The Defiant Ones

Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier are two convicts chained together who manage to escape. Also starring Charles Gravelvoice McGraw, directed by Stanley Kramer.

It's a good film. It's a message film, though, so there's not really any big surprise how it turns out. The characters are not completely credible - you can sort of feel them being moved around to make a point. Still, it's more eloquently done than Racism is bad!-film Crash made 50 years later. Curtis is quite good, almost unrecognizable from his usual prettyboy roles, but it's hard not to imagine what the film would have been like with the first choice for the part, Marlon Brando.

Experiment in Terror

Lee Remick is a bankteller threatened by a man to steal 100 000 dollars from her bank or he will kill her and her sister. Glenn Ford is the FBI agent working on the case. Directed by Blake Edwards.

It's a nice, little thriller, shot in black and white, with a terrific opening scene of Remick in her garage being grabbed by a man whose face we don't see. There's also a creepy scene of the same man dressed up as an old lady. In these films the victim is often not believed by the police. Here the FBI agent believes her just based on a phone call and even sends out a surveillance team! Not sure if that would have happened in a Hitchcock film... and Hitchcock would maybe have given it that extra suspenseful touch at the end. But still, it's quite an effective film from Edwards, showing he could do more than just comedy.

One more

Another panel based on an earlier sketch. The main character, the detective, is again a man out of time, a bit like Athos in The Last Musketeer. The story takes place in the present, but he dresses in a fedora and trenchcoat, as if it was in the fourties. And he walks around in a French city, not in LA or San Fransisco.

Using more sketches

Another panel based on a sketch. Now that France is moving over to cable, all the tv antennas will probably be taken down. Which is almost a shame. The rooftops won't be the same without them.

Using sketches

One good thing about having done a lot of sketches this summer is that I can use them in my comic, since the story takes place in Montpellier. I used to walk around and take photos, but that is something I try to avoid now. If I need a character walking in a street I just go out and draw the background directly on the original.

Dune Avatar

I re-watched Dune the other day. Okay, it's not a perfect film... It's complicated and overserious. Half the time you're sitting there, thinking, what the hell is going on?! The dialogue is stilted; hearing the characters' thoughts doesn't help. The acting is not very good. Or it's as if they're acting in an old silent film. The music is by Toto for chrissake. But I can't help but like the film. It has a unique look, the whole Victorian influenced production design. The worms look great. The opening scene with the mutated navigator is terrific. And then, unfortunately, it falls apart.

I also found a used copy of Avatar and gave it a new look. The first time I saw it was in the cinema, but the 3D glasses gave me a headache, and after the first hour I just sat there waiting for the film to end. The film has the look of a progrock albumcover from 75, that same airbrushed look. Everything is too perfect. What kind of jungle looks like this? And doing everything in the computer, it feels like the director is tempted to put in too many details. It makes me think of the Emperor (?) in Amadeus: There's simply too many notes! Okay, the dinosaurs look good, and the flying dinosaur sequences are impressive, but the aliens, the navi, still look fake. And it's hard not to compare the final fight with the one in Aliens, where Ripley fights the alien queen, which one looks most real and intense?

I watched Dr. Zhivago some time ago. The film is from 1965. If it was made today, almost fifty years later, it would almost certainly not look as good. Then everything was filmed in camera, today there would have been lots of CGI, and sorry, but most of it still looks fake. The simplest thing, like a blue sky and clouds outside a window, looks fake. If Jaws was made today, would it be as good? What's scary about the original one is that we almost never see the shark! Today it would have been there from the beginning. The first and the last Indiana Jones film, which one looks best? Will the new Alien film look half as convincing as the original one?

So, anyway... Dune 1 Avatar 0.

And another