project / process / anvil

in

Each project requires its own process: how does it need me to toil – beyond the universal dayin/dayout ass-to-chair / feet to floor in front of standing desk – to bring it to life? Hurl passages and broken rhythms at the screen until something sticks? Draw it? Hurl drawings and broken rhythms until something throws passages back at me?

All I know is that the actual process won't resemble anything I had envisioned amid the non-working hours of accumulation and subconscious processing. Sometimes it changes midway.

Frustrating, to be certain – especially when the project won't budge and stares back at me, arms crossed, from across the chasm between notion and reality as I stare at it, from the other side, waiting, like Wile E. Coyote, for the anvil to appear.

Worth noting: my week tends to go better if I shift between different projects and different processes – which would make that part of the process of each, I suppose. Exercise each part and give the other some space to work itself out.

(Meep meep)

NIGHTMARE ALLEY (Goulding, 1947)

in

(Directed by Edmund Goulding from a script by Jules Furthman based on the novel by William Lindsay Gresham; starring Tyrone Power, Joan Blondell, Coleen Gray, Helen Walker, and Mike Mazurki. Released 09 October 1947; watched fri/20230120 via Criterion Blu-Ray. )

While (I'm loathe to base my notes on a film on a fleeting comparison between it and its remake) GDT's version had a more powerful final third (mercifully devoid of the Zanuck-required hope for redemption that hampered this version's finale), that not only does Goulding's telling have none of the fat of Stan's backstory – his motivation for being such a shit is immaterial – but features commanding, visceral – and possessed of none of the sense of homage that took me out of 2021's story (exceptions being Rooney Mara and Richard Jenkins) – performances from Power (who played it as though he had everything to lose), Joan Blondell, Ian Keith, and Helen Walker (and Mike Mazurki, still my favorite on-screen Dick Tracy villain, 1945's Splitface) makes it, for me, the best. Wish I'd seen this one first – the Blu's been on my stack since it came out, months before GDT's landed in theaters, so I only have myself to blame.

links/20230123

in

Trying to get in the habit of the occasional linkblog-gy posting here if only for myself…

BATMAN: THREE JOKERS (Johns/Fabok, 2020)

in

(Written by Geoff Johns with art by Jason Fabok and Brad Anderson. Released August-October 2020 via DC Comics Black Label; my complete reading list, from 2013 to the present, lives here)

While he wrote one of my favorite recent Bat-variants – the Thomas Wayne Flashpoint Batman (though it was Azzarello’s work that made him a favorite) – and the central conceit of THREE JOKERS is intriguing (any opportunity to see the Joker in his first, “Criminal,” iteration is a win for me – and I LOVE that it hurts him to laugh), Geoff Johns writing Batman triggers some weird cognitive dissonance for me: it's a phenomenon I've yet to explain – perhaps fodder for a future maundering – but one that is, nonetheless there, clouding my view of any of Johns's efforts with the Bat.

While it may have clouded my view, it didn't hamper my enjoyment: THREE JOKERS is a solid yarn with some particularly affecting sequences delivered in stunning detail by Fabok interspersed with some that felt like afterthoughts– in particular, Barb and Jason's "moment" and its impact deserved more time and more depth than Johns afforded it; I can't decide if it was out of a fear or discomfort of "going there" and all that it could entail (a veritable goldmine, I think), or a desire to cram a whole bunch of ideas into a far-too-lean package.

Definitely worth a read though its brevity was a disservice to both its impact and staying power.