by Chris Barrus
The poster for Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited is out and the world’s typophiles are on the case to figure out exactly what font it is. Shockingly, it’s not Futura.
Hell, I’m excited just to see the trailer (and get ready to fish out your copy of The Kinks’ Lola vs. Powerman and the Moneygoround)
A couple of worthy stories over on Airminded. The first comes from a DOE atomic bomb test in 1957 to see what would happen if a Navy airship was used to deliver a nuclear depth charge.
In short, the bomb wins:
The second story concerns the latter days of Hammer Films in the early 1970s and an unmade film with the working title Zeppelin vs Pterodactyls.
The story was along the lines of THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT, with a German Zeppelin being blown off-course during a bombing raid on London and winding up at a “lost continent”-type place.
The Land That Time Forgot is still essential viewing here whenever I run across it, but Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls would have obsoleted it instantly. Hammer only got as far as commissioning up a poster to attract investors, but holy cow what a poster!
Microgramma font is instant Stendhal syndrome for me.
…going to a lecture about futurist city design and architecture inside a re-purposed wind tunnel owned by an art school while a brush fire threatens to burn the city down.
Yet another good BLDGBLOG event though I wish there was more time to lift it out of the show-and-tell blitzkrieg. The one question I wanted to ask the panel was if they considered and/or incorporated the temporal nature of city evolution. As a sci-fi artist for movies, it seems the tendency would be to tilt toward ground-up master planning, but cities aren’t hegemonic areas, they grow, go broke, get blighted, get hit by deorbiting star destroyers, get rebuilt, attacked by Godzilla, new stuff built on top of old stuff, etc.
The last couple of Star Wars movies hinted at that evolution, but not nearly as thorough as portrayed in Blade Runner or perhaps A.I.
The Hot Dog Show of Toluca Lake (as seen in the original 1956 Invasion Of The Body Snatchers)
And how it looks now.
It’s called Papoo’s Hot Dog Show now, but it’s still standing at the corner of Rose and Riverside in Toluca Lake since it opened in 1949. Good dogs too!
(Snatchers photo from Nostalgia Party No. 2)
It’s not the opening to a TV show, but the opening to one of the films in the Torakku Yaro (a.k.a. “Truck Guy”) movie series from the late-1970s. This may just be one of the best opening sequences ever…
[youtube]un01YwT6jf0[/youtube]
TV In Japan (where I found this clip) notes:
This is a movie I feel I need to learn a lot more about.
It’s also the kind of thing that Quentin Tarantino probably has memorized.
I absolutely concur with that statement. A YouTube commenter notes that the opening song is by Ryuudou Uzaki and is titled “Ichibanboshi Blues.” Presumably there’s a helpful otaku out there who’s compiled all the music together.
I dug around on the net and turned up some info on what looks like the best film in the ten film series. In the fifth installment Sonny Chiba is the leader of the “Jaws Army Corps” truck gang. Sonny’s truck (a.k.a. Jaws I) is decorated as follows:
Yowza!
A little something I noticed in the latest trailer for Grindhouse:
An Alpine White 1970 Dodge Challenger with the license plate “OA 5599.” There’s only one of those…
Something had been bothering me about the last four James Bond films and my irritation had nothing to do with Pierce Brosnan (who was a perfectly capable Bond, even when elements of the movies, well, weren’t). I was put-off by the mix-up of Serpentine italic and Britannic bold italic with the traditional sans serif caps used in the opening titles. To illustrate:
Ugly. Not just ugly, but tremendously ugly. At best, they’re suitable for a video game box but fundamentally they’re about as striking and iconic as a direct-to-DVD E-list action movie. Worse, they clash with the font used for the rest of the credits. Now compare these with some earlier ones from the Maurice Binder era:
Consistent and elegant typography. As outrageous as a typical Bond movie is supposed to be, you at least feel like you’re about to see something better than your average spy/action/comic book flick. Which brings us to Casino Royale:
That crap ItalicBoldMetallic title font is finally tossed for a sans serif (I think it’s Century Gothic) that’s familiar enough, but honestly I didn’t notice that much because the opening credit sequence is so bloody great. Congrats to Daniel Kleinman for making us forget how lousy Chris Cornell is. Note to Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, please hire Hooverphonic or Alison Goldfrapp for the next movie. k thx bye.
As for the movie itself. Casino Royale and Daniel Craig wisely sidesteps the entire “how does he compare to Connery” issue that a zillion armchair critics have saved into their blog draft folders and goes completely off-axis to a third Bond-archetype that isn’t Connery or Moore. Something about Craig’s Bond was naggingly familiar when about two-thirds of the way through, I figured it out. These are the two actors people should be comparing together:
All the online reviews are pretty spot-on, so I won’t waste your time with running through them again. The best thing I can say about it is that after it finished, I immediately wanted to see the sequel. It’s also the only movie this year I’ve paid to see twice.
You can watch the opening credits to all of the Bond movies here. Typotheque has a lengthy essay on the title design to From Russia With Love and Salon looks at Maurice Binder’s work.
I can’t think of a single movie in which Jack Palance is anything other than great or completely bugfuck insane great. There’s a healthy helping of MST3K fodder in the years between Contempt and City Slickers, but I can’t think of anyone (maybe Donald Pleasence) who could take in otherwise crap movie and make it their own – not just chewing up the script, but the filmstock, the scenery, the extras, and anything else in site. Favorite insane Palance roles? Cocaine Cowboys (Palance as a rock band manager co-starring Andy Warhol as himself!), Che (Palance as Fidel Castro!), and two that did make it to MST3K: Angel’s Revenge & Outlaw. And of course as the eerie host of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.
His IMDB bio entry is pretty amazing. Do they even make people like this anymore?
According to a website honoring movie celebrities that flew in B-24s, Palance burned his face severely while bailing out of a B-24 which was on fire during a training flight in Tucson in 1942 (that would probably have been the Davis-Monthan Army Air Corps base at that time) and after several surgeries was discharged in 1944. He is described as a “pilot in training”.
Speaks six languages: Ukrainian, Russian, Italian, Spanish, French and English.
Once fell asleep in his square during a taping of “The Hollywood Squares” (1966).
While an understudy to Marlon Brando in the Broadway production of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Brando, who was into athletics, rigged up a punching bag in the theater’s boiler room and invited Jack to work out with him. One night, Jack threw a hard punch that missed the bag and landed square on Brando’s nose. The star had to be hospitalized and understudy Palance created his own big break by going on for Brando. Jack’s reviews as Stanley Kowalski helped get him a 20th Century-Fox contract.
Quote: “The only two things you can truly depend upon are gravity and greed.”
The obits all mention City Slickers and the Oscar speech, but if I had to pick one Palance role it would be the eccentric artist Rudi Cox in Bagdad Cafe who keeps trying to adequately paint the visions he sees in the desert. R.I.P.
New Zealand is droning! And it’s not just the Dead C and those nutty Flying Nun guys, but a VLF buzz not to dissimilar from the Taos Hum that was bothering everyone years back.
Winston Moseley was denied parole early this year. I know I know, who cares. What made this story interesting was that forty-two years ago Moseley killed Kitty Genovese – still the go-to person for urban apathy horror. I had no idea the guy was still alive, it’s like flipping through the news pages and reading a current story about Bruno Hauptmann or Charles Starkweather. Digging around a bit, I see that Charles Sobhraj, Caril Fugate, the Onion Field killers, the Manson Family and Sirhan Sirhan are all still alive too.
Hmmm. I’ve got the makings of a 2007 dead pool list here where if someone on it dies I won’t feel bad at all. Also, predictably there’s a special section of the Kew Gardens history website devoted to Kitty Genovese.
Speaking of crime, Court TV has been on a roll lately and I’m happy that they’re running a new series of Masterminds. I was worried when the network was swallowed into the Turner empire with *sigh* an edict of “a broader program mix to bring in younger viewers,” but I’m looking forward to this counterpart to Oxygen’s awesome Snapped:
CourtTV’s planned new series each have something of a crime theme, including “Til Death Do Us Part,” an offbeat look at marriages that end when one spouse kills the other, hosted by filmmaker John Waters.
Lastly, like everyone else who read the Wired article on Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain, I’m guardedly optimistic about it and hope that it does not suck. No matter how the movie turns out, I can’t wait to see the microzoom art of Chris & Peter Parks at full Arclight Cinema resolution.
Matt M. pokes a stick at the movie Chinatown and uncovers the horror movie that lies within.
Not only is Cross a crook who manipulates civic policy, potentially endangering hundreds with flood; not only does he order murders as casually as you might step on an ant. He steals life from others to prolong his own. When he says that he wants The Future, he’s not just talking about the future of water in the city or his personal fortunes. He is talking capital T, capital F The Future. “How many years have I got? She’s mine, too,†he tells his daughter, Evelyn of his granddaughter Katherine.
But Katherine Mulwray isn’t just his granddaughter. She’s his daughter, too. Evelyn Cross Mulwray isn’t only Katherine’s mother, but she’s her sister. Is this adding up? Cross slept with his daughter to give birth to another daughter that is more than half of himself (assuming that you can call your child half your own). And his plan is to sire another child who is more than three quarters himself. Cross commits monstrous, perverse acts in order to extend his power and his grasp of the future. Not only will he live through his daughter, but his granddaughter and even his great granddaughter, who are more and more him with every generation.
Cross is a vampire in the literal sense of the word, but worse than that, he’s a vampire that preys upon his own children, sundering taboos and any consideration but his own survival as he does so.
And in order for evil to survive, good has to be quietly vanquished. Cross extinguishes hope with every footstep. He is impervious to the law, even when Gittes finds out the truth. What’s more, Cross acts with impunity, all but kidnapping the only innocent being in the story right under the noses of the police and a powerless Gittes. What’s more, Gittes has to take it. He has to swim in that water, and in order to do so, it’s easier to let evil triumph. The Bad Guys win, and not in a “zombies swarm all over the wreckage” kind of way. It’s a very personal, intimate kind of devastation that Cross wreaks. He is able to take the fight out of Gittes (whose been shown to be more than capable of manipulating any situation) with seemingly no effort.
Happy Halloween Los Angeles!