by Raymond Pease
Artwork of the Day: Line of Fire (by Raymond Pease)
Monthly Archives: May 2018
Eurocomics Spotlight : Anne Simon’s “The Song Of Aglaia” (Advance Review)
There are so many things going on in veteran French cartoonist Anne Simon’s graphic novel The Song Of Aglaia (originally serialized in a variety of European publications beginning in 2008, later collected in her home country under the title Le Geste D’Algae in 2012, and soon to be released in English for the first time by Fantagraphics) that it’s frankly impossible to pigeonhole it into a single category : part fairy-tale, part cautionary fable, part fantasy narrative, part feminist treatise, part satirical take on palace intrigue, part dark comedy, part family drama, part tragedy — in short, it’s a book that wears a lot of hats. The remarkable thing (okay, one of the remarkable things) about it, though, is that it wears them all with a sense of fierce, defiant, downright joyous aplomb.
I admit that I’m a newcomer to Simon’s work, having encountered it for the first…
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Artwork of the Day: The Hanging Heiress (by Raymond Pease)
by Raymond Pease
You’d Have To Be “Dumb” To Pass On This Book (Advance Review)
I’ll let you in on a little secret : people have always been telling me to put a sock in it. I’ve been an annoyingly opinionated SOB my entire life, but now that I have some online outlets for my opining, I’m far more reserved in my daily interactions with folks. Even still, when you’ve got a side gig as a critic, plenty of people are still going to wish you’d shut up and go away. But what if you shut up — and don’t go away?
Canadian cartoonist Georgia Webber had to live through the answer to that question when a sudden and quite severe throat injury forced her into months of physically- and medically-mandated silence, and to call her experiences “devastating” is probably to sell them a bit too short — but they do make for fascinating, engrossing, and revelatory reading in her new (-ish, more on that…
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Pre Code Confidential #19: Marlene Dietrich in SHANGHAI EXPRESS (Paramount 1932)
Marlene Dietrich is TCM’S Star of the Month for May, and “Shanghai Express” airs tonight at 12:00 midnight EST.
A train ride from Peking to Shanghai is fraught with danger and romance in Josef von Sternberg’s SHANGHAI EXPRESS, a whirlwind of a movie starring that Teutonic whirlwind herself, Marlene Dietrich. This was the fourth of their seven collaborations together, and their biggest hit, nominated for three Oscars and winning for Lee Garmes’s striking black and white cinematography.
The Director and his Muse
Dietrich became a huge sensation as the sultry seductress Lola Lola in Sternberg’s 1930 German film THE BLUE ANGEL, and the pair headed to America to work for Paramount. Marlene became the autocratic director’s muse, as he molded her screen image into a glamorous object of lust and desire. Sternberg’s Expressionistic painting of light and shadows, aided by Dietrich’s innate sexuality, turned the former chorus girl and cabaret…
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Here’s The Teaser Trailer For The Predator!
Despite featuring Jacob Tremblay, this is apparently not a sequel to The Book of Henry…
To be honest, the trailer is kind of bleh. Then again, it really doesn’t have to be anything spectacular. Most people who see this film are going to see it because of The Predator name, as opposed to anything that may or may not be in the trailer. Predator is a bit like Alien and The Terminator. There’s always going to be, at the very least, a curiosity factor whenever a new chapter in the franchise comes out.
That said, the film is directed by Shane Black, who is a freaking genius, and the script was co-written by Fred “Night of the Creeps” Dekker. So, I’ll give it a look.
Artwork of the Day: Office Sinner (by Raymond Pease)
by Raymond Pease
Altered Carbon, Book Review by Case Wright
I grew up loving pulpy detective stories of the 40s. Sam Spade and The Thin Man were my heroes from another time. They dealt in visceral reality and tarnished ideals, but still meted justice to the deserving. However, because of the mores of the time period, the more explicit side could only be implied.
“Altered Carbon” takes the Gumshoe genre mixes in the concept of a Ronin (A Japanese samurai who no longer has a liege lord and becomes a sword for hire), has the mystery take place hundreds of years in the future, but still keeps the setting of the Rainy City (Seattle, My Home) and Bay City (Future San Francisco). What results is the greatest pulp detective story that I have ever read. The story touches upon issues of morality and our technology stripping us naked of our humanity.
In the future, we are able to download our memories onto flash drives and re-upload them into “Sleeves” (bodies grown or bought). Crime is punished by you losing your body and putting your consciousness on a server where it will remain for as long as 200+ years, making you return to a body not your own and family scattered in time. We have colonized worlds throughout the galaxy and corporations and the super rich rule us all. The wealthy are able to have unlimited bodies to download into, giving them immortality and total perversion.
Takeshi Kovac is taken out of storage by an extremely wealthy man – Lorenz Bancroft- who is over 300 years old because he wants to find out who “murdered” him. Lorenz has his consciousness saved to a remote server every 48 hours. During the last 48 hours, he was murdered or he killed him self. He doesn’t know who is out to kill him.
Lorenz chooses Kovacs because Kovac’s is a former “Envoy” (hyper-trained marine of the future). His senses are honed to make him a badass Sherlock Holmes!
Kovac’s mission is to dig into the underworld of the future to find the killer. The whodunnit is filled with twists, violence, and the steamiest sex scenes to print. The novel pushes our understanding what makes us human and the Id run riot!
If sex, violence, and mystery doesn’t interest you, keep browsing, but you’re making a mistake.
I’m going to be cautious about spoiling anything in this excellent book, but I will tease some more as to why it should be read.
Artwork of the Day: Untitled (by Aleta Rafton)
Far Out, Man!: CHEECH & CHONG’S UP IN SMOKE (Paramount 1978)
Hey Man, if you dig crude, vulgar stoner comedy… wait, what was I saying? Oh yeah, Cheech and Chong, man. These two dudes were, like, really cool dudes, and made a lot of records and stuff, and… wait, what was I saying, man? OK, so Cheech and Chong were hippie culture’s answer to Abbott & Costello , and so popular they starred in a series of doper-themed movies, the first being UP IN SMOKE, a film basically about nothing except two burnouts trying to score some weed. C&C play their familiar personas of Pedro and Man, a pair of L.A. hippies floating their way through the world in a perpetual marijuana haze. . Sure, it’s uncouth, sophomoric, and defiantly non-PC, but had me laughing out loud forty years later!
The supporting cast features Stacy Keach as Sgt. Stedenko, a super-narc trying to stamp out drug use, and he’s a straight-edge riot…
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Through the Shattered Lens 