Saul Bass was born in the Bronx, New York and studied part-time at the Art Students League in Manhattan. Though he was best known for designing title sequences like the one for Psycho, he also designed several film posters. His minimalistic style continues to influential today.
Let’s start with a life lesson here that’s completely contradictory right on its face and therefore of absolutely no value whatsoever — sometimes the simplest ideas are great, and sometimes they’re really, really dumb.It all depends on the inherent intelligence level of the person who has them.
First case in point : a retrograde, racist, trigger-happy, self-appointed “neighborhood watch captain” decides it would be a good idea to follow around a kid in his gated suburban subdivision who’s minding his own business and eating Skittles. The cops tell him to back the fuck off and stay in his car, but our low-grade Charles Bronson-wannabe thinks he knows better : he pursues the young man on foot, removes his gun from its holster, loads some rounds in the chamber, unlatches the safety, and proceeds to generally and obviously tail him for three or four blocks. When the target of his harassment finally decides enough is enough and jumps him, a fight ensues. We’ll never definitely know who threw the first punch, but when “Mr. Tough Guy” was on the ground getting his nose bloodied by the kid’s fist, he decided he’d had enough and shot his “assailant” in the heart.
Dumb idea. I don’t care if a jury gave him a free pass for murdering the victim of his stalking or not, it’s still just not smart. Bargain-basement Bronson was reckless with his firearm, needlessly killed a kid who was, let’s face it, provoked into a confrontation, and now he has this bright, promising youngster’s blood on his conscience (assuming he has one, which is debatable) and has to sleep with one eye open for the rest of his life. Clearly, nothing good came from this guy’s very simple, and very stupid, idea.
Case in point number two : Wouldn’t it be seriously fucking cool if the Transformers fought Godzilla?
The answer to this question is as resounding as it is obvious : hell yes (as long as Michael Bay doesn’t direct it)! Thankfully, Guillermo del Toro is the guy who had this idea, and the result is Pacific Rim, easily the funnest thing to hit the silver screen this summer (even if I did just say the same thing about The Lone Ranger — this tops it, and by a wide margin).
Now, you can take exception to my admittedly over-simplified root description of this film all you want — hey, man, this is about a lot more than that : it’s about giant mentally-linked-to-human-host robots called Jaegers who battle inter-dimensional monsters from beneath the ocean floor known as Kaiju, there’s a nice little low-key love story that develops between out hero, Raleigh Beckett (Charlie Hunnam) and his co-pilot, Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), it’s got Idris Elba as a stoic-but-compassionate military commander, and hey, Ron Perlman’s on board playing a mad scientist/black marketeer with the kind of relish that only he can bring to a role.
All these things are true, of course, but at the end of the day this is still a 12-year-old sci-fi geek’s wet dream realized on an enormous Hollywood budget. And that’s the best thing about it (besides maybe the awesome post-credits dedication to Ray Harryahusen and Ishiro Honda). This is del Toro letting loose his inner child for all of us to see, and that’s a pretty insipiring thing indeed, my friends.
Are there plot holes aplenty here? Sure, bigger than the monsters themselves (most notable among them being that if they know one of these nuclear Jaegers can seal up the dimenstional breach for good by blowing it to kingdom come, why did’t they try it years ago?), but never you mind that. Just sit back and allow yourself to be as thoroughly and completely wowed as is humanly possible by a movie. And when you feel a smile forming at the corners of your lips as the week goes on, don’t fight it — you really did have that much fun at the movies. It’s totally okay to feel like a giddy little kid again for awhile.
Like the show or not the one thing that The Walking Dead tv series has always had have been some good marketing people. From the marketing leading up to the premiere season and now leading up to it’s upcoming fourth season the show continues to honor it’s comic book legacy.
For the upcoming San Diego Comic-Con spectacle AMC TV and the people behind The Walking Dead tv series have unveiled the SDCC-exclusive poster for the upcoming season. Season 1 saw noted comic book cover artist and illustrator Drew Struzan come up with the exclusive poster. For Season 2 we had another famous comic book illustrator in Tim Bradstreet with the honor. Last year’s Season 3 at SDCC saw Greg Capullo come up with the poster.
For the Season 4 poster that will be given out at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con one of the best cover and comic book illustrators in the business will do the honors. I speak of Alex Ross who has cemented his place in comic book fandom with his work on such comic books as Marvels and Kingdom Come.
While Alex Ross has been known more for his superhero illustrations the fact that he’s doing a horror-themed illustration just shows that the show still continues to remain strong and people continue to want to be involved with it in one fashion or another (or AMC just paid Alex Ross a nice chunk of change).
Below are the past SDCC-Exclusive posters for The Walking Dead.
Source: AMC TV
Decade of last.fm scrobbling countdown:
37. Drudkh (841 plays)
Top track (67 plays): Fate, from The Swan Road (2005)
Ukraine was my gateway into black metal. My earliest exposure to bm in general was met with a closed mind; I remember picking up IX Equilibrium not long after it came out, hearing nothing but distortion and blast beats, and wondering what all the fuss was about, as if its brilliant classical component was non-existent. But somehow Nokturnal Mortum’s Goat Horns blew my mind on first exposure, when I was still a teenager rocking out to In Flames, Opeth, Iced Earth and the like. That pagan spirit screaming murder beneath a wall of chaos struck me with more force than “satanic” or “progressive” bm ever would, then or now. I spent a substantial chunk of my paychecks at The End Records in the years that followed, and I was not searching for “black metal” so much as “Ukraine”. The consequence was that I got to enjoy bands like Drudkh, Hate Forest, and Astrofaes before it was “cool” to do so. (Let’s face it, hype always influences our perspective on a band in one way or another, whether we like to admit it or not.)
Drudkh quickly became my second favorite band in that scene after Nokturnal Mortum, and what I have heard in them over the years is nothing like the steady degradation from Forgotten Legends downward that supposedly “old school” fans are inclined to proclaim. I don’t know why so many people see Drudkh as a one-track band. Perhaps it is because the rate at which they release new material softens perception of the major shifts in their evolution as artists. Handful of Stars (2010) was the only album on which fans actually had to stop and go “wait, is this still Drudkh?”, and the band answered that question decisively with the Slavonic Chronicles EP. But if you listen to Drudkh as a band who played the same solid thing for four or five albums and then got too successful and lost their touch, you’re fairly misguided. It’s true that their first three albums have a lot of similarities. I sort of feel as though their vision on all three was roughly the same, with Swan Road (2005) marking the point at which they had enough recording experience to really make their sound fully capture that vision. The band has rarely repeated the same sound since. Blood in Our Wells (2006), my personal favorite, was a tremendous shift in favor of their pagan undertones, with songs like “Solitude” and “Eternity” crushing the listener through anthems more than atmospherics. Songs of Grief and Solitude (2006) was perhaps the best folk interlude album in black metal since Ulver famously did it, and Estrangement (2007) completely revisioned their sound, replacing characteristic deep plods with rabid, shrill blast beats and grittier production. Microcosmos (2009) was a significant change in production towards the other end of the spectrum, and I rather doubt the gut-wrenching quality of “Ars Poetica” (a song I still think has an almost screamo vibe to it at the climax) would have hit home so forcefully otherwise.
Drudkh’s trip to France on Handful of Stars (2010) may have left some fans disgusted, but it would be frankly stupid to call a band so consistently open to change “sell-outs” the moment their vision failed to reflect stereotypical expectations of aggression, masculinity, whatever the fuck tr00 cvlt dandies demand. And anyone who thinks Eternal Turn of the Wheel (2012) was some grand return to the good old days is in stark denial of the (I think quite intentional) persistent French influence underlining this newest chapter in their discography.
If I seem to be taking a defensive stance here, it might be in part because I’m arguing against my own initial inclinations. I’ve made the shallow mistake of blowing off Drudkh as washed up many times before, and I never fail to regret it once I’ve given the album in question substantially more time to grow on me. (My initial review here of Eternal Turn of the Wheel was cautiously negative. Today I would say it’s great.) I think over the years I’ve developed some boneheaded stereotype of Ukraine as a third world nation–an opinion based mainly on Ukrainian Americans whose pseudo-heritage reeks of self-debasing Cold War propaganda and “world music” zines. (“Only my American non-profit organization can preserve the endangered culture of our pathetic, eternally oppressed, utopianly pacifistic Slavic ancestors! I’ll give you a cultural awareness award and my new Carpathian-Caribbean fusion cd! Buy my shitty handicrafts! Send money!”) I try to forget about it and remind myself that these people are the ultimate American idiots with no actual connection to the people they pretend to represent, but I still find it hard at times to give Slavic musicians the intellectual credit they deserve. Roman Saenko and co are actually among the most intelligent musicians of our generation, and when I remind myself of that and revisit their discography, I realize again that it has been consistently solid from start to finish.
Through the Shattered Lens 