and That Is Deeply Obviously An Author Insert Interest in any given fic lmao. How many Fancy 2 Story Curtains with Strong Anchoring can I work into a fic…….. how many curiously 3ish foot steel hoops hanging from a strap is too many…… a suspicious number of secure but loose ended vertical ropes is normal right………………… Chekhov’s rigging……………..

[justforbooks]

Peter Eötvös

Hungarian conductor of modernist music who went on to compose operas with texts ranging from Three Sisters to Angels in America

The Hungarian composer and conductor Peter Eötvös, who has died aged 80, is now best known for the 12 operas that he wrote during the last 25 years of his life. Before that, he played a leading role as a conductor specialising in the promotion of European musical modernism.

Premiered in Lyon in 1998, the work that launched Eötvös’s career as a successful opera composer was Three Sisters. The libretto, written with Claus H Henneberg, reworks Anton Chekhov’s play into a series of three “sequences”, each offering a version of events from the point of view of a single character; no fewer than four roles are taken by countertenors.

From then onwards, he frequently added new stage works to an already growing number of concert works in an extensive output notable for its radiant lyricism and brilliant orchestration. By extending the modernist origins of an approach rooted in the music and ideas of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen with the aid of deeply considered investigations of other music of cultures beyond Europe, Eötvös gradually found his own voice.

Stockhausen had already drawn on Japanese musical and theatrical traditions, and Eötvös’s earliest opera, Harakiri – based on the ritual suicide of Yukio Mishima – was composed as far back as 1973, while both composers were working together in Osaka. Subsequently, however, Eötvös’s style – variously influenced by Chinese as well as Japanese traditions, by Indian, African and Basque musics, by jazz and, not least, by Béla Bartók and the folk repertoires of his native Transylvania – developed much of its individuality from interrogations of those cultures that went far beyond any mere cultural tourism.

His instrumental compositions, as well as his operas, often spring from such sources: the large-scale orchestral work Atlantis (1995), for example, draws on Transylvanian dances that act as a symbol of a lost culture associated, for the composer, with renewed hope. In later years he received many commissions from the world’s leading orchestras: in 2016, for instance, for Oratorium Balbulum, to a text by Péter Esterházy, for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, premiered at the Salzburg festival. Ruminating on a variety of topical political issues, from the 9/11 terrorist attacks to relationships between countries, this work is typical of Eötvös’s social and political concerns.

But his operas already seem likely to represent the most enduring and surprisingly varied dimension of his output. Adapting novels and plays by writers both classic and modern – including Jon Fosse, Jean Genet, Tony Kushner and Gabriel García Márquez – these works demonstrate both Eötvös’s wide literary ambitions and his willingness to explore a variety of different dramatic approaches, comic as well as tragic. He was assisted in devising some of these opera libretti by Maria Eötvösne Mezei, his third wife.

Le Balcon – its libretto, by Françoise Morvan, André Markovitz and the composer, derived from Genet’s now classic tale of power struggles within a revolutionary setting – was first seen at Aix-en-Provence in 2002. Mezei’s libretto for Angels in America (2004) boils down to less than three hours the original seven hours of Kushner’s play about HIV/Aids.

Several of his operas have been seen in the UK. When his Márquez-based Love and Other Demons was produced at Glyndebourne in 2008, Eötvös became the first non-British composer to have a stage work premiered there. Described by the composer as “a bel canto opera”, it explored illicit love, superstition, race and demonic power, with a libretto by Kornél Hamvai. The music underpins the drama with an innate understanding of how orchestral forces can enhance the overall effect; though indulging in some gorgeous sounds, the composer displays the rare knack of knowing when less can sometimes be more powerful than more.

Eötvös’s final opera, Valuska – also his first with a libretto in Hungarian, by Mezei and Kinga Keszthelyi – was drawn from the novel The Melancholy of Resistance, by László Krasznahorkai: a tragi-comic, surreal story centring on a newspaper delivery man and the arrival in his small town of a circus with, as its star attraction, the world’s largest taxidermied whale. Valuska was premiered in Budapest last December.

Eötvös was, like his older compatriots György Ligeti and György Kurtág, a native of multi-ethnic Transylvania – then in Hungary but subsequently transferred to Romania; his birthplace was Székelyudvarhely. The turbulent final months of the second world war caused his family, including his mother, Ilona Szucs, to flee westwards. She was a pianist, and his father, Laszlo Eötvös, was a lawyer. Peter’s early childhood was spent in Miskolc, a northern Hungarian town where he first met Ligeti. The latter was already becoming established as a composer and teacher by the late 1940s, and the two remained in contact.

Eötvös studied piano and composition at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest from 1958 onwards; after advice from Zoltán Kodály, János Viski became his composition teacher. He soon gaining a reputation for improvising to accompany silent films and composing scores for both cinema and theatre.

In 1966, at the age of 22, he moved to Cologne on a scholarship to work with Stockhausen. He also studied composition with Bernd Alois Zimmermann and began to conduct. When I first went to the Darmstadt Summer School, in 1974, I recall Eötvös not only as one of Stockhausen’s closest acolytes but also as a member of a recently formed group of young Cologne-based musicians calling themselves the Oeldorf Group and specialising in live performance involving electronics.

From 1978, after Boulez asked him to conduct the opening concert of IRCAM, his Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, in Paris, Eötvös found fame as a conductor specialising in all the latest compositional trends that helped to drive the global modernist agenda of the time. He quickly assumed the position of musical director of Ensemble Intercontemporain, IRCAM’s flagship chamber orchestra.

He conducted the world premieres of Stockhausen’s operas Donnerstag aus Licht (1981) and Montag aus Licht (1988). In the UK, he conducted the Covent Garden performances of Donnerstag in 1985 and was principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from that year until 1988. He worked with the London Sinfonietta and also conducted Leos Janáček’s The Makropulos Case at Glyndebourne in 2001.

It was only after relinquishing his duties with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, in 1991, that Eötvös really came to the fore as a composer. With his new status on the European scene, and the political events of 1989 onwards, came new responsibilities.

He taught conducting and contemporary chamber music in both Karlsruhe and Cologne in Germany. Having already founded the International Eötvös Institute for young conductors and composers in Budapest in 1991, he went on to establish the Peter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation in 2004. It was at this moment, when Hungary joined the European Union, that Eötvös and his wife Maria – who had both previously lived in Cologne, Paris and then Hilversum in the Netherlands – finally moved back to Budapest.

A son from Eötvös’s first marriage, to the actor Piroska Molnár in 1968, predeceased him. In 1976 he married the Taiwanese-German pianist Pi-hsien Chen, with whom he had a daughter, Ann-yi. They divorced and he subsequently married Maria Mezei in 1995. He is survived by her, Ann-yi and by two stepsons from that marriage, Peter and Daniel.

🔔 Peter Eötvös, composer and conductor, born 2 January 1944; died 24 March 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[thechekhov]

Harrow's necromantic power includes the ability to create underlighting whenever it's necessary.

Bonus:

[thepalemoonprincess]

i have read the whole comic of white steven by chekhov (@/ask-whitepearl-and-steven) and im very inspired to get back to my own comics 😭 i mean, their artstyle is just SO PRETTY it makes want to eat it ����

i don't know if i'll really get back and write and draw my own comics but, if i do, it'll be an original story and will be posted on tapas bc is where I'm more familiar with

but hmmmm there's a lot to do actually...... i was reviewing my four stories and not just they're all bad written and developed that Oh mY gOd. today i have a waaaaay better critical eye and i have actually STUDIED how to write a story so im way more confident, at the same time that i have trouble with scheduling things and doing it on the time for a long period of time (bc i have adhd so this is rlly a struggle to me) and also my school is coming back in less than a month sooo things may get a little harder to handle

but yeah i guess is it for now heh ig anyone will read it so it's more that im putting my thoughts out of words 💭💭

[sanspidy]

Homecoming

This is the second movie to star Tom Holland as Spider-Man in this incarnation (after “Captain America: Civil War”). Both the superhero and his high-school-student alter-ego (or is it the other way around? That’s another thing I can be hazy on) Peter Parker, are presented at their most awkwardly adolescent. In the timeline of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe), “Spider-Man: Homecoming” begins directly after Spider-Man’s participation in a superhero gang fight in 2016’s “Civil War.” But the movie itself begins eight years prior to that, in the aftermath of Loki unleashing the Chitauri, which trashed much of NYC and the Avengers’ sleek headquarters in 2012’s “The Avengers.” (That’s a 2012 movie, and it’s only 2017 now, but don’t look at me, I’m just going by the on-screen texts.) In the wreck of the Avengers’ HQ, Michael Keaton’s hard-working salvage dude Adrian Toomes is showing a colleague a drawing of the Avengers scrawled by Toomes’ own ten-year-old child. Those in the audience with a familiarity with possibly fake Chekhov quotes will recognize this as the gun on the mantelpiece in Act One that is obliged to go off in Act Three, and by Odin, off it does indeed go, but it’s a long way from Act One to Act Three. Soon Toomes and his crew are kicked off the site by an officious Tyne Daly and it’s revealed that Tony Stark is ostensibly self-dealing by heading a government clean-up crew to handle the superhero mess. To give credit to the six screenwriters on this movie, oodles of rather convoluted plot detail are relatively clear even if you’re not super paying attention.

That said, once the movie gets all its ducks in a row (and after serving up a Queens-set crime-fighting foray that highlights some of the movie’s worst visual effects, looking flat-out like video game action for most of its length), it delivers some genuinely effective action/suspense set pieces, including one set in the Washington Monument that worked me up a treat. A subsequent near-disaster on the Staten Island Ferry is less effective but does lead to the movie’s most effective narrative coup. That is, the nifty Spidey suit that Stark afforded Parker is taken away, and “Spider-Man: Homecoming” has to swing to its thrilling climax with its hero in a very low-rent outfit. Is this the opposite of “fan-serving,” or is it “fan-serving” itself, presented in a cleverly inverted form? I cannot say. I can say that the film’s adaptation of one of the original “Spider-Man” comic’s most graphically exceptional scenes, from 1966’s Issue 33, “The Final Chapter!” um, isn’t as good as the comic book was, quite honestly. But I give director Jon Watts and the other seventy thousand craftspersons involved in this production credit for trying.

[tilbageidanmark]

Movies I watched this Week #128 (Year 3/Week 24):

Nils Malmros’s Tree of knowledge (”Kundskabens træ”) has always been my favorite Danish movie, and also one of my general All-time Top-Five favorites - Ever. Together with Truffault’s ‘Small Change’, it’s also the best movie about the pains of puberty and the joys of adolescence.

It was hard to find online, and seeing it again after many years, is like meeting an old lover after 40 years apart, and they hasn’t age a day. It’s a perfect masterpiece without a single faulty frame.

A nostalgic trip to provincial Århus at the end of the 1950′s, Malmros spent two years filming a group of teens as they struggle with first loves and heartbreaks. A tragic story of innocent lost. (Photo Above).

Later Edit:

A second viewing the next day confirmed that it is indeed an impeccable classic, subtle and precise. So many Friday night jazz parties where for their first time the kids are allowed to dance in the dark cheek to cheek to Gershwin’s ‘The man I love’.

“You probably don’t get that there’s only has to be very little for people to talk”:  The misery that befalls Erin as she turns from the popular girl into a pariah is crushing. 10/10.

🍿   Lourdes, my 1st film by Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner, starring the incomparable Léa Seydoux as a young nun with a twinkle in her eye. A rarely seen subject of Catholic cripples and handicapped pilgrims who flock to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, searching for a miracle. With priests who look like Cardinal Mahoney, Holy water sprinkled around and piously praying invalids, it feels very much like a blanding of Buñuel and Haneke. It must have been shot with the permission of the church, as much of it looks like part of the real rituals going on there. However, it hides a certain unorthodox subversiveness. 7/10. 

🍿   

2 more by British director Michael Radford:

🍿 “...If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever...”

Nineteen Eighty-Four, the original hopeless dystopia. Orwell’s frightening vision of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, thought-police and total repression was anti-Stalinist when he wrote it, but it became a real-life blue-print for today’s hyper-Capitalist societies too.

Many of the scenes were shot on the days noted originally in the novel. The scene where Winston Smith writes in his diary, dating the entry April 4, 1984, was filmed on April 4, 1984. It was Richard Burton’s final film, and was photographed by Roger Deakins. 9/10.

Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ came a year later and also described a doomed love story in a cheerless bureaucratic nightmare. But unlike Brazil, 1984 had only dark and painful reality to deal with, no flights of surrealism and fancy.

"...Oranges and lemons, Say the bells of St. Clement's.  You owe me five farthings, Say the bells of St. Martin's...”

🍿 Lovable 80-year-olds Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer fall in love in New Orleans in Elsa and Fred. He’s reserved and bitter, she’s exuberant and over-whelming, and there’s a Picasso drawing of her that is used as ‘Chekhov’s gun’.  Also, it was George Segal’s last film. 5/10.

I love it when an unusual musical note in a movie signifys an emotional high-point, and when checking the clock, it’s exactly 47:30 minutes in - the middle of the movie!

Maybe it’s time to watch Fellini’s ‘8 1/2′ again [The Anita Ekberg dive in the Trevi Fountain is the film’s driver].

🍿

The Farewell Party (’Good Death’ in Hebrew) is a tragic-comic story about old age and mercy killing. A group of seniors at an assisted living home develop a machine for self-euthanasia. They reluctantly use it on one of their dying friends, but once the word gets around, more and more people want it. 7/10. 

🍿   First watch: Bergman’s magnetic, early romance film Summer with Monika. It was considered scandalous at the time, because of “frank” nude scenes. Star-making vehicle to young rebel Harriet Andersson (still alive and 91-year-old). 100% score on ‘Rotten Tomatoes’ and no argument from me there. Terrific Mise-en-scène, crisp cinematography and rich visual story-telling.

It featured Åke Fridell (’Plog’ from ‘The Seventh Seal’) as her father. On the official Bergman site, there’s a good list of many of his other collaborators.

[There are some early Bergman’s films I haven’t seen yet, which I have to remedy ASAP] 🍿

2 more with Robert De Nero: 

🍿 Sergio Leone’s last, overrated film, Once upon a time in America, the 229-min. Cut. It’s a crime saga about Jewish gangsters, a Spaghetti Godfather if you will, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Coppola’s. ‘The Godfather’ is perfect in spirit and execution, and every element in it works. Leone’s facsimile is epic and stylish, but most of it feels like a vacant rip-off. Some good performance from De Nero, and some great romantic scenes (Jennifer Connelly reading the Psalms, and reuniting with Deborah again), but the young characters (and many of the others, including wooden James Wood) are bland and unauthentic.

Without Ennio Morricone’s swiping score elevating every scene it plays with, the film wouldn’t get half the accolades it received. And the brutal, unprovoked rape scene was shocking and uncalled for. Not a superb film - 5/10. 

RIP, Treat Williams!

🍿 Ellis, a short (15 min.) poetic evocation of the large hospital complex in Ellis Island. Basically it’s Robert De Nero, “The immigrant”, walking slowly in abandoned corridors, accompanied by some vaguely-moody piano chords, reciting in a somber voice-over some vaguely impressionist lines about dreams and immigrants and yearnings. 1/10.

🍿 

2 very different documentaries:

🍿 Close to Vermeer is a very moving Dutch documentary about the staging and preparation of last year’s Rijksmuseum Vermeer exhibition, the largest ever mounted. Only 34 paintings are universally attributed to him today, and the museum’s curators were able to bring a total of 28 of them for this magnificent event. Scholars and researchers, collectors and art historians participate in this sober, quiet and passionate exploration of the enigmatic 'Sphinx of Delft‘.

Close to transcendence - 10/10.

(The trailer in inferior to the film itself.)

[This is the 3rd Vermeer film that I’ve seen (after Penn & Teller’s documentary ‘Tim’s Vermeer’ and Scarlett Johansson’s ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’, both terrific!). As a completist, I now discovered 6 more films that I will watch in the near future: ‘All The Vermeers In New York’, ‘Brush with fate’, Dan Friedkin‘s ‘The last Vermeer’ (That one sounds odd!), the Dutch ‘A real Vermeer’, and two more documentaries, ‘Vermeer: Master of Light’ narrated by Meryl Streep, and the newest ‘Vermeer: The Greatest Exhibition’, about this same exhibition at the Rijksmuseum. Can’t wait!]

🍿 The art of the prank is a fun 2015 documentary about provocative Culture Jammer Joey Skaggs, who had been staging elaborate media pranks since the 60′s. Like previous hoaxers ‘Coyle and Sharpe’, and later ones ‘Yes Men’ and ‘Improv Everywhere’, he builds ‘Fake news’ performances art events, designed to stir shit and embarrass the inane world of television news. Things like ‘Cathouse for dogs’, ‘Celebrity sperm bank’ and ‘Comacocoon’.

🍿  Hacksaw Ridge, my first film directed by known homophobe / antisemite Mel Gibson. [Watched after encouragement from Ahmad]. I’m not big on war dramas, even when they’re about a real-life conscientious objector. Trying to combine the opening from ‘Saving Private Ryan’ with ‘Full Metal Jacket’ boot camp hysterics. But I still can’t stand Andrew Garfield, Vince Vaughn is no Lee Ermey, and the war parts were simply not interesting. 4/10.

🍿 

“I Really Don’t Like Netflix” X 2:

🍿 Inside the mind of a cat, a typically-trash Netflix documentary, narrated by a highly-irritating “pleasant” voice. The only way to endure it is by turning of the sound and reading the subtitles. Lazy and un-inteligent, but “Hey: Cats!” - The second most-common reason to go on the internet.

🍿 After years of anticipation, Season 6 of Black Mirror finally dropped. Was it as good as some of the previous ones? An Emphatic No!

Episode 1, ‘Joan is awful’, was awful. An average woman is stunned to discover that Netflix has launched a prestige TV drama adaptation of her life, in which she is portrayed by Salma Hayek, and taking a shit in a church. Inception-like Meta-Netflix labyrinth with an unlikable cast making fun of themselves. 3/10.

Episode 2, ‘Loch Henry’, a meta-making of a True Crime series about a notorious serial killer who tortured his victims in a quaint faraway Scottish village. Unoriginal horror tale. 2/10.

Episode 3, ‘Beyond the sea’ too was sub-par on every level. A sadistic sci-fi, all superficial with no depth of emotions. Using Charles Trenet’s “La Mer” improves any movie immeasurably, from the opening to LA Story to the ending of Mr. Bean. But here, in a typical Netflix appropriation, it felt 100% fake. 2/10.

Episode 4, ‘Mazey Day’: Another hit-and-run thriller + unscrupulous paparazzi + LA Thomas Guide (which means it’s the early 2000′s!) which turns into a gory ‘American werewolf in London’ fantasy-thingy. 4/10.

The set up of Episode 5, ‘Demon 79′ was ridiculous: “A young Indian Sales Assistant accidentally frees a ruthless and handsome demon-in-training who is required to damn a soul to hell in order to become a full-fledged demon. The sales assistant is told she must kill three people for the demon-in-training, with the demon threatening to cause a nuclear apocalypse if she refuses”. But it was the only episode in this season that worked, and the only one that will be worth re-visiting. It was directed by the guy who also did ‘USS Callister’, another absurd concept that he got right. 8/10.

🍿 

2 shorts from ‘Nag:

🍿 Morocco Arise, by nomadic vlogger Brandon Li. His ‘Director Commentary’ was just as captivating.

🍿 Greenpeace takes aim at “fossil fuel party” with Don’t stop, a star-studded Fleetwood Mac cover. Exec-produced by Steve McQueen.

🍿 

Throw-back to the "Art project”:  

1984 Adora.

Adora with the pearl earring.

Black Mirror Adora.

🍿  

(My complete movie list is here).

[ask-whitepearl-and-steven]

Season 5, EP 2 (part 1) is now out on Tapas. But what about part 2?

If you haven't noticed, we've now settled into a Season 5 posting schedule. From now on, comics will release:

Every two weeks, on Friday, 6PM PST.

Therefore, here's our schedule for February.

It will continue in the same manner into March.

Now, you might say:

And that's tragic! However. This is the pace that works for me. AND. There's a solution to your problem!

If you don't feel like waiting for free comics to release at a steady pace on the free comics website, you can go to the PAID comics website and pay to have comics... pretty much immediately after I finish drawing them!

On Patreon, you can pay me $2 a month to get access to my pre-public comics up to MONTHS in advance. For example, the second part of EP2 is already available...

HERE!

You know what else is also available?

...AND

But that's not all!

For the price of one month's Patreon, you also get:

AS WELL AS

Now.........I get it.

Not everyone can afford to pay for Patreon.

That's why the comic will, as always, remain available for free! I am trying to draw a lot of episodes in advance so that I can keep on publishing them at a steady, expected rate even if something happens to make me fall behind.

But, if you are on the fence about supporting me on Patreon, there is also Ko-Fi, which offers once-off donations as well!

Thanks, as always, for reading... and see ya in two weeks!

[kameotakuwu]

My prediction for next week’s (June 5, 2020) @ask-whitepearl-and-steven comic by @thechekhov