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karahalloway · 3 years

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(Un)Common Attraction: Chapter 30 - Country Pursuits

Series: TRR (following the events of Book 1, with some changes)

Pairing: Drake Walker x OC (Harper Gale)

Rights belong to Pixelberry, most characters and some dialogue belong to them.

Book Synopsis: Harper Gale is a small-town girl working as a waitress at a seedy New York dive bar. After a chance encounter with nobility sees her jetting halfway around the world to compete for the hand of the Prince of Cordonia, her dream of seeing the world starts to come true sooner than she expected. But as the completion heats up, Harper quickly learns that life at court is a lot more than just pretty dresses and fancy balls, and that the polished aristocratic smiles often hide deceit. Does she have what it takes to rise above the gossip and intrigue of the social season, and beat the nobles at their own games? And, more importantly, does she actually want to become the queen of a small European country? Or will her heart have other ideas?

Masterlist: (Un)Common Attraction

Chapter Summary: It’s the day of the Jamboree and Harper and Christian play a game... and have an honest heart-to-heart.

Word Count: 4,300

Rating/Warnings: PG-13 (bit of angst)

Please read: Author’s Note

Also available on Wattpad.

Chapter 29 - Country Pursuits

"As you can see," drones the stuffy noble with the impressive Kaiser Wilhelm moustache, "this painting is reminiscent of Rembrandt's style during the Dutch Golden Age."

"Uh-huh," I mutter, taking a fortifying sip of my drink as I glance dutifully at the picture in question.

It was the morning of the Country Jamboree and everyone was gathered in one of the Manor's drawing rooms to enjoy a champagne breakfast before the start of the lawn games.

I had made the mistake of wandering away from the buffet table to admire some of the paintings hanging on the wall and had become trapped in conversation with a self-styled art expert who seemed intent on educating me on the finer details of 17th century still-lifes.

"Whereas this one—"

"I'm really sorry, my lord," I interject. "But I just saw some friends waving at me. Please excuse me."

Without waiting for his reply, I turn on my heel and beat a hasty retreat towards Maxwell and Hana.

"Oh, hi, Harper!" she greets as I approach.

"Sorry to interrupt," I mutter. "But if I had to get away from wannabe Mr Saatchi over there..."

"Not a problem," grins Maxwell. "I could see you were desperately looking for an excuse to escape."

"How's your ankle this morning?" I ask Hana.

"Much better, thanks," she replies. "Icing it overnight really helped get the swelling down, though it's going to be a few days before I can wear heels again."

"Lucky that there's no dancing planned, huh?"

"Quite," she agrees.

Suddenly, Hana's phone rings. Glancing at the caller ID, her face falls.

"I'm sorry, but I need to take this... It's my mother."

"You could just let it ring if you don't want to talk to her," I suggest.

"She'd just call again," she replies with a wan smile. "Excuse me..."

As Hana makes her way gingerly out of the drawing room, Bertrand appears to take her place.

"Harper," he greets, running his eyes over me critically. "I take it this is your interpretation of charmingly rustic attire?"

"Yes," I reply, lifting my chin.

I was wearing a lacy halter-neck dress with a floaty, asymmetrical skirt (my other acquisition from when Drake and I snuck down to the capital), which I had paired with caramel-coloured, thigh-high suede boots and the same chunky leather belt I had worn for the first day of the Apple Blossom Festival. And I, for one, thought I looked very country chic.

"Hmm..." mutters Bertrand non-committedly. "Anyway, I have just received word that we should start making our way outside. The lawn games are about to start."

As we file out of the drawing room, I catch sight of Hana, who was still talking on her phone, a sour look on her face.

"I'll meet you outside in a minute," I whisper to Maxwell.

Spotting Hana, Maxwell nods. "I'll tell Bertrand you needed to use the ladies' room."

"Thanks," I smile.

"Yes, I know..." I can hear Hana say as I walk up to her. "No, you've made yourself perfectly clear. I've tried that... My etiquette has been fine... uh-hu... Yes, Mother, I've tried gaining the court's favour." She heaves a heavy sigh. "If I'm being honest, no. No, the Prince isn't likely to choose me..."

I lay a reassuring hand on her shoulder.

Hana flashes me a sad smile. "Yes, Mother. I know you love me and only want what's best for me... I'm sorry – I need to go. The Jamboree is starting. Yes, I'll call you later. Okay... Bye."

"Are you okay?" I ask as she hangs up.

"Honestly...?" she sighs. "My parents are not pleased by my progress in the competition. They think I've wasted an opportunity of a lifetime."

"I wouldn't say that," I counter. "You've not only had the chance to rub shoulders with royalty, but you've made more friends than you've ever had before. And since the start of the social season, you've really come out of your shell!"

"I know," she sighs. "But my parents didn't send me here to make friends... They want me to win the Prince's hand."

I fix her with a pointed look. "And is that what you want?"

"No..." she admits after a long pause.

"Then you need to tell them that," I say. "They say they want what's best for you, but by the sounds of that conversation, it's clear that what they want and what you want are two very different things. And they're never going to get that unless you stand up for yourself and tell them what makes you happy."

"But... I don't know what makes me happy," she whispers. "All my life I've just done what my parents told me to do..."

"Then it's definitely time for you to do some soul searching and find out what matters to you. This is your life after all, not theirs, and you have the right to live it how you want to... without needing to seek constant approval from your parents."

She looks at me uncertainly, tears welling in her eyes.

"Hana," I say, grabbing her hands in mine. "You are a grown woman who can... no, who needs to make her own choices. Otherwise, you'll just end up feeling bitter and resentful towards your parents. Like you did when they forced you to play the piano."

"But, won't they be furious with me?"

"Maybe..." I admit. "At least initially. But if they really love you, then they'll come around... and even start to respect you for carving out your own sphere of existence outside of theirs."

"I... I suppose you're right," sighs Hana. "I've let me parents dictate my choices for too long... and it's only made me miserable."

"Exactly," I nod. "So, next time you talk to them, you need to take a deep breath and tell them that they need to stop treating you like a child and that there's more to life than simply fulfilling their wishes."

"Okay," she concedes. "I'll try to do that."

"And if you need moral support, just let me know," I add, giving her hand a reassuring squeeze.

"Thanks, Harper," she says, wiping the tears from her eyes. "You are such an amazing friend."

"Are you saying I have surpassed Princess Snickerdoodle?" I ask with a grin.

"Oh, for sure!" she chuckles. "She was always so bossy..."

I laugh. "Now, come on! We have a Jamboree to get to!"

We make our way outside and find that the large expanse of manicured verge at the back of the Manor had been transformed into a rustic country fair. Various game stations had been set up to allow the nobles to play croquet, badminton, ring toss and archery, among others, while liveried servants made sure that everyone was sufficiently hydrated.

"Harper, Hana, there you are!" greets Maxwell as I help Hana descend the marble steps onto the grass.

"Better late than never!" I reply with a smile. "Where's Bertrand?"

"Making his rounds," says Maxwell. "Though he left me specific instructions to, and I quote, 'Ensure that Harper conducts herself with poise and dignity and makes a good impression at the lawn games'."

"Meaning...?" I ask, raising a brow quizzically.

"I have no idea," shrugs Maxwell. "I'm here for the archery, personally. You think they'll let me shoot an apple off someone's head?"

"Probably not," I admit.

Hana's eyes go wide. "Isn't that extremely dangerous?"

"Nah," says Maxwell with a dismissive wave of his hand. "I saw a guy do it blindfolded in a video last night. It can't be that hard."

"You do realise tha—"

But Maxwell was already bounding off towards the archery range.

"You still have your phone on you?" I ask Hana.

"Yes. Why?"

"You may want to have the paramedics on standby," I suggest dryly, watching Maxwell try to persuade a passing noblewoman to balance an apple on her head.

"Good morning, ladies," greets Christian, strolling up to us. "How are you enj—"

"Ooh...!" I wince as I see the noblewoman slap Maxwell across the face with a resounding smack!

"What happened?" asks Christian.

"Nothing that Maxwell didn't deserve," I reply with a smirk, watching Maxwell rub his cheek bashfully.

Christian follows my gaze and scoffs. "Maxwell's been trying for years to persuade someone to help him re-enact the legend of William Tell. So far, no one has been brave enough to try."

"I can see why..." I muse, watching Maxwell pepper the target with some rather wild shots in self-consolation. "Guy needs to work on his aim."

"Quite," grins Christian. "In any event, I came over in the hope that one of you ladies would like to join me for a game of some sort."

"Harper, you can play with Christian," says Hana. "I'm going to sit down for a bit. My ankle's starting to feel a bit sore again from standing up all morning."

"Should I ask one of the staff to fetch an ice pack for you?" asks Christian.

"That's kind of you, but I'll be fine," she replies with a smile. "I just need to rest it for a bit."

"Let me at least escort you to a chair, then," insist Christian, offering Hana his arm.

The two of us help Hana to one of the wrought-iron table and chair sets that had been dotted around the lawn.

Hana lifts her leg up onto the empty seat and rotates her ankle gingerly.

"Are you sure you'll be alright?" I ask. I felt bad for leaving her by herself.

"Don't worry about me," she assures me. "You two enjoy your game and maybe we can have some tea afterwards."

"Sounds like a plan," I agree.

"Have fun!" she calls as Christian and I make our way towards the lawn games area.

"So, what game can I interest the lady in?" he asks.

"How about..." I muse, surveying the options, "badminton?"

"Excellent choice!"

* * *

"Okay, time out!" I call thirty minutes later, holding my hands up in a desperate 'T' shape.

"Are you alright, Harper?" asks Christian, shading his eyes to peer at me over the net.

"Yeah!" I pant. "I just need a drink!"

"Yes, it is rather hot out, isn't it?" he agrees, wiping the perspiration off his brow.

Five minutes into the game had been enough for me to discard my boots, while Christian had forgone his blazer and cravat and had even rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. But even that hadn't been enough to keep us from working up a sweat as we batted the shuttlecock back and forth under the glare of the midmorning sun. Especially given that Christian approached the whole session as if it were a high stakes game of tennis or squash, rather than the leisurely experience that I had been expecting.

Christian flags down a passing server and I grab a mint julep, downing it greedily.

"Up for another round?" he asks, taking a sip of the tonic water that he had acquired for himself.

"Maybe in a minute," I reply, fanning myself rather ineffectually with my hand. "I'd like a chance to cool off a bit first."

"How about a leisurely stroll then?" he suggests, dropping his racquet to the ground.

"Don't you need to make your rounds?" I ask, doing the same.

"It can wait," he replies offhandedly. "Since the announcement of my father's abdication, I've been overwhelmed by nobles wanting to... well, congratulate isn't quite the word, but they want to spend a few moments with the soon-to-be king. So, it seems like all I've done for the past few weeks is shake hands and smile politely."

"So, you're saying that you want to sneak off," I surmise, picking my boots off the ground.

"If you would oblige me?" he says, a self-deprecating smile pulling at his lips as he gathers his belongings as well. "It would give us a chance to talk – just the two of us. I know we have not had much time together recently."

"Alright," I concede, knowing that I needed to have a frank conversation with Christian at some point as well, and this seemed as good a time as any. "Where were you thinking of going?"

"There is a hedge maze we can explore, if you're interested?"

I snort in amusement. "What's with you and hedge mazes, huh?"

"What can I say?" grins Christian, offering me his arm. "My family enjoys them. And this one holds a special place in my heart."

"Is it better than the one back at the Palace?"

"From a sentimental point of view, yes," he nods. "My brother and I used to play there constantly when we came to Applewood during the summers – it was the setting of many epic childhood adventures."

"I'm sure it was," I grin, imagining two little blond-haired boys tearing around the estate.

"The rules were a bit more relaxed here," he continues as we duck under the arched hedge that marks the start of the maze. "We were allowed to wear plain clothes and run rampant. For a short time, at least, we were able to just be children. This place was our refuge. My brother and I never wanted to leave."

"Sounds like you didn't have much of a childhood."

"Outside of this place, perhaps not," he agrees. "We realised from an early age that our parents had very high expectations of us. They loved us, of course, and tried to find as much time as their busy schedules allowed to spend moments with us, but my childhood was very different from Drake's, for instance."

"Have you ever wished you weren't born a prince?"

"On occasion..." he admits. "But I am luckier than most. I have had the good fortune of being born into an aristocratic family, to grow up in a beautiful part of the world. I have had access to the finest education that money could buy and a whole host of experiences that many could only dream of. So, having had the benefit of all that, I feel that it would be incredibly selfish not to give back to my country and my people, and help those who are much less fortunate than me. And what better way to do that than guiding the kingdom in a new direction when I become king?"

"I don't think they could ask to be in better hands," I say sincerely. "You're kind, compassionate, and responsible to a fault. But most of all, you're always thinking of others. For what it's worth, I think you'll make an incredible ruler."

"Thank you, Harper," he says, stopping to gaze down at me. "You see me so clearly... And I always feel reassured by your words."

"I just call it like it is," I demure, tucking my hair behind my ear.

"You have no idea how rare that is for me," he murmurs, closing the gap between us.

His lips are soft and warm against my skin, but as I breathe in the minty scent of his cologne, all I can think about is Drake...

"I can't!" I gasp, pulling back suddenly.

"I didn't mean..."

"I'm sorry, Christian," I whisper, my throat constricting. "But I can't do this... Us, being queen, any of it. I know how you feel about me, and I've thought about what you said, but the more I learn about life at court, the more convinced I become that it is not the life for me. The constant scheming, the powerplays... it's just not something that I could cope with on a daily basis. And... even if I did love you enough to marry you, I will still be viewed as an outsider by people like Tariq who cannot deal with the fact that I am – and always will be – a commoner. And I do not want a life where I constantly need to look over my shoulder."

Christian's expression wavers slightly. "Is... is that your final answer, then?"

"Yes," I confirm, tears welling in my eyes.

"I... I am very sorry to hear that, Harper," he admits sadly. "As you know, I had been hopeful that the events of the social season would ease your reservations about becoming queen, but it seems that it has done just the opposite."

"Don't get me wrong... This entire experience has been incredible – a true adventure of a lifetime. Not only have I had the chance to see a breathtaking corner of the world, but I have met some truly amazing people. And I'll cherish the memories forever... but even fairy tales must come to an end, so at the end of the social season, I'm going to go back to New York."

I had realised at the Hunt yesterday that this was the only logical decision. And after yet another sleepless night spent tossing and turning, trying to come up with any kind of alternative, I hadn't been able to. Because Drake had made it very clear that we could never be together, and since I didn't want to be queen, there was no two ways about — there was no point in me staying in Cordonia once the social season ended.

Surprise flashes across his face. "Is there any way I could convince you to stay?"

My eyes snap up to his. "Wh-why would you want that?"

"Harper," he says softly. "You are an amazing woman and you know you would've been my first choice for queen. But even though you cannot see yourself ruling by my side, that doesn't mean that I don't still want you in my life."

My eyes widen. "Seriously?"

He nods. "I wasn't lying when I told you that I treasure your honesty and your forthrightness. Not only that, but the past few days have served as further confirmation that you would be a true asset to this kingdom. For instance, when Hana fell down that hole yesterday, you managed to not only keep your cool in a time of crisis, but you risked your own well-being to help her. I don't believe any of the other ladies would have done something so noble and selfless."

"You don't know that..."

"I do," he insists. "When you meet as many people as I do, you learn to quickly take the measure of a person. So, I can confidently reaffirm that you are not anything like the other suitors, who are more concerned with advancing their station in life or are only here because their families want to gain power and influence by allying themselves with the Crown. And that is why you would've made a great queen – because you would've put the needs of the country before petty politics and family allegiances."

"Thanks," I murmur. "But I don't see what benefit there would be in me staying. I'm just another commoner after all..."

"What if... I made you into a duchess?"

My mouth drops to the floor. "A what?!"

"A duchess," confirms Christian. "You would be Lady Harper Gale in your own right, not just through association with the Beaumonts."

"You can't be serious..."

"I am," he reaffirms. "There are more than a few unclaimed duchies in Cordonia. And as King, I will have the ability to ennoble anyone I deem worthy."

"But I'm not Cordonian..."

"That can easily be rectified," he shrugs. "It's only some paperwork."

"I—"

"Look, Harper..." he says meaningfully, taking my hands in his. "Even though you do not want to be queen, I firmly believe that you could still help change this country for the better with the power and influence that would come with becoming a member of the aristocracy. Not only would you get a seat at the Council, but you would have the freedom and finances to champion causes that are important to you. You are already very popular with the people, who view you as one of their own because of your commoner background and you have also managed to impress more than a few nobles during your short time here."

"I... I don't know..." I breathe, my head reeling from Christian's proposal.

Never, in a million years, had I expected something like this!

"I know it's a lot to take in," he says with a smile. "But I hope you will consider my offer."

"I-I'll take it under advisement..." I mumble, still in a daze.

"An answer worthy of a born duchess," he smiles, leaning in to drop a tender kiss on my cheek. "And even if your answer is 'no', I do hope you will at least stay for the Coronation – as my personal guest."

"Of course," I reply with a small smile. "It's the least I can do after you just offered me a duchy!"

"I'm glad to hear it," he says with a reciprocating smile. After a moment, he adds, "I suppose we should start heading back to the Jamboree."

"Yes," I agree shakily, wondering if this was a weird dream that I was about to wake up from any moment now...

Christian offers me his arm again, but instead of taking it, I throw my arms around him in a tight hug. He sucks in a surprised breath, but his hands quickly come up to tighten around me.

"Thank you," I breathe. "For being so understanding. God knows I don't deserve it."

"Meeting you in New York was one of the best things that's ever happened to me. You changed my life. And as much as I hoped that we could have our own happily-ever-after, I guess in the back of my head I always knew that having you as my queen was a long shot."

"Who will you choose instead?" I ask as we pull apart and we begin making our way back out of the maze.

He heaves a heavy sigh. "Probably Olivia," he admits. "I've known her since we were both children and even though I don't reciprocate her romantic feelings, I do care for her... and maybe that's enough."

"I thought you didn't want a loveless marriage..."

"No," he says quietly. "I didn't. But I need to choose someone and if I can't have you, then I'd rather choose someone I care about, instead of someone who would simply be a good match for politics' sake."

"Do you think you could grow to love her?"

She was definitely not my first choice for queen, but she did love Christian. And maybe if he chose her, she'd stop being such a spiteful cow all the time.

"Maybe," he shrugs. "Only time will tell, though."

"Well, I wish you all the best," I say sincerely. "You're an amazing guy and you deserve happiness in your life... even if I can't be the one to give it to you."

"Thank you, Harper," he replies with a wan smile. "And I just want you to know, that no matter what happens, I am truly grateful for the time we've spent together."

"Me too."

We stroll the rest of the way back to the Jamboree in companionable silence, each of us lost in our respective thoughts.

Arriving back at the lawn, I see that the party is still in full swing.

"Prince Christian!" cries a noble whom I do not recognise. "If I may have a moment of your time?"

"Of course," smiles Christian politely as he pulls his blazer back on.

"No rest for the soon-to-king," I murmur, tugging on my boots. It had been lovely to spend some time barefoot, but I knew that Bertrand would have a heart attack if he caught me padding around like a shoeless vagabond.

"Unfortunately not," he agrees, bending down to kiss the back of my hand. "But I'm glad we had a chance to talk. I'll see you at the dinner later?"

"Definitely."

"Until then, my lady."

As I watch Christian stride off, I hear my stomach growl and I decide to make my way over to the buffet table to grab some food. Picking up a plate, I load up on the delicious finger sandwiches, cocktail prawns and scones, hoping that it will be enough to tide me over until dinnertime. All this finger-food was scrumptious, but as Drake had pointed out at the lawn picnic after the Derby, you could never get sufficiently full from it.

My hand stills as it hovers over a tower of crumpets.

Drake...

Seemed like everywhere I turned, all I could think about was him.

My hand drops in defeat.

As much as the idea of becoming a duchess thrilled me — on several levels — I was not sure I could say 'yes' to Christian's incredibly generous offer. Because staying in Cordonia as a member of the nobility would mean staying at court and being required to attend the endless stream of balls and social events... which invariably meant that I'd be bumping into Drake more often than not. And I was not sure I could cope with that.

So as much as I wanted to accept, I knew in my heart that I was going to have to say 'no'...

Heaving a sigh, I am in the process of turning around to find Hana, when I collide with a passing waiter.

"Oh!" I exclaim, just managing to keep my plate of food from ending up on the floor.

"My most sincere apologies, my lady!"

"No worries," I reply. "I wasn't paying attention."

As the waiter hurries away, I become aware of a wetness over my stomach. Glancing down, my heart sinks when I spot a massive red wine stain all over the front of my white dress.

I groan, knowing that if I had any chance of salvaging the material, I had to get it off and into the sink to soak straight away.

I resignedly set my plate of food down on the buffet table, grabbing a couple of sandwiches to munch on the go as I make my way back to the Manor to get changed.

The story continues in Chapter 31 - Lean on You

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aluoka · 3 years

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PHIL HALE

Phil Hale was born in 1963 in Boston, Massachusetts and has been based in London since 1985. Born into a family of artists, Hale became an apprentice to American painter Rick Berry at the age of sixteen. Much of his early professional work was as an illustrator for clients such as Stephen King, RayGun, Playboy and Spectrum. His fine art works have been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe and held in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Houses of Westminster, Lords Cricket Ground, Sony and Warner Bros. In 2008, Hale was commissioned to paint the portrait of Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Strive to cope with the already vague anxiety in your body like an ocean wave, and you don't even feel like going back to work when you criticize constantly. There's no downtime for yourself. That means wow. I saw this show, and now I have to start to come to my senses and more often than not agree with myself on the merits. This is Good. This is bad. It's not. I wouldn't say there are compelling arguments, and again, when I tend to quit painting it, it groans witty. So you pass that to her argument after you've discussed it, don't do it justice. Anyway, to paint, you must to remain to know the degree, and you want to get an award! There are many people around and many scientists who did not want it to look like this. Yeah.

An endless stream of ideas that I keep pondering, but for some reason, it seems too difficult to tackle - I don't have the time, finances, or focus to bring it all together. Perhaps decisiveness, vision. To create this work, it took me a whole year, since I was carrying this image in my head for a long time, I took a shot last year at one of the lessons on the basics of photography, totally by accident, but I liked her expression that was not played in front of the camera, but a living and vital, moment thinking about something important. Although the oil painting looks unfinished and it is not, I like to keep it as it is, because it gives me thoughts about time as Air perspective is an image of an object, taking into account the apparent light changes in the space. It is straightforward to see in this example. However, it also requires your imagination. In other words, everything that we see farther from us is less bright, clear, smaller in size, less visible details. This is because the time as air also has density, colour (impurities are present: dust, fog, smoke, rain). We see the distant plan as if in a "haze" through a layer of air or as l am suggesting time. The distant shot is always faded.

His work as a doctrine based on continuous development. It is important to break through to it through many obstacles of being, to comprehend the truth, for harmony and balance. I cannot look at the works of Lucien Freud, they set me on fire. A great master, stubborn and thoughtful in his gift of persuasion, who carefully studied in his work, castigated himself and his victims posing for him, now we are spectators, tormented by his questions, and the scripture is remembered; but the one who loves him from childhood punishes. “In his works, he appears as the father of humanity, punishing the body for the Path to Truth. It was only natural that the turn through creativity laid the foundation for deep knowledge. Painting as a doctrine based on continuous development. It is important to break through to him through many obstacles of being, to comprehend the truth, for harmony and balance

“Lucian Freud was born into an artistic middle-class Jewish family. His father Ernst was an architect, his mother Lucie Brasch studied art history, and his grandfather was the paradigm-shifting psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. In 1933, Freud and his family left Berlin to escape Hitler and settled in London.”

was stubborn and believed in his gift of persuasion, a thoroughly studying Lucian in his work scourged himself and his victims posing for him now we are the viewer under the torture of his questions and the holy scripture is remembered; and he who loves, punishes him from childhood. "In his works, he appears as the father of mankind, punishing the body for the Path to Truth

“Lucian Freud, renowned for his unflinching observations of anatomy and psychology, made even the beautiful people (including Kate Moss) look ugly. One of the late twentieth-century's most celebrated portraitists, Freud painted only those closest to him: friends and family, wives and mistresses, and, last but not least, himself. His insightful series of self-portraits spanned over six decades. Unusual among artists with such long careers, his style remained remarkably consistent. Perhaps inevitably, the psychic intensity of his portraits, and his notoriously long sessions with sitters have been compared with the psychoanalytic practice of his famous grandfather, Sigmund Freud. Unapologetically self-absorbed, Freud embodied a notion that comes to us from the Renaissance, and which has been attributed to Leonardo da Vinci: "Every artist paints himself." Freud remained aloof from his sitters, a rapport that comes through in his work, referring to the work as "purely autobiographical" and the people he painted as merely the vehicle for figurative innovations: "I use the people to invent my pictures with, and I can work more freely when they are there."While life drawing classes had long included nude models, the expressive detail with which Freud paints genitals sets him apart from other artists in the history of portraiture. With the analytic scrutiny and detail a botanical illustrator might devote to a rare flower, Freud paints primary and secondary sex characteristics.Freud owes much to the early-20th-century Expressionists. His pronounced, expressive strokes recall Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch, and the tilted perspective and anthropomorphic depictions of chairs, shoes, and other inanimate objects bring to mind Vincent van Gogh.Freud was one of the great self-portraitists of the 20th century. He painted himself obsessively. While it may lack the range of Rembrandt, Van Gogh, or Schiele, Freud's self-portraits form one of the most complete visual autobiographies of any painter, yielding insight into the self-absorption and relentless drive that fueled the artist.”

“Biography of Lucien Freud (Lucian Michael Freud) is full of paradoxes. He was a rebel, breaking the rules at every opportunity, and managed to live to be 88 years. All his life he was reserved and secretive, but was wildly popular among the women and told them to reciprocate. His private life has become a byword, but he about it was never extended. Freud rarely gave interviews and were jealous of their personal space from the press and from strangers. His fame resounded around the world, but in the artist's life were not written any biographical book about him. https://artchive.ru/en/lucianfreud

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aion-rsa · 5 years

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The Many Crossovers of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

http://bit.ly/2Xzhucg

There have been so many different incarnations of the Heroes in a Half Shell and between them, they've seemingly met just about everyone!

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has covered a lot of ground in the past 35 years. There are so many different takes on "four reptiles in eye masks who fight crime with ninjitsu" that it's honestly hard to keep count of all the different continuities. From the gritty Frank Miller homages of the earliest comics to goofball cartoon characters to CGI hunchbacks in the latest two movies, there have been a wide range of interpretations.

Like all popular properties, the Ninja Turtles have done their share of crossovers. They've met all kinds of characters and rubbed elbows with so many different franchises. They've fought alongside everyone from Archie to Batman to Alf. You can basically plug and play them into any situation at this point.

Starting, fittingly enough, in the Mirage days, the Turtles' first crossover came in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #8. Turtle creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird teamed together with Dave Sim and Gerhard to do a story where the foursome met up with Sim's magnum opus character Cerebus. Otherwise known as the star of "that once-beloved barbarian aardvark comic that went off the rails once Sim grew to hate women."

Watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on Amazon

In the story, we're introduced to Renet, a time-travel witch with no pants who acts as an apprentice to a strict master, who she's deathly afraid of. After screwing up, she steals a magic scepter and hides out in 1986 New York City, immediately coming into contact with the Turtles. Escaping her master once again, she brings all of them to 1406, where they run afoul of Cerebus the Aardvark. The three parties reluctantly team up with the easily-disgruntled Cerebus annoyed by the mere presence of the Turtles while the Turtles are constantly annoyed by Renet's never-ending, airheaded attitude. A year after this issue, the Turtles and Cerebus – once again depicted by Eastman, Laird, and Sim – would briefly meet up in the pages of Miami Mice #4, where Cerebus again wanted to distance himself from the four.

Also in 1986, the memorable Donatello Micro-Series issue (the one where he teamed up with Jack Kirby) ended with a pin-up by Stan Sakai, depicting the Turtles surrounding his own anthromorphic swordsman creation Miyamoto Usagi from the comic Usagi Yojimbo. 1987 brought us a comic called Turtle Soup, where various comic creators would do short stories featuring the Ninja Turtles. Sakai got to write a storyline where due to some magical residue brought on from his adventure with Renet, Leonardo is sent spiraling through time and ends up in an adventure with Usagi. The two are attacked by the same pack of enemies and cut them down until they are the only ones left. They turn their attentions to each other and are about to go at it, but Leonardo returns to the present, causing Usagi to run through nothing and crash into a tree.

read more: The Original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie is Still Amazing

That began a lengthy relationship between the two properties. Miyamoto Usagi became the Alien to the Ninja Turtles' Predator. In the Mirage comics, Leonardo made several more trips into Usagi's time and eventually brought his brothers with him. Usagi got his own action figure as part of Playmates' Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles line, showed up in a couple video games, and two of the animated series. In the '80s cartoon he was named Usagi Yojimbo, I suppose for simplicity's sake, where he was stranded on Earth after being pulled in from an alternate reality. He starred in two episodes.

The 4Kids cartoon had him show up more often, also from an alternate reality, though they played up his relationship with Leonardo more than the '80s cartoon. When they did the Flash Forward part of the series where the Turtles were in the future, they intended to introduce his comic book descendant Space Usagi, but that never came to be.

One of the more entertaining crossovers came in the form of Flaming Carrot Comics #25 to #27 by Bob Burden, where Raphael gets stricken with amnesia and ends up becoming the sidekick to mentally-lacking superhero the Flaming Carrot. Raphael ends up wearing a sack on his head and a cape that says "BREAD" on it, calling himself the Night Avenger. Instead, the authorities call him Bread Boy. The two of them, later joined by the rest of the Turtles and Mysterymen member Screwball, work together to prevent a group of evil umpires from using the disembodied head of Frankenstein's Monster to steal the Empire State Building. It was very, very weird.

read more: The Weirdest Classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Episodes Ever

The two parties would meet up again a few years later in a four-issue Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Flaming Carrot crossover with Jim Lawson on art, where a military team has gone missing after investigating a mysterious island. The government brings in the Turtles to investigate, while at the same time, the Mysterymen start their own investigation. The two sides collide, befriend each other, and then fight fire ghosts, a werewolf, and other ridiculous things. Meanwhile, the Flaming Carrot tries selling lemonade. He isn't successful.

Across the '90s, the Ninja Turtles crossed paths a couple times with Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon. Drawn by Michael Dooney, 1993's Savage Dragon/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has Dragon visit New York City to investigate some animated gargoyles abducting the elderly. While friendly with the Turtles, he has a running gag of never being able to tell them apart, suggesting that they get initials on their belt buckles. Even then, in a later crossover, he refers to Raphael as "Rembrandt."

Image Comics took in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise in the mid-90s, so they became integrated with the universe more. Turtles showing up in Savage Dragon's comics – which happened quite a bit – was no longer all that special anymore. Raphael even made a quick appearance fighting a Martian in an alley in Mars Attacks Image.

read more: The Real Life Stories Behind Martial Arts Movie Legends

The most amusing appearance during this time was Gen 13 #13B, where Grunge goes on a journey that causes him to run into all sorts of indie comic characters like Bone, Madman, Savage Dragon, etc. His brief meeting with the Ninja Turtles has a bit of a meta thing going on where Grunge asking, "What happened to you guys?" is less about how they got in a life-and-death predicament and more about how they lost their overwhelming popularity.

Otherwise, the Mirage-era Ninja Turtles made a couple other less-notable crossover appearances. In 1991, they appeared in The Last of the Viking Heroes Meet the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by Michael Thibodeaux, which again brought time travel into the fray. In 1996, we got Creed/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by Trent Kaniuga, where they got tangled up in a plot with a young boy named Creed and a mystical, green crystal. While the Ninja Turtles had nothing to do with it, one of their supporting characters starred in the two-part Gizmo and the Fugitoid comic by Laird and Michael Dooney.

During the early '90s, the Ninja Turtles also appeared in a more family-friendly comic run under the Archie Comics banner. Naturally, this gave us Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Meet Archie by Ryan Brown and Dean Clarrain. Around that time in the Archie Turtles series, the four are brought to various realities by Cudley the Cowlick, a giant, cosmic, talking cow head. Because comics are weird. He drops them off in Riverdale for twelve hours. Archie and Betty see them and freak out over what they figured to be an alien invasion, yet nobody believes them. The four disguise themselves and even check out a Josie and the Pussycats concert incognito, but reveal their true identities when Veronica gets kidnapped by some criminals intending to get a hefty ransom. It isn't nearly as good as Archie Meets the Punisher, but it's fine for what it is.

read more: The Comic Book Roots of the First TMNT Movie

In terms of properties with far less staying power, there was also Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Meet the Conservation Corps by Paul Castiglia and Dan Nakrosis. This was actually used to springboard the short-lived comic where an alien crash-lands onto Earth and uses some special tech to turn random animals into mutants for the sake of protecting the Earth from pollution. It was just as hokey as you'd expect, though the villain design wasn't bad. Oily Bird is a giant, oil-covered duck, the only survivor of an oil tanker spill that killed his family. The mix of oil and toxic waste turned him into an insane monster out to overrun the entire planet with pollution. So, I mean, the comic has that going for it. Looking at covers for the Conservation Corps series, he later became a cyborg. So it has that going for it too.

Also under the Archie banner, the Turtles made a quick guest appearance in Sonic the Hedgehog #10, back when that series was young and intentionally silly. Sonic was busy running through an underground labyrinth and when in a sewer, the four Turtles ran by, admitting out loud that they were basically lost. Not only in the wrong sewer, but in the wrong comic as well.

Nearly twenty years later, Sonic's evil double (no, the other one) Scourge ended up in prison with Bebop and Rocksteady in Sonic Universe #29, though that's more of an Easter egg thing than an official crossover.

Speaking of criminal acts, the '80s animated series led to Michelangelo showing up in the all-so-memorable Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue, the anti-drug cartoon about a teenager who gets into marijuana. After he's seen stealing money from his little sister, a bunch of cartoon characters come to life to spend a half hour lecturing him that drugs are bad and smoking weed will make you look like a zombie and kill you. Alongside Michelangelo are Alvin and the Chipmunks, Garfield, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Muppet Babies, Winnie the Pooh, Slimer, the Smurfs, Alf, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. That's a of properties that got transformed into lousy CGI movies over the last few years...

read more - The Essential Episodes of X-Men: The Animated Series

Oh, God. We're due for a CGI Alf reboot, aren't we?

Regardless, as someone who was 8 when that cartoon came out, us kids only gave a damn about Michelangelo showing up. Dude didn't even get to appear on the VHS cover.

It wasn't Garfield's only meeting with Michelangelo. The winter 1992 edition of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Magazine had a one-page comic written by Garfield creator Jim Davis with Gary Barker and Larry Fentz on art and Laird himself doing the inking. The gag here is that Garfield tries disguising himself as the fifth Ninja Turtle in order to get them to leave him alone with all their pizza. Instead, they choose to beat the holy hell out of him, which is rather messed up, all things considered.

read more: The Best Batman Beyond Episodes

He's just a normal cat with the ability to inner-monologue, guys.

In 1997, the Ninja Turtles returned to TV with the abysmal Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation. The live-action show introduced their female member Venus and lasted for a mere six months before cancellation. An episode of Power Rangers in Space called "Shell Shocked" brought the two parties together and while it should have been the best thing ever, it was outright terrible. The evil Astronema decided the best way to defeat the Power Rangers would be to summon the Ninja Turtles, brainwash them, and then make them betray the Rangers. Everyone was insufferable, nothing made any sense, and they only came to their senses by the weakest of all plot devices. It ended with the five Turtles surfing through space and me wanting to die.

The preview of the following episode mentioned Bulk being attacked by a claw and that had me more pumped than the previous 22 minutes.

One bit of strangeness is how the Turtles had a tendency to constantly crossover with Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of the Moo Mesa. Namely the fact that these multiple adventures happened well over a decade after the Moo Mesa cartoon's cancellation, and even then, it wasn't exactly the most memorable show to go back to. The mutant cows appeared sporadically through various issues of Mirage's Tales of the TMNT in a bunch of dimension-hopping storylines I'm not going to even begin to explain.

read more: The Essential Episodes of Tales From the Cryptkeeper

Around that time, when the 4Kids animated series did the Flash Forward season, the Turtles were thrown into a Danger Room-type simulation by the villain Viral where they're stuck having to face the cast of Moo Mesa in a barfight. Viral leaves them to die and returns later, insulted to see the Turtles playing cards with the likes of Moo Montana.

That 4Kids Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series lasted a good seven seasons. Once Nickelodeon bought the rights to everything Ninja Turtles and it was apparent that the 4Kids series was going to be cancelled, they went out in style with Turtles Forever. The animated movie was about the 2000s cartoon crossing over with the '80s cartoon in a plot where the badass Utrom Shredder takes over the '80s Technodrome and tries to use it to wipe out all reality.

There are a couple minor problems in there. The '80s Turtles are treated a little too much as jokes to the point that all four of them are practically Michelangelo. Due to union issues, the original voice actors couldn't come back, meaning we were cheated out of James Avery playing Shredder one last time. Still, it was a wonderful love letter to the various takes on the characters, especially in the final act, where they visited the black-and-white world of Turtle Prime, where they met the grim and gritty Mirage Turtles.

read more: The Craziest Episodes of the Beetlejuice Animated Series

Coincidentally, an episode of the Nickelodeon CGI animated series called "Wormquake" has shown that show's animated Turtles looking through alternate realities and seeing their '80s cartoon counterparts, with Michelangelo wondering why they look like dorks. The hour-long episode has them fight a giant worm and in the end, they get rid of it by sending it to one of the alternate realities. That gives us a quick scene of the '80s incarnations choosing to fight it, all while giving us back the original voice actors. Seriously, hearing Donatello yell, "Turtle Power!" gave me the warm fuzzies.

The Nickelodeon cartoon team and the '80s cartoon team would finally meet up in the season 4 episode "Trans Dimensional Turtles." It's essentially a half-hour remake of Turtles Forever (right down to the use of the Mirage universe in the third act) only using the current show and focusing on a team-up between '80s Krang and Kraang Subprime. Again, the original voice actors return and it leads to a funny moment where Rob Paulsen's '80s Raphael makes fun of the way Rob Paulsen's '10s Donatello talks.

That brings us to the current IDW comic series. IDW has a lot of licensed series under its belt and back in 2011, they introduced a soft crossover event called Infestation. The idea was that a zombie virus was spreading around on an inter-dimensional level. That meant it tied together all these different properties without actually having them meet up. The first series included Zombies vs. Robots, Star Trek, Transformers, Ghostbusters, and GI Joe. A year later, they did Infestation 2, which included Transformers, Dungeons and Dragons, GI Joe, 30 Days of Night, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Instead of zombies, the second series focused more on Lovecraftian nightmares. Over the course of two issues, the Turtles investigate some disturbances in the sewer and defeat an otherworldly squid, saving reality.

read more: Extreme Ghostbusters is Better Than You Remember

IDW used the same soft crossover concept more recently in X-Files: Conspiracy. The crossover involves X-Files characters the Lone Gunmen, whose quest to track down a maguffin leads them to various worlds. They deal with Ghostbusters, Transformers, the Crow, and – you guessed it – the Ninja Turtles. While the Turtle tie-in issue doesn't feature Mulder and Scully, it does have them fight vampires, so there's that.

In 2014, the IDW comic would do a four-issue crossover miniseries with Ghostbusters. Written by Erik Burnham and Tom Waltz with art by Dan Schoening, it revolves around Chi-You, the ever-powerful sibling of Kitsune and the Rat King (who is basically an immortal demigod in IDW continuity). The Turtles and April end up in the Ghostbusters' reality and work alongside Venkman and the rest.

It's a solid outing and one of the things that really works is how everyone matches up with their counterparts. You have the two brains, the two dorks, the two assholes, the redhead lady assistants, and...Leonardo and Winston. Yet the story makes them feel like kindred spirits in the way they act as the down-to-earth ones who have to put up with their partners' over-the-top personalities.

Also great is how even in a cross-dimensional team-up, there's still skepticism. Donatello refuses to believe in ghosts while Egon refuses to believe in aliens. Real glass houses.

This was followed up with a sequel where the ghost of TMNT villain Darius Dun has teamed up with Ghostbusters villains known as the Collectors. The plot has caused different Turtles/Buster pairings to dive through various realities and has led to some neat moments, like Peter using his psychology know-how to help Michelangelo work out his issues with his fall-out with Splinter or how Donatello and Egon discuss their recent experiences of dying and coming back to life. They also run into the ghost of the Turtles' mother and, naturally, Peter hits on her.

read more: The Scariest Real Ghostbusters Episodes

One world they visit during this is a society run by mutant animals where Harold, Danny, Bill, and Ernie are the Ghostbusturtles. Cute.

Recently, they have been having endless crossovers with the Dark Knight. The first of which is a trip to the DC Universe for Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a six-issue miniseries by James Tynion IV and Freddie E Williams II. It's fantastic.

They end up stranded in Gotham with the knowledge that the science that allows them to exist doesn't exactly hold up in the DC dimension. Their mutagen will gradually become inert, eventually turning them back to normal turtles.

After a run-in with Batman, the four talk about what the hell just happened. Donatello does some internet research, Michelangelo figures out the pros and cons of this dark avenger, Raphael considers him to be some psychopath, and Leonardo reflects on the fight and figures him out in his own way.

"I've never fought someone like him...Shredder, maybe...but it was different. He was testing us. Avoiding lethal blows...he wanted to figure us out. He was fighting like a detective. I've never seen anything like it."

We ultimately get a team-up of the Foot Clan and the League of Assassins, which makes all the sense in the world, and it gets over-the-top once they use mutagen on the inmates of Arkham Asylum. Snake Joker, Hyena Harley, Baboon Two-Face, Vulture Scarecrow, Elephant Bane, Penguin Penguin, and so on. But all the mutated Batman villains in Gotham are no match for Splinter wielding Harley's oversized cartoon mallet.

The same creative team would make two sequels. The second series focuses on Bane taking over New York City in the Turtles' universe while made even stronger from mutagen. It ends up taking the combined might of Batman, Splinter, and Shredder to take him down.

As of this writing, they're in the midst of a crossover story amazingly called "Crisis on a Half Shell," where the villain is Krang wearing the Anti-Monitor.

The current story also features a team-up in there between the Mirage Turtles and a classic, smiling, blue-clad Batman. Everything about this is fantastic.

Yet there are even more TMNT/Batman crossovers out there. Matthew K. Manning and Jon Sommariva did a five-issue miniseries called Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures. This time it's the Turtles from the recent Nickelodeon show meeting up with Batman: The Animated Series.

read more - The Best Batman: The Animated Series Episodes

In it, Mad Hatter creates portals into the Ninja Turtles' universe and sends a handful of Arkham villains there to cause trouble. This includes a stretch of time where Joker takes over the Foot Clan and goes around wearing Shredder's helmet. On the other hand, Shredder is able to overcome Joker gas via pure willpower and hatred towards Splinter.

The comic even uses the crossover as an in-universe explanation for why Scarecrow changed up his look and became ultra-creepy for Adventures of Batman and Robin.

Inspired by these comic crossovers, an animated movie called Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was released. The story is very much based on the first comic crossover with the mutant Arkham inmates and the team-up of Ra's al Ghul and Shredder, but the main difference is that they don't do the alternate universe gimmick. It plays it up like Batman and the Turtles have always existed in the same world but have been completely unaware of each other up to this point.

It's very much worth watching, especially for a spectacular Batman vs. Shredder fight early on. Shredder even enters the fight with the same slow-motion jump from the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie! I love it.

read more: The Essential Episodes of Justice League Unlimited

Despite all these Batman meet-ups, it still blew everyone away when NetherRealm Studios announced that all four Turtles would be playable in Injustice 2 as the final DLC release. Not only do they get to fight with the DC Universe (or a darker version of), but they also face the likes of Hellboy, Sub-Zero, and Raiden. Each Turtle has about a half hour's worth of dialogue with their opponents and there are tons of cute references in there. My favorite is a subtle Turtles in Time Easter egg where Michelangelo's skateboard has an apple-shaped sticker that says "BIG" and under it is a sticker saying "3AM."

Their ending has Harley Quinn reward them for their help by giving them a pizza laced with the same chemical used in the game's "super pills," which allows street-level characters to go toe-to-toe with Superman. After ingesting this, the Turtles go back to their home dimension and absolutely crush Krang and Shredder with little issue.

read more: The Strange History of The Legend of Zelda Animated Series

So yeah, that's quite the rolodex of aquaintances.

Throughout the years, Leo and the rest have met up with everyone from the Mysterymen to Baby Kermit the Frog. With so many incarnations out there, it's like nothing is off-limits when it comes to teaming up with the Ninja Turtles. It's weirder to realize the properties they haven't crossed paths with yet, like Spider-Man or Predator.

I mean, Michelangelo, Gandalf, Milhouse, and Shaquille O'Neal were Lego Master Builders that one time. That feels totally normal and makes perfect sense to me. It's just the kind of world we live in.

Gavin Jasper writes for Den of Geek and still can't believe we haven't had an official Turtles/Daredevil crossover yet. Read more of his articles here and follow him on Twitter @Gavin4L

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Jun 24, 2019

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weekendwarriorblog · 3 years

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The Weekend Warrior 8/20/21 - REMINISCENCE, PAW PATROL: THE MOVIE, THE PROTÉGÉ, THE NIGHT HOUSE, FLAG DAY, DEMONIC and More

Ugh.

Apparently, we have four or five new wide releases this weekend, just as we get into what I always lovingly referred to as “The Dog Days of Summer.” Thanks to COVID, that could be referring to almost every weekend this summer, but it definitely becomes more true as we get to the end of summer as many kids are returning to school, some of them wearing masks, others social-distancing, some just getting us closer to the herd immunity we were always heading towards… ha ha… that’s one way to see if anyone is even reading this column. Get Political!!

Presumably, the widest release this weekend will be the sci-fi noir, REMINISCENCE (Warner Bros.), starring Hugh Jackman, Thandiwe Newton, and Rebecca Ferguson, which is the feature directorial debut by Lisa Joy, the co-creator of HBO’s popular series, Westworld. Like The Suicide Squad, In the Heights, and every other Warner Bros. movie this year, Reminiscence will be released concurrently on HBO Max this Friday. Unlike any of those other movies, I honestly don’t think anyone will give a shit about getting off their asses to risk COVID in order to see this. And I say that a.) without having seen it; b.) knowing almost nothing about it; c.) not believing the poppycock that movie theaters are the death traps some claim; and d.) I already have a ticket to see it on Friday.

In fact, I almost feel like I shouldn’t do a lot of research into what this movie is about, because despite having seen the trailer a few times, I still have no idea. All I know is that it stars Hugh Jackman, and it’s science-fiction, and that’s enough for me! (I haven’t even watched that much of Westworld beyond the first season for no other reason except that I haven’t.) The plot according to IMDB is, “A scientist discovers a way to relive your past and uses the technology to search for his long lost love.” Good enough for me.

Okay, then, so basically it sounds like a Christopher Nolan movie like Tenet or Inception from a lesser-known director -- who also happens to be Nolan’s sister-in-law, because she’s married to the other Westworld co-creator Jonathan Nolan. See how Hollywood works?

Because of all the Nolan connections, maybe we need to look at something like Transcendence, the 2014 sci-fi thriller directed by Nolan DP Wally Pfister, which starred Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall (coincidentally), and Paul Bettany. The movie opened in mid-April (a known dumping ground) to about $10.9 million in 3,455 theaters, and then tanked, making just $23 million domestically. (It made about $80 million overseas.) The fact that the title Reminiscence bears more similarity to Pfister’s movie brings another level of foreboding.

At the time, Depp hadn’t completely destroyed his career, and he still had a few bit hits under his belt, including Into the Woods and his final Pirates of the Caribbean movie in 2017, as well as Murder on the Orient Express. Jackman, on the other hand, is still in a better place career-wise, although he still owes much of his career to playing Wolverine in the X-Men movies for nearly two decades. He’s had one significant hit since Logan’s swan song, fittingly enough in 2017’s Logan, which grossed $226.3 million domestically. That was the PT Barnum musical, The Greatest Showman, which made $174.3 million over the holidays that same year, and that really centered around Jackman as a leading man. His next movie, the Gary Hart movie, The Front Runner, didn’t fare very well (less than $2 million gross), nor did the animated Missing Link, although the latter did get an Oscar nomination. The question is whether Jackman can do much to get moviegoers into an original science fiction movie with his mere presence.

Even the rest of the cast that includes Ferguson from Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible movies, Newton from… well, another one of Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible movies, and Daniel Wu from the series Into the Badlands and the most recent Tomb Raider movie. Again, take these three out of a franchise and who knows if there’s really much left?

I’m not even sure how many theaters Warner Bros. is releasing… sorry, I hate spelling out the title of this movie… into, but I have a feeling it won’t be that much more than 3,000, especially with the movie being readily available on HBO Max and all the week’s other movies being theatrical only.

Because of that, I’m very dubious about this movie making $10 million this weekend. In fact, I’m not even sure it can make $8 million this weekend. No, I’m probably going to go closer to $6 to 7 million on this, and even that might be overly optimistic.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to see Reminiscence in advance, so we'll just have to see what other critics who see it think about it. I’m not really expecting it to get too many good reviews, since it seems like the kind of movie that critics go to see begrudgingly, because they were assigned to see it, more than having any interest in it. And I was right.

On the other hand, I’ve already been seeing rave reviews about the animated PAW PATROL: THE MOVIE (Paramount), which I also haven’t seen, and in fact, I can guarantee that I will never see it. Why? Because I don’t have kids. Nor will I ever have kids. Nor do I know anything about this other than it’s about police dogs?

In fact, opening in 2,700 theaters, I wouldn’t be surprised if this rare G-rated movie ends up winning the weekend, or at least comes in second to Free Guy, despite many kids being back in school, kids being unvaccinated and more likely to get COVID by going to movie theaters, etc. etc.

If you can’t tell, I’m writing this while on a mini-vacation and I’m kind of in a “I just don’t give a shit” kind of mood right now, but as I said, I don’t have kids, and the only reason I know what “Paw Patrol” is because the people I know who have kids seem to know of the movie’s existence. Maybe even some of them will take their kids to see it or at least wait until it’s on Paramount+, which you know is coming.

I’m going with this making somewhere around $8 million this weekend, taking second place behind Free Guy, which should continue to do well with little other direct competition.

On the other, other hand (I have three arms, you know), I have had a chance to see the action flick, THE PROTÉGÉ (Lionsgate), directed by Martin Campbell of Casino Royale acclaim and Green Lantern… what’s the opposite of acclaim? That.

The movie stars Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Keaton, but more importantly, it stars… the awesome Maggie Q from Mission: Impossible III! (See a pattern in this week’s Weekend Warrior?) Most will probably know Ms. Q from her run as Nikita on the show of the same name, and she’s definitely back in that mode for this action-thriller in which she plays an assassin looking for the killer of her mentor (Jackson) which puts her at odds with another assassin, played by Keaton. I loved the fact that Maggie appeared in three very different movies last year from Sony/Blumhouse’s Fantasy Island and two other movies that ended up going to VOD, but the former of these shamefully opened with just $12.3 million over Valentine’s weekend and then it quickly got destroyed, first by the release of Blumhouse’s The Invisible Man in its third weekend and then by COVID, because theaters shut down in its fourth weekend. It made less than $50 million worldwide, which is a shame, because I actually liked it.

This is another case where I don’t know how many theaters it’s getting, although I do know reviews are embargoed until sometime Thursday evening, which is never a good sign, and actually, I can’t even tell you if I liked it or hated it until then, so… I guess we’ll have to go blind on this one, assuming Lionsgate will dump it into around 2,300 theaters with very little promotion. Even though action has been faring well this year, I have a feeling this will struggle to make $3 million this weekend.

Mini-Review: As I’ve probably mentioned, I love Maggie Q whenever she’s in any movie, but she’s particularly good in this sort of action role that requires a little more of a dramatic touch than we’d normally get from a man in this type of role. Sure, we can be slightly worried when there’s a movie with a female lead both written and directed by men, and some of those worries are founded, but Ms. Q always finds a way to bring more to her roles, and that’s the case here as well.

The general plot is that her Anna is an assassin and when her mentor Moody (Jackson) is murdered, she sets out to find his killer or killers, which brings her back to Vietnam where she runs headlong into another known as Rembrandt, played by Michael Keaton. At the same time, Moody has set Anna on a mission to find a boy whose father was assassinated 30 years earlier, as she learns that the two things are connected.

Written by Richard Wenk, who has quite a bit of experience with this sort of action movie, having written Denzel’s The Equalizer movies, as well as a few of The Expendables movies, he gives the movie enough story and characterization to separate it from the normal trashy action movie where that stuff isn’t important. For instance, giving Maggie’s Anna a full backstory with Samuel L. Jackson’s Moody, her blues guitar-playing mentor, or having her be interested in books and running a bookstore.

Unfortunately, the movie is kind of erratic, comical sometimes but deadly serious for the most part and the flirtatious relationship between Anna and Keaton’s character leads to some super cringe-worthy moments. While the action and fight choreography is pretty solid, the fact that 69-year-old Keaton doesn’t seem to be doing much of the actual fighting is a little too obvious. (Is he trying to be Liam Neeson now?) The way the violent fighting leads the two of them into bed also feels problematic. I generally abhor any sort of violence against women, but at least Maggie Q makes her character look super-tough and able to handle anything.

I wasn’t as keen on the film’s multiple twists in the ending or the flashback to Anna’s past, which seems to come far too late in the movie. In general, women are going to HATE this movie and I know exactly why, but men will probably enjoy it for just as many obvious reasons. All-in-all, it’s not a terrible throwback action movie that only sometimes goes off the rails. Rating: 6.5/10

Next, we have another highly-acclaimed horror film that played back at the Sundance Film Festival back in 2020 (like the recent Nine Days) with David (The Ritual) Bruckner’s THE NIGHT HOUSE (Searchlight Pictures), starring Rebecca Hall as Beth, a teacher whose husband Owen shot himself but not after designing and building their house on the lake. Shortly afterwards, weird things start happening and Beth thinks the house is haunting, but then she discovers a mysterious mirror image on the other side of the lake, and things start getting even weirder.

Definitely don’t want to say too much about this, because whether you like it or not might rely on whether you like the twist(s) in the movie, and I’m not sure that average moviegoers will like them as much as the type of person that goes to the Sundance Film Festival.

Hall is one of my favorite actors, because I feel she can do anything but she’s also very underrated. I mean, she can play a role in Iron Man 3 (one of the best things about that movie) or a movie like Transcendence (mentioned above) or Godzilla vs. King Kong or do comedy like ...um… Holmes and Watson, if anyone would consider that “comedy.” What she hasn’t been able to do is really get people out to theaters with her presence, although one of her more successful non-Marvel movies was Joel Edgerton’s The Gift, and she’s done a couple other good thrillers.

On top of that, the movie is still sitting pretty with 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, which makes one wonder if Sundance buzz is able to transcend the 20-month gap since a movie’s premiere, and Nine Days seems to say otherwise. Another thing going in The Night House’s favor is that there’s been quite a bit of horror movies in recent months, which means this trailer has played in front of a lot of them.

I’m not really sure why Searchlight didn’t put this concurrently on their streaming partner Hulu, but maybe they’re giving theatrical another chance even with COVID still being a concern to many, but maybe not the fan of horror who might want a little escapism. This is only opening in about 2,000 theaters, and I think that might make it tough for it to make more than $3 or 4 million.

Mini-Review: Like with Maggie Q above, Rebecca Hall is an actress who I honestly think can do no wrong. Therefore, David Bruckner’s thriller might already have a bit of an advantage, because I assumed (correctly) that this movie will feature a lot of the filmmaker’s camera trained on her at all times capturing her every emotion, every fear and facial twitch.

As mentioned above, I don’t want to say too much about the plot beyond what you can easily watch in the trailer, but this is only partially the movie you might be expecting. Sure, there’s a good amount of eerie creepiness as Hall’s character tries to find whatever is haunting her house after her husband’s suicide, as well as discovering the identical house that may or may not be in a dream. (It's that kind of movie.)

Much of the film is kind of slow and mopey, and even funny in a weird way, since Hall’s character seems to be going crazy and her behavior (and performance) is quite erratic because of it. Think of it a bit as if you can imagine Hall going into crazy Nicholas Cage moments over the course of the movie or acting that way towards her friends, including Sarah Goldberg’s Claire, who always seems to be saying the wrong thing around her BFF.

One of the things that tends to work about Bruckner’s film is that you’re never quite sure what exactly is happening, but it keeps you interested enough to want to know where it might be going. The other great thing that works even moreso is the film’s amazing score and sound design that helps to keep the viewer on edge through all of the film’s ups and downs.

As the film went along, I presumed correctly that there would probably be some sort of semi-inane M. Night Shyamalan twist, and in some ways, I was right. I certainly didn’t hate the twist when it showed up (or the second or third twist), but I know plenty of fans of more straight-ahead (translation: bad) horror that might be thrown off and even perturbed by so many twists.

The Night House may ultimately be too smart or clever for its own good, since it’s being sold as a straight-ahead ghost story with the twist of this mirror house, but that’s really something that’s very much only on the surface. Any problems with the movie are countered by the fact that Hall is just so good at selling its strange concept.

Rating: 7/10

Lastly, there’s Sean Penn’s film FLAG DAY (MGM), which may or may not get a wide release -- I'm going to guess not, but just in case it does, I might try to figure out how it might do. It tells the story of lifelong criminal and con-man Jon Vogel (Penn) as seen through the eyes of his journalist daughter Jessica (Penn's daughter, Dylan Penn). Based on Jessica Vogel's book "Flim-Flam Man: The True Story of My Father’s Counterfeit Life,” the movie covers Jessica's entire life from when her father left her and her brother Nick (played later by Hopper Penn) and mother Patty (Kathryn Winnick) through her own troubled life to when she takes back her life to succeed as a journalist. Also starring Josh Brolin, Dale Dickey, Regina King (blink and you'll miss her), Eddie Marsan and more, it's opening on Friday.

Without knowing whether Flag Day actually is getting any sort of wide release or will just be put into a few hundred theaters, but as you'll read in my review below, it's a very strange movie for MGM (or rather, United Artists Releasing) to have picked up before it premiered at Cannes, because it's just not that great, and it certainly isn't something that might do well in a wide release. Even if somehow MGM gets this movie into 1,000 theaters this weekend, I’m not convinced it can make a million dollars, because I just don’t think many if any people really know about it. Maybe it didn’t turn out to be the awards contender MGM hoped to release it later in the year, but it’s also strange for it to be opening a week after Respect, which I expect to do quite well in its second weekend. I’m just going to assume this will be in a few hundred theaters, and that’s about it.

Mini-Review: I really didn't know much about this movie going into it, other than the fact that it was directed by Penn, co-starred his daughter Dylan, as well as his son, Hopper. (Okay, maybe I didn’t know that last part.) What I didn’t know was that it was about a notorious counterfeiter named Jon Vogel, as seen through the eyes of his journalist daughter Jessica, and as with most of these type of memoir adaptations, it’s only going to be as interesting as how the story is told.

Penn has proven himself to be a decent filmmaker and storyteller, but here, he’s going for something arty that’s almost Terrence Malick-like at times, but needlessly so, because it just feels like he’s trying to make up for the flaws in the story by throwing in things like shaky camera work, overusing voice-over narrative and frequently leans on its soundtrack to try to make up for the weak storytelling.

On the other hand, if Penn was trying to create a great showcase for his daughter Dylan, Flag Day does a great job doing just that, and when you first see her on screen, you might be thrown off by how much she looks like her mother Robin Wright when she was much younger. It’s somewhat interesting to note that Sean Penn has never appeared in a movie he directed, which is only odd because you would think that being in scenes with other actors would make it easier to direct them. (I learned that from Jason Bateman, oddly.) In fact, the very best moments in Flag Day are those between Penn and his daughter, although there's still a lot of overacting and melodrama.

Honestly, I’ve met people like Jon Vogel, who are just constantly trying to make money however they can without worrying about who they hurt with their dishonesty. Because of this, I couldn’t fully get behind the father-daughter aspect of the story vs. just being interested in Jessica’s own personal growth.

In other words, maybe Flag Day should have been prefaced by "Based on a Dull Story,” because it just never really connected with me even though there were a scattered few moments that worked.

Rating: 5/10

Presuming that Flag Day isn’t going nationwide into over 500 theaters (and even if it does, it won’t be in the Top 10), here’s what the Top 10 should look like.

1. Free Guy (20th Century/Disney) - $15 million -47%

2. Paw Patrol: The Movie (Paramount) - $8.4 million N/A

3. Reminiscence (Warner Bros.) - $6.2 million N/A

4. Jungle Cruise (Walt Disney Pictures) - $5 million -45%

4. Respect (MGM) - $4.8 million -45%

5. Don’t Breathe 2 (Sony/Screen Gems) - $4.6 million -57%

7. The Night House (Searchlight) - $3.3 million N/A

8. The Suicide Squad (Warner Bros.) - $3.2 million -57%

9. The Protege (Lionsgate) - $2.6 million N/A

10. Old (Universal) - $1.4 million -41%

District 9 director Neil Blomkamp returns with the horror film, DEMONIC (IFC Midnight), in which Carly Pope plays Carly Spenser, who learns her estranged mother Angela (Nathalie Boltt) who disappeared years earlier is now in a coma, although new technology has been created as therapy that will allow Carly to enter her mother's brain and communicate with her. What could possibly go wrong? I mean, read the title and take one effin’ guess.

I went into this one fairly hopeful that maybe Blomkamp had figured out a way of getting out of director’s jail after the last few duds by essentially going the M. Night Shyamalan route i.e. making a super low-budget horror movie without stars that can let him show people that District 9 wasn’t a fluke. But unfortunately, kids, Demonic does the exact opposite, because it’s one of those horrible high concept tech-driven horror movies (not unlike the Blumhouse model) that gets so bogged down in a premise that should thrive on its simplicity that it just fails to keep the viewer entertained, let alone scared.

As soon as Carly enters the mindscape that is her mother’s brain, you know you’re in trouble, because it looks like a scratched DVD or an old video game that’s gotten dirty and is now skipping or crashing just as you’re almost past the hardest level. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie, and after Carly’s first horrific experience in her mother’s brain -- I mean, just writing that and knowing my own mother makes this a scary idea -- you wonder why she’d go back and do it again.

On top of that, there’s just so much exposition with Carly talking about her mother’s disappearance, but before you can get bored, something weird happens like her best friend turns into some weird creature and gets pulled into the mix of whatever is possessing Carly’s mother. I won’t say too much more, because like with The Night House above, you shouldn’t know too much. Unlike that movie, as you learn more, you become more annoyed with the whole idea.

Then on top of that, Pope just isn’t a particularly dynamic actress, so she does little to elevate the weak material, and when her dumb-ass BFF shows up at 3 in the morning, the banter between them is so cringeworthy, you might wonder who wrote this crap. (Surprise: Blomkamp did, so he can’t even blame how bad this movie is on the script.) There’s also what looks like a scary chicken, which just makes the whole thing more laughable than scary.

Demonic is a truly awful movie, taking Blomkamp further down the spiral of a filmmaker that was obviously a one-trick pony and doesn’t seem to be able to prove otherwise.

Rating: 4/10

Now available on digital is Gracie Otto’s documentary, UNDER THE VOLCANO (Universal Pictures Content Group), which premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in March, and I absolutely loved it, though that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to anyone who knows about my background working in recording studios. The doc is in fact about the Air Studios Montserrat that the late Sir George Martin built in the Caribbean in the ‘70s where some amazing artists like The Police, Duran Duran, Mark Knopfler and others recorded some of the classic rock records of the ‘80s. Of course, like the movie Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm about Rockfield Studios in Wales, I’m a complete suck for these movies about legendary recording studios where great music was recorded, because it feeds one of my primary interests in life: music and specifically the history of rock music. I’m actually going to have an interview with the filmmakers over at Below the Line sometime soon, so you can read a lot more about the movie then.

Because I was away this weekend, I wasn't able to get to any of these. Sorry, publicists!

ON BROADWAY (Kino Lorber) MA BELLE, MY BEAUTY (Good Deed Entertainment) BARBARA LEE: SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER (Greenwich) CONFETTI (Dada Filims) CRYPTOZOO (Magnolia) COLLUSIONS (Vertical) Next week, we're back to just a single new wide release -- thank you, God! -- and it's the Universal/Blumhouse remake of the cult horror classic, CANDYMAN.

Incidentally, I couldn’t write this column weekly without the fantastic data found at The-Numbers.com. The site continues to maintain one of the best box office databases on the internet, and I appreciate that being available to us.

#The Weekend Warrior #Reminiscence #Paw Patrol #Flag Day #The Night House #Demonic #The Protege #Movies #Reviews #box office

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geralddeslandes · 5 years

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The Botanic Garden & AI: Almost Human

One of the most interesting works in the new Barbican exhibion AI: Almost Human is a set of computer generated reproductions of botanical illustrations similar to those represented during the Golden Age of Dutch painting. Coincidentally, I visited it while reading Ian McEwan’s novel Machines Like Me and preparing a talk about botanical gardens in the Enlightenment.Scores of these were founded either for medicinal or scientific reasons or, increasingly, in the pursuit of new materials or processes to fuel the Industrial Revolution.

At first sight the Barbican piece looks like a typical byproduct of Saussure’s linguistic theories, which imply that images should be seen in the context of other similar ��signifiers’ that have been organised into ‘a system of differences’. In this way it resembles other structuralist works such as Yukinori Yanagi’s Pacific of 1996, in which he brought together the flags of all the countries that had intervened in the South Seas as ‘words’ in order to reveal the overarching ‘language’, which is their colonization of the region. Another and perhaps more telling comparison are Warhol’s prints of Elizabeth Taylor, Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. For on one level the artist seems to imply that just as it is possible to identify both particular illustrators and particular plants through their common features, so too is it possible to categorize the language of sixties’ pin-ups in terms of hair and lips and make-up.

What interests me in particular, however, is that the grid-like arrangement of such works mirrors the famous depiction of Linnaeus’ classification of plants by George Ehret, who was associated both with the Chelsea Physic Garden and Kew. His drawing inspired a host of other Enlightenment taxonomies from the Encyclopedia’s classification of knots to the portrayal of Mary Anning’s trilobites.

The Chelsea Physic Garden is known to have influenced the portrayal of the dinner services that Hans Sloane commissioned from the Chelsea Pottery. It may also have influenced the flat monochromatic patterns that began to appear in wallpaper and ceramics. Such patterns were well-suited to mass production and the elimination of waste since the repetition of small motifs meant that they could easily be made up and repaired in case of damage. Likewise, in the context of fashion the descriptions of the dresses worn by run-away servant girls and slaves in advertisements placed in American newspapers indicate how far floral patterns and mass-produced textiles became ubiquitous in women’s lives.

Even before the Enlightenment Dutch botanical illustrators had become synonymous with the passion for imported plants that reached its height in the tulip craze of 1636-37. In Machines Like Me Ian McEwan mentions the work of Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek who made powerful lenses in order to study natural organisms. His near contemporaries included Maria van Oosterwijck, Maria Sybilla Merian and Rachel Ruysch who benefited from the coincidence of economic speculation, technical innovations in printing and optics and increasing globalization, epitomized by the founding of the Dutch botanic garden in Cape Town in 1694. The parallels with the crash of the tulip craze and our own digital age are all too obvious. Although Merian died a pauper, Rachel Ruysch earned 1200 guilders for her works at a time when Rembrandt was rarely paid as much as 500. Meanwhile Maria van Oosterwijck was so confident of her own worth that she was able to reject the advances of Rachel’s tutor, Van Aelst, whom she agreed to marry only if he promised to work 11 hours a day for a year in order to keep her in a style to which she had so rightfully grown accustomed.

A century later Franz Bauer was making botanical illustrations using a microscope at Kew while his brother Ferdinand was accompanying Flinders to Australia and developing new ways of classifying the tones of exotic plants. Not only does his chart resemble Wedgwood’s account of his experiments of firing ceramics in kilns at different temperatures but it helps endorse the theory that our understanding of the world is determined by our ability to reproduce it.

As late as 1859 Britain was paying more than £50,000 a year to the Spanish for quinine and huge sums for the beautiful scarlet colours that they extracted from cactus-fed insects in Mexico. Economic botany was king. In Mauritius Ferdinand Bauer visited one of a network of French botanical gardens that stretched from Paris to the Caribbean. In 1788, the same year as the Mutiny on the Bounty, the French succeeded in bringing breadfruit from the Indian Ocean to present-day Haiti where its administrator Mozon seemed unusually willing to share his success with his English counterparts in Jamaica. In words that would have been worthy of Tim Berners-Lee, he wrote that: ‘the time has passed when nations have tried to monopolize the riches of nations. The flame of philosophy has dispelled the obscurantism that produces such an anti-social system’.

Unfortunately by 1793 his garden in Haiti had been almost extinguished in the cross-currents of the French revolution. Yet even before that, and despite the ongoing achievements of illustrators such as Mary Delany, Rousseau had begun to disparage botanical illustrators as mere ‘copyists’. Interestingly, when Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus, published his great poem, The Botanic Garden, in 1789 he seemed more confident of its success than when his grandson published a series of books about botany during the 1870s. One of Charles’s inspirations was his uncle John Wedgwood, who wrote to George III’s gardener in 1801 proposing the foundation of the Royal Horticultural Society. John also commissioned the beautiful botanical plates from the family firm that he gave to his sister, Suki, as a wedding present. ‘Nature repeats itself or almost does… ‘ Charles, no doubt, would have seen them on his mother’s dinner table, thus proving that unlike McEwan’s hero, Adam, one can pick up an enthusiasm for beauty even on one’s mother’s knee.

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anarchistbanjo · 6 years

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The Strangling Hand Ch 1 Pg 25-32

The Strangling Hand by Karl Hans Strobl translated by Joe E. Bandel Copyright Joe E. Bandel The Strangling Hand Ch 1 pg 25-32

He appeared entirely absorbed in himself, unapproachable, unmoving like the statue of a god, behind whose stone face wild lechery lurked and whose body was completely filled with a tense power. Out of the rich treasures portrayed in the works of the poet which she had inherited, was an image that seemed to attach itself to this man, this emissary. It was the image of the Asian despot, ruler over millions of slaves as he crowded them closely together in order to transport them.

The curtain moved a little, the stranger glanced in her direction and without embarrassment gave up his comfortable posture and stood up.

“I was not announced, gracious Frau, my name is Rudolph Hainx.”

Frau Emma forced herself to nod, and then with a smile in which the corners of his mouth only lifted a little, he continued:

“I am not a journalist. I must say that first, and when I found a gentleman from the press here I immediately took the opportunity to get rid of him so he would not bother you any more. For that service I must ask you to hear me out.”

“I am prepared to listen to you.”

In the most privileged quarter of our city, there, right where the countryside presses against the city, stands a large garden and villa, one filled with every luxury that there is. The steps are made of Paris marble, and rambling Goldilocks climb upon the walls. The furniture is designed by Riemer-Schmidt and delivered from workshops in the United States. The glasses in the credenza are from Tiffany’s in New York.

In a small room, whose window shimmers with all the colors of the rainbow, you will find a chest, whose drawers protect jewelry created by Lalique. A front room, which is like an atrium, a quadrangle cut from the heavens, is cooled in the summer by one of Hermann Obrist’s elaborate fountains. Now, I know that you love paintings, so I must not forget to say that scattered through separate chambers are paintings by Bocklin, Thoma, Manet and Leibl. The stairs and front hall are filled with acrylics, and one room is decorated with original Hokusai paintings which you love so much. And for evening twilight, to inspire your dreams, is a cabinet with portraits and etchings of genuine Rembrandts.

All of the great arts are allowed to stream through this princely home. You will find a music room and a rich library with rare printings and incunables. There is an ancient Roman bath and a horse stable with English and Arabian race horses. You would not exhaust the riches of this house in an entire year. There are other collections as well that I can’t forget to mention, a weapon collection in one hall and a well organized collection of postage stamps in another.

When you go through a flight of chambers, it is like wandering through the styles and cultures of all times, from ancient Assyrian to the Epoch of Biedermeier, and I will add that the furniture and appliances in this house are not copies, but original working pieces. The gardens around the house consist of individual partitions, in which you will be enchanted by gardening arts of the past. You will find replicas of the hanging gardens of Semiramis and the intricately interlaced and precious Bosketts of Trianon. A crowd of servants will fulfill your every wish.”

“I have listened to you; why are you telling me all of this?”

“On an island in the Adriatic ocean, which has never known winter, is another house which contains all the wonders and hot freedom of paradise, built in the Grecian style. From the columned entrance you can see the ocean, which is more beautiful there than anywhere else, more moody, more moving, with many sleepy colors that awaken to play in the morning and evening. A balcony, high above the rustling tree tops, gives a free view in all directions, and the most difficult and urgent longings will find wings and become more easy and joy filled there. Nothing prevents you from living there in luxurious solitude or reveling with good friends in a Hellenistic kingdom. There in view of the ocean and the heavens you can once more find undespairing joy and build a new radiant temple over the ruins of the past. A boat floats in a little harbor, and reddish purple sails shimmer through the tips of the pines. This boat is similar to the grandness of the ship Agrippa, and like it contains rare luxuries collected together in the smallest spaces.

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because I come to offer you this house in the city and the one on the island.”

Frau Emma reeled under the thought, in which she appeared to fall to ruin, torn by blind and senseless forces from the solid stronghold of her newly made plans. What kind of image was this? How could this confusion of colors and brilliance be her future? Really, the description of this magnificence was dangerous. And this offer was not a joke, she could see the seriousness in the unmoving mask of this man, as he now pulled a long paper out of his breast pocket and laid it out on the writing desk.

“It goes without saying, that I would not make this offer without being prepared to also offer you the money needed for all possible trivialities that would allow you to live such a life without a care. Just name an amount, which you think will suffice, and don’t be shy. My offer has only one limit down below, but none above. Speak your fantasy, to arrange a fairy tale of gold. I am authorized to make this check out for any sum which you name.”

“You offer me an immense treasure. I must admit that this has me all confused. What do you want of me? You speak of a contract. What is this contract? Look around you , and you will see my past. What do I have to offer that is worth such a future? Is your offer a gift? Whose gift? And what ... My God!...”

“You can call my offer a gift. What is needed is so simple, that there shouldn’t be any problem. Many others would not even stop to consider it, if they were offered millions upon millions. Before I tell you what is needed, I will give you something else to think about. Do the memorials of our past depend upon objects, real things, or rather much more upon tender and incontrovertible memories of real life experiences that can’t be erased?

If Caesar had lost his fame as a warrior, would his glorious past be extinguished; if the manuscript of his memoirs over the Gaullish war had been destroyed in fire; if a thief had stolen the suit of armor, which the commander had worn in the battle against Vercingetorix? Would Tamerlane’s career have been altered, would he have not won as many victories, if the skulls of his demoralized enemies had been allowed to fall from the spear tips, decay and turn to dust?”

“Be silent, be silent, I sense...”

“You have promised to hear me out. I know from the newspapers, that your husband’s will contained a strange order concerning his head. I also know that Eleagabal Kuperus has the capability of fulfilling this wish of the dead. My offer stands therein, to offer you all of these things, which I have previously made an effort to describe to you, in exchange for that head.”

The trembling fingers of Emma played around the heavy bronze sphinx, which lay upon the writing desk. But the eyes of Rudolph Hainx suddenly lit up like flaming stars and forced her glance back down. She didn’t dare look him in the eyes anymore and allowed him to sit back down at the writing desk, pick up the quill and prepare to write. The quill, with which a poet had once written a difficult sonnet, now stood at a steep angle in the hand of this stranger.

Emma had never seen such a hand. It was a cold, scrawny hand, whose sinews suddenly sprang out from the wrist as if they could not wait to elongate into fingers and transmit their command. The fingers were crooked and pointed, and on the wrist, clusters of hair grew in rocky fissures of the wrinkled skin down to the yellow knuckles. It was a gentleman’s hand, that was soft and delicate, with beautiful rounded curves , yet without the gentle swelling of fat that would hinder its grip. It was the hand of a master that lay upon the paper, which stretched tautly, prepared to write down an endless series of numbers. Evil eyes burned like perishing stars over this decisive moment.

“You say that you are making this proposal for someone else. Won’t you tell me who this contract belongs to?” “I see that it is important for you to know this. You should know that my client has the power to fulfil his promise, but also, that it stands in his power to make being disobedient to his wishes very taxing. He has commanded me to reveal his name in only the most exceptional case. I show you the honor of realizing that your reluctance is so heavy that this exceptional case is needed.”

“– Herr Bezug has sent me to you.”

At that the Frau sprang up to the messenger, tore the quill from out of his hand and threw it to the floor with such violence that it remained stuck upright in a black splotch.

“Get out!” She screamed, “Get out!”

And now she dared look him in the eyes; now he had no more power over her. Rudolph Hainx took his dusty gray gloves from the chair and picked up his hat.

“You will regret this!”

Frau Emma looked around, as if searching for a weapon to use against him. Then she ran to the door of the courtyard and leaned against the iron railing that sagged beneath her weight. She appeared prepared to call the entire house for help against the messenger, to set all the neighbors against him. Rudolph Hainx stepped past without her seeing, an envoy whose deal had been broken, and went forth in order to declare a war. His smooth, immaculate elegance framed the dirty walls of the stairs for a moment as he climbed down, only to once more come into view before crossing the courtyard down below and disappearing out the wide mouth of the main house door.

I am currently translating this book a few pages at a time. I will be posting them as I translate them. If you enjoy this story and type of literature please support me and become a patron. Translation is hard work and takes a lot of time. Consider donating $1 a month to help out. This book is over 500 pages long! You can donate at my website: http://thelastrosicrucian.is/wp/ or my Patreon link: https://www.patreon.com/anarchistbanjo Comments are welcome!

#adventure #fiction #translation #literature

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juniorformulamotorsport · 4 years

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Thursday, 28th November/Friday, 29th November 2019 – Hamburg

We always aim to go somewhere that has plenty of Christmas markets, and plenty of other things to see and do as well for the first weekend in Advent, and so this year we headed to Hamburg, in the North of Germany, for our “get in the mood for Christmas” trip.

It’s a city I have some history with, having been a few times including my first trip abroad in 1966 when I was despatched via BOAC to stay with my aunt, Lottie, who lived there, for the six weeks of the summer holiday. I was 7 years old and had my own passport, and my parents drove me all the way to Heathrow, handed me over to the airline staff, and picked me up again 6 weeks later. I was keen to have another look at a city that I last saw 30 years ago, a week after the Berlin wall fell, when it was the logical place for my parents and I to meet our relatives from the East who were able to travel west for the first time in my life. So… history… I wondered if I’d recognise much and was keen to find out. First we had to get there of course. A noon flight out of Heathrow was perfect timing, and having booked Club Europe tickets (only marginally more expensive than Economy) we had lounge access at the airport, fast track security, and were well looked after on the flight out too. The meal provided was very good, and the Champagne was generously supplied.

We landed on time and didn’t have to wait too long for our luggage, and were soon out of the airport and swinging into a cab for the short-ish ride to the city. We could have used our Hamburg Cards, but if we don’t have to, we prefer not to wrangle luggage on and off public transport. As we would later discover, it would almost certainly have involved the Number 6 bus, because as far as I can tell, everything did! It took slightly less than 30 minutes to get to the Crowne Plaza Hotel, and we were soon checked in, with an upgrade thanks to my IHG Ambassador membership. There followed around an hour attempting to find anywhere to put anything! The rooms have been recently refurbished and I don’t think it’s for the better, personally. In the room we had there was a small wardrobe for hanging things, and not a single shelf or drawer for anything that can’t be hung, like, say socks. It was utterly infuriating in a “first world problems” sort of way. We ended up parking stuff on the narrow ledge that ran from the tiny desk space round the side of the room, Lynne put stuff under her bedside cabinet, and I used the floor under the tiny table beside my bed. I really wasn’t amused and it’s a shame that they’ve done this… A social media rant later revealed that this is now a common complaint, especially among my female friends who travel for business. Perhaps whoever designs these things should be made to spend a week in a mocked up version of whatever they are considering, in possession of a week’s worth of stuff, and see how they damn well like it!

Eventually we got organised, and cleaned up, and decided that we’d pop to the bar for our welcome drinks. The bar proved to be very welcoming, and the staff were superb. Friendly, engaging, keen to help, which is all you can hope for in hotel staff. A drink or two and we were due to head out for dinner at TYO TYO, of which more in a separate post.

On Friday we treated ourselves to a latish start, and had a very good breakfast in the hotel, at least once we’d got the hang of the coffee machine, we did. The cups are too small for the latte/cappuccino options, and I didn’t realise immediately that there were larger, glass mugs available for those. It’s the sort of thing you want to be obvious when you’re coming in for breakfast, because until you’ve had coffee, nothing is obvious! After that we headed out into the Sankt Georg neighbourhood, which is interesting it its own right, to walk to the Kunsthalle, having been told we really should not miss it, and being advised by the guidebooks that we should spend as much time in there as we could spare. They said it would be rewarding; they weren’t wrong! If anything, they understated their case substantially.

The Hamburger Kunsthalle is is one of the largest museums in Germany, and was founded in 1850. Today, it covers seven centuries of European art, from the Middle Ages to the present, with a focus on North German painting of the 14th century, paintings by Dutch, Flemish and Italian artists of the 16th and 17th centuries, French and German drawings and paintings of the 19th century, and international modern and contemporary art. Needless to say it also runs a variety of exhibitions, and you could probably lose yourself in the complex of three buildings for an entire weekend. The museum began life as the “Städtische Gallerie”, run by the Hamburg Kunstverein, which was founded in 1817. The collection grew with donations, and purchases, and they quickly needed a building to house all the works. The original red brick Kunsthalle was built between 1863 and 1869, financed largely through private donations and it has grown, and grown from there.

The Kunsthalle is divided into the Gallery of Old Masters, the Gallery of 19th-century Art, the Gallery of Classical Modernism and the Gallery of Contemporary Art, and in a sense of linear solidarity we started with the early works of which they have a very healthy collection, including some mighty fine altarpieces, which is not surprising in such a rich city. The museum website highlights the works of the masters Bertram von Minden, who seems to have spent most of his life in and around Hamburg, and whose work I was much taken with, particularly the Buxtehude altar piece and this, which is from the Petrikirche in Hamburg and dates from 1379 to 1383. It’s huge and phenomenally detailed and definitely rewards close study.

As if that wasn’t enough, they have works by Lucas Cranach the Elder, in particular a portrait of the three electors of Saxony, (the rather wonderfully named Frederick the Wise, John the Steadfast and John-Frederick the Magnanimous), and Hans Holbein the Elder, and we made our way through the rooms admiring the works, and thinking we maybe should have picked up the audio guide (though if we had we’d probably have needed even longer to get round).

After we’d dealt with them, we moved on to a rather fabulous collection of drawings by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn – to give him his proper name – in an exhibition entitled Rembrandt, Masterpieces from the Collection. The Kunsthalle has around 300 Rembrandt etchings which belonged to the art dealer and collector Georg Ernst Harzen (1790–1863), who bequeathed them to the City of Hamburg in his will in 1869. I suspect we’ll be seeing some of them again in Oxford in January next year, but that in no way detracts from the sheer joy of getting up close to some of these incredible works. It’s amazing what can be done with just a few apparently scratchy lines, is all I can say! There turned out to be another roomful of these amazing treasures downstairs in the basement, and I could have happily spent a large part of the day taking in the details.

Of course, we already knew about Caspar David Friedrich, but I’d not seen any of the paintings it real life before. When you hit the section on German Romanticism, there’s a whole roomful of them, including the especially well known “Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer”(Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog) from 1817. It’s so famous it even appears on a piece of Hamburg street furniture close to our hotel, and while it’s regarded as his masterpiece, I’m not so sure.

Personally I was more enamoured of “The Sea of Ice” in terms of atmosphere, finding it to have something oddly futuristic about it.

Failing that, however, the piece I would steal is this one of church ruins near Dresden, “Kirchenruine Oybin”. The light is so special and so magical.

By now we were in need of a break, having had nothing beyond a coffee since breakfast, so we found our way to the basement and the café Das Liebermann, where we were soon in possession of much-needed cake. The Cube would have been a better choice perhaps, but we’d been informed that it was closed for a special event of some sort, so cake it was.

Fortified by cake (and somewhat disappointed to later discover we could have had soup or a wurst) we set off back into the collection, moving ahead in time to the turn of the last century and promptly tripping over the first of a series of works in the 100 Years of the Hamburg Secession – Encounters with the Collection exhibition, scattered throughout the galleries with other works from the same time period. I knew about the Viennese Secession, but the Hamburg group was new to me, and I was especially interested to see the work of a number of women artists prominently displayed, including Alma del Banco, Dorothea Maetzel-Johannsen, Anita Rée and Gretchen Wohlwill.

After we’d finished there we needed another quick sit down, before heading over through the Modern Art section (via Francis Bacon, Max Ernst, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso et al) to the Impressionism exhibition. On the way though I was much taken with this humourous Picasso owl which just made me smile so much – though it does seem that in addition to knowing some funny looking women, and men, Pablo also knew some funny looking owls.

The Impressionism exhibition in the newer part of the museum, which you get to by tunnel. Here the display was of masterpieces from the Ordrupgaard Collection, which I had not heard of but which I think I now need to check out. The collection, which is state-run, began with paintings collected by businessman Wilhelm Hansen and his wife, Henny in the late 19th century. The collection contains works by all of the leading Impressionist artists from Camille Pissarro, by way of Édouard Manet, and Claude Monet, to Pierre-Auguste Renoir and the rest, including a group of eight paintings by Paul Gauguin. It is obviously an impressive collection, even with just a selection on show in Hamburg so I think it may need to be seen.

Feeling somewhat exhausted by now, and realising several hours had gone by, we headed back outside and decided to walk down to one of the Christmas Markets not far away. We settled on the Weisser Zauber on the Jungfernstieg, the promenade that runs along the Binnenalster. The stalls are all white and are quite upmarket and swish, and I managed to buy myself a new wallet because mine is now falling apart, and a new pair of fleece lined dark blue leather gloves as despite having packed in an organised manner, and having a 64kg luggage allowance (!) I’d managed to forget my gloves and hat. We decided we’d stop for a gluehwein, which should have been relaxing, but no one told the Hamburg seagulls, which are an absolute menace. When one dive-bombed some poor bloke for whatever it was he was eating and skimmed straight past my face to do it, we figured we’d best drink up and move away.

I wasn’t any keener on the seagulls after we spotted one eating something that turned out to be the wing of a pigeon… Lovely. We soon forgot about that though as we walked through the delightful Alsterarkaden, a charming arcade built between 1844 and 1846 after the Great Fire of 1842 took out the old town and made way for new developments. The design was the responsibility of Alexis de Chateauneuf (1799-1853), the architect who was born in Hamburg and whose work can also be found in Paris and Oslo. It’s full of rather swish cafés, and very posh shops including this upmarket rum establishment, and again reminds you that there is money in Hamburg (it has the largest number of millionaires in all of Germany).

It also overlooks the Rathaus square, which has its own Christmas market, and which we would take a closer look at on another day. It was time to wander back towards the hotel, investigating a couple more markets on the way, one of which was selling the paper lampshade stars we like to use at this time of year.

We also stuck our noses into the Pride market, but although the DJ was in full swing, and the glitterball was reflecting off the pink reindeer, it was far too early for the clientele and there was hardly anyone there. We walked back along Lange Reihe and stopped off at a small wine shop to buy a bottle of wine before returning to the hotel to shower and change ahead of dinner at Wolfs Junge.

Travel 2019 – Hamburg, Days 1 and 2 Thursday, 28th November/Friday, 29th November 2019 - Hamburg We always aim to go somewhere that has plenty of Christmas markets, and plenty of other things to see and do as well for the first weekend in Advent, and so this year we headed to Hamburg, in the North of Germany, for our "get in the mood for Christmas" trip.

#2019 #Arts #Bars #Christmas #Crowne Plaza Hamburg #Europe #Germany #Hamburg #Hotels #Jungfernsteig #Kunsthalle Hamburg #Museums #Travel #Weisser Zauber Christmas Market

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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Hyperallergic: Hard Looking: Proust and Gauguin on Art

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, “The Ray” (1728), oil on canvas, 114 x 146 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris (all images via wga.hu unless otherwise noted)

Don’t you wish that every piece of art criticism could begin with a line as specific and disarming as “Take a young man of modest means and artistic inclinations, sitting in his dining room at that banal, dismal moment when the midday meal has just finished and the table is only partly cleared”?

The book in question (photo by the author for Hyperallergic)

This is how the 24-year-old Marcel Proust opens Chardin and Rembrandt, an unfinished essay (so unfinished that it ends in mid-sentence) written around 1895 and newly published by David Zwirner Books as one of the first two entries in its ekphrasis series, which, according to the Zwirner website, is “specially dedicated to publishing rare, out-of-print, and newly commissioned texts as accessible paperback volumes.”

The books in the series seem designed to slip into your back pocket — slim, spartan, and compact, sporting uniform covers consisting solely of typeface in black or white, with a matching horizontal bar across the top, against a solid color. The other title is Paul Gauguin’s Racontars de rapin, here translated as Ramblings of a Wannabe Painter, but more on that later.

Proust’s essay, gracefully translated by Jennie Feldman, takes the form of an imaginary journey to the Louvre, “through the La Caze room and the gallery of eighteenth-century French painters,” where the author projects himself as a docent attempting to open the eyes of the imaginary “young man of modest means and artistic inclinations” to the work of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, whose canvases transform everyday life — the source of the young man’s “unease and ennui” — into visions of transcendent beauty.

The tactic Proust deploys is a succession of extraordinarily close readings of the paintings, in language so luminous that the text easily embodies the series’ title, ekphrasis, or the translation of visual art into poetry, often through objective description. At first, Proust adopts a metaphysical bent echoing Wordsworth’s famous observation “that poetry […] takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”:

The pleasure you take in [Chardin’s] painting of a room where someone is sewing, or of a pantry, a kitchen, a sideboard, is the same pleasure—seized in passion, detached from the moment, deepened, eternalized—that he took in seeing a sideboard, a kitchen, a pantry, or a room where someone is sewing.

The seductive symmetry of that sentence is just a hint of the verbal pleasures in this book, but the insights are also striking, such as Proust’s admonition to the young man that the above-mentioned “feeling of pleasure was already there in you, unconsciously, at the sight of a humble existence and scenes of still life, otherwise it would not have arisen with you when Chardin, in his brilliant, compelling language, happened to summon it.”

These lines, found on the third page of a 14-page essay, set the tone of the piece, which is not that of a lecture-from-on-high but of a looking-together with a precocious motormouth. The descriptions come fast and furious, with a parade of similes bordering on the overripe, though once in a while one will flash by and stop you in your tracks, such as his account of a partially filleted ray, “tinted with red blood, blue nerves, and white muscle, like the nave of a polychrome cathedral.”

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, “Old Man in an Interior with Winding Staircase,” also called ““The Philosopher in Mediation” (1632), oil on panel, 29 x 33 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris

Twelve pages on, the topic abruptly switches to paintings by Rembrandt (“The Philosopher in Mediation,” 1632, and “The Good Samaritan,” c.1650, which was attributed to Rembrandt at the time but is now considered the work of Constantijn Daniel van Renesse) before the essay abruptly ends two pages later. Proust may have intended the section on Rembrandt to have been much longer, but there is no evidence either way. What is manifest, however, is his desire to present Rembrandt as a qualitatively different painter from Chardin. After extolling at length Chardin’s loving embrace of observed reality, he takes a startling leap:

With Rembrandt, reality itself will be overtaken. […] We shall see that objects in themselves are nothing, being hollow orbits whose light is the play of expression […]

In his Afterword, the appropriately named scholar Alain Madeleine-Perdrillat writes that in “the unexpected passage on Rembrandt […] there is a departure that undermines what has come before and may explain why the essay stops short: instead of the object, light itself is seen as the true ‘upholder’ of beauty; the author’s thinking thus moves to the dematerialization of beauty,” and thus enters “the subjective realm [which] will become the author’s chief preoccupation in In Search of Lost Time.”

And it is just this subjectivity, the acknowledgement that art often lies beyond the scope of language, that feels so contemporary. In a remarkable prefiguration of the Barnett Newman quip, “Aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to birds,” Proust compares a painter listening to “men of letters” talk about art to the astonishment of “a woman who has just given birth to hear a gynecologist describe the physiological process that she, with mysterious strength, has carried through without knowing its nature.”

That new mother would find a kindred spirit in Paul Gauguin, who uses the term “literati,” repeatedly, as a slur. He wrote his Racontars de rapin in 1902, the year before he died, while living in French Polynesia. Donatien Grau, the essay’s editor and translator, tells us in his introduction (“The Last Words of the First Modern Artist”) that “rapin” means “apprentice painter, a term Gauguin uses ironically here.” But “apprentice” implies the intensive acquisition of a skill, while the wince-inducing anachronism “wannabe” connotes wishful thinking and a distinct lack of ambition. Was Gauguin referring to himself, as Grau suggests, “as a striver who has not yet made it,” or as a painter whose ambition exceeded the limits of his own lifetime, ars longa vita brevis?

Paul Gauguin, “Self-Portrait” (1889), oil on wood, 79 x 51 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington

That’s my only quibble. The translation otherwise brings the flamboyant, abrasive, and highly distractible spirit of Gauguin roaring back to life. A sizable dollop of the text, truth be told, is given over to fin de siècle score-settling, mostly at the expense of critics and academicians, but it is nonetheless a surprise to encounter the Wild One’s sentimental defense of stodgy old Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, or his praise of Camille Pissarro as “a virgin who had many children but remained a virgin despite the seductions of money and power,” or his two-line epigrammatic (if not gnomic) endorsement of Paul Cézanne:

Apples, Rembrandt? Yes, Rembrandt, apples.

You would think, in light of his fierce engagement with Parisian art world politics, that Gauguin might have left France but France never left him. He hardly mentions his exotic surroundings, except for two memorable moments, one a brief interview with an unreconstructed cannibal, and the other a chance meeting with a blind madwoman in the forest, which left him with an alarming sense of his own otherness, even if its significance doesn’t entirely penetrate his mental shield of Western cultural assumptions.

His foremost concern in writing Racontars de rapin, however, is to enshrine imagination and truth-telling as artistic lodestars, rather than technical finesse and material polish. As Grau points out, Gauguin used “his individuality as an artist to challenge conventions and make art a space for controversy.”

He consistently skewers the Parisian market’s number-one darling at the time, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, and tirelessly promotes forward-thinking artists. And for those who traffic in historical relativism, although Gauguin’s world has long since vanished, the artists he supported in his day are the same ones we turn to more than a century later. At the end of the essay, he offers a summary of “the work of the second half of the nineteenth century, [mentioning] a few names among the most important,” and goes on to list everyone from Corot and Courbet to Morisot and Cassatt to Seurat, Bonnard, and van Gogh. Of the 41 artists he cites, 28 are household names and 13 are not.

He concludes his list with, “Many others I forgot,” but quickly acknowledges that there are many more, “arisen since I left [France], whom I don’t know.” And by 1902, there were quite a lot of them.

Gauguin’s art furthered the dematerialization of beauty that Proust discerned in Rembrandt’s use of light by freeing color from form and drawing from realism. His victory lap at the end of the book, which he takes in honor of his fellow avant-gardists, feels deserved, as he declares in his closing words, “most importantly, in recent times, [we] have created freedom for the visual arts. It’s time for me to send you my regards.”

Chardin and Rembrandt by Marcel Proust and Ramblings of a Wannabe Painter by Paul Gauguin are published by David Zwirner Books.

The post Hard Looking: Proust and Gauguin on Art appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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The Protege is a Reminder of Just How Good Nikita Was

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This article contains minor spoilers for The Protégé and Nikita.

The TV landscape has always been ahead of movies when it comes to giving women—and other underrepresented identities—a shot. This is probably because there has traditionally been less money to be made on TV, so the rich, mostly white men who rule Hollywood have left TV to a slightly more diverse crowd of behind-the-scenes talent to tell slightly more diverse—especially on less “important” platforms like The CW.

Action flick The Protégé, released in theaters last weekend, tells this story too well. The film pairs Casino Royale director Martin Campbell with proven action hero Maggie Q, and it should be a shoe-in for a good time. Unfortunately, a terrible script results in a 109-minute reminder of just how good Q’s underrated action TV series Nikita truly was, and just how much kinder action TV has been to women than the world of action movies in the last decade.

The Protégé is Infuriatingly Bad

The Protégé is an exercise in casting several charismatic actors and seeing how many terrible tropes can be piled on top of them before the performers break under the clichés’ weight. The answer is a lot, because Maggie Q, Samuel L. Jackson, and Michael Keaton are goddamn professionals.

In The Protégé, Q stars as Anna, a Vietnamese assassin found by hitman Moody (Jackson) as a child and trained to join the found family business. Thirty years later, when Moody is killed by a mysterious Big Bad, Anna goes back to Vietnam to find his killer and becomes tied up in a convoluted conspiracy.

Yet despite a large chunk of this movie is both set and filmed in Vietnam, the film’s world is populated almost entirely by American characters, including a Da Nang-based biker gang headed by Robert Patrick and composed of other white men. Rather than delve into the rich texture of Da Nang, one of the Vietnam’s biggest cities, The Protégé uses the city as a backdrop to be coded with colonialist assumptions of danger and lawlessness. One need look no further for how the film feels about its setting than the following line delivered by Patrick’s Billy Boy: “Vietnam has always been a place of death. Only the lucky ones make it out alive.” It’s particularly disappointing for a film led by a Vietnamese American actor to fall down so hard in its Vietnamese representation.

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Gunpowder Milkshake Continues Lena Headey’s Career of Badass Mothers

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Bond Director on What Modern Action Movies Get Wrong

By Don Kaye

While some viewers may celebrate the arrival of Keaton’s Rembrandt, a fixer for criminals situated as Anna’s equal on the bad guy’s team, that celebration would be premature. The film forces a Mr. and Mrs. Smith dynamic on the two that not only severely undercuts their believability as professional killers but also leads to the truly horrific line: “You point a gun at my pussy, and then you ask me to bed. I like your style.” (Q didn’t have to put up with this kind of shit in Nikita.)

The film doesn’t bother giving the characters a believable motivation for their dull flirtation, which traverses a 27-year age difference. Instead the movie seems confident in the infallibility of the all-too-common movie rule that posits a hot woman must be attracted to the movie’s white male lead and presumed audience surrogate. That this responsibility is forced on Q in what should be her film speaks to just how firmly these sexist tropes are entrenched in our film language. For those who need a point of comparison, look no further than the other (better) screen story that sees Q playing a badass assassin, out for revenge…

Nikita: One of TV’s Best Action Dramas

While The Protégé is a movie that is far worse than it should be, Nikita was a TV show that was always far better than it was given credit for. Based on the ’90s TV series La Femme Nikita (which was, in turn, based on the French film Nikita), the CW action drama ran from 2010 to 2013 and starred Q as an assassin gone rogue and looking to take down the shady government agency, known as Division, that trained her. With Jackie Chan-trained Q as its star, and in a pre-Arrow TV landscape, Nikita easily had some of the best fight scenes on TV. It also casually centered an Asian American star in a time when that was even less common than it is now.

While Nikita‘s action was fun and impressive to watch in its own right, that only gets you so far in action-driven storytelling. Any action series hoping to sustain itself must ground that action in character. Nikita did this in part by centering a relationship rather than a lone hero. Nikita shares protagonist duty with Alex (played by Agent Carter‘s Lyndsy Fonseca), a young woman recruited by Nikita to become a double agent within Division. While The Protégé ostensibly sets itself up around a core relationship—the one between Anna and mentor Moody—it rarely bothers to show us what the connection between these two actually looks like, or even how Moody’s death impacts Anna past her desire to kill whoever is responsible. This is especially a shame as, in the few scenes that let Q and Jackson breathe, there’s some great chemistry between the two actors.

While The Protégé barely bothers with its most important relationships, Nikita directly explored just how messy spycraft can get when personal relationships and past trauma is involved. There’s a tendency in female-fronted action stories to give the Smurfette woman assassin the same stoic, invincible demeanor as the stereotypical Male Action Hero, seemingly along the principle: anything you can do, I can do better. And I get it, I do. But, for my money, the best female-fronted action flicks (and male-fronted action flicks, for that matter) are the ones that allow their protagonists to be affected by the violence they are enacting and that is being enacted upon them.

For a cinematic equivalent, one need look no further than Campbell’s own masterful Casino Royale, which effectively contextualizes James Bond’s action with the character’s obvious trauma without losing the fun of the franchise. As Nikita progresses, especially in its first season, we see Nikita torn between her goal to take down Division and her responsibility to Alex. It makes for riveting stuff, and that’s without taking into account the rest of the tangled interpersonal web that makes up Division.

Action only matters if it has stakes, and those stakes must be grounded in character at some level. If a protagonist is largely unaffected by the action they are a part of, then so are we as viewers. If a story doesn’t do the work to demonstrate what an action hero cares about then there are no stakes to them achieving it or not. In Nikita, we care about the outcome of the fight scenes because we care about the characters—often, on both sides of the fight. We care about Nikita and Alex’s goal to take down Division because we see how much harm it is has done to both of their characters, and to the world at large. But we also care about their wellbeing, and the wellbeing of their relationship, which complicates how every single fight scene plays out. The same cannot be said for The Protégé, which never sells us on any of its characters, let alone their relationships to one another.

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Gunpowder Milkshake: Karen Gillan on Her Surprise Action Star Career

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Divergent: Interview With Maggie Q

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It makes sense that Nikita would be better at telling a new, interested action-driven spy story than The Protégé. The CW series may have had far fewer resources than a Hollywood movie, but it also had something The Protégé never bothered to invest in: diverse behind-the-scenes creative talent. While Nikita was showrun by Craig Silverstein (who would go on to create another underrated TV show in Turn: Washington’s Spies), its writing team also included women and/or people of color like Amanda Segal, Kalinda Vazquez, Kristen Reidel, and Albert Kim, who will be showrunning Netflix’s live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender series.

While it’s of course possible for writers to imagine complex interiority for characters whose identities are different from their own experiences, that’s not often how it shakes out in Hollywood, which is still largely run by white men from financially privileged backgrounds. When TV shows and movies hire people who fall outside that very narrow demographic (and those people are supported in their storytelling), fresh stories tend to happen organically by virtue of the greater diversity in perspective and lived experience at the storytelling team’s disposal.

Filmmakers have built a genre on action movies featuring male leads who punch their way out of problems, but the best action movies have always been the ones that give those problems emotional stakes. While trope-y action films centering unaffected white man are a story failure, trope-y action films centering unaffected woman of color can be an even greater missed opportunity.

It’s past time to start reimagining feminist storytelling as something other than slotting women of color into tired tropes built by and for white male protagonists. Maggie Q is one of the best action heroes of her generation and, especially post-Nikita, it’s a shame that she hasn’t had more opportunities to demonstrate that.

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weekendwarriorblog · 3 years

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The Weekend Warrior’s January 2021 Preview

Happy New Year!

So we’re gonna do things a little different this month. If it works out, I might do this as a regular thing until I feel comfortable writing about box office on a weekly basis again. It may be a long while. As you’ll see, this is a fairly comprehensive preview of the month ahead, as it stands on the first day of posting this, which hopefully is Wednesday, January 6.

I will be updating this post regularly with reviews and any date changes, etc. If you want to keep track of which movies I’ve reviewed, your best option is to bookmark my Rotten Tomatoes page, since more than likely, any new reviews will be added there at the same time they’re posted here.

Why do I have this bad feeling that doing the column this way is just gonna give me more work? (I was correct. Instead of writing about 6 movies every single week, I ended up writing about nearly 30 movies in one week.)

What’s surprising is that there are far fewer wide releases in January than any previous year, as I only count two or three in total. That’s not good.

Definitions:

Theatrical – Movie will play in any number of movie theaters, either in select locations or nationwide. Some of these may have a digital/VOD component.

Streaming – Movie is available to watch any time as part of a subscription streaming service aka Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Shudder, Hulu, etc.

Virtual Cinema – Movie is available to watch through a ticketed system which shares profits with any number of local or nationwide arthouses or festivals. Some of these may be geoblocked.

VOD – Video on Demand, movie can be rented, downloaded and watched either for a set amount of time (24 hours+) or bought to watch any time, available on a variety of platforms including iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, Fandango Now and others. (Also may be called “Digital,” “PVOD,” “TVOD,” or merely “On Demand,”)

TUESDAY, JANUARY 5

Digital/VOD: Gun and a Hotel Bible (Freestyle Digital Media) Scooby Doo director Raja Gosnell teams with Alicia Joy LeBlanc to adapt the award-winning play starring Bradley Gosnell as Pete, a desperate man who is about to commit a violent act when he encounters Daniel Floren’s Gideon, a personified hotel bible, as they get into a philosophical discussion. It will be available to buy or rent on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, DirecTV, On Demand, YouTube Movies, Vudu, Xbox, & FandangoNOW.

Streaming:

History of Swear Words (Netflix) No less than Nicolas Cage stars in Season 1 of the “educational series” on swear words that goes into the origins of all of your favorites!

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 6

Virtual Cinema:

MY REMBRANDT (Strand Releasing) Dutch filmmaker Oeke Hoogendijk’s documentary looks at a few of the just 37 private owners of Rembrandt paintings, particularly Amsterdam’s Jan Six, a young art dealer and member of a family who has owned many Rembrandts, but he’s obsessed with an unknown painting that might even have Rembrandt having painted himself into the picture. Another owner, Baron Eric de Rothschild, is obsessed with selling two paintings, creating a bidding war between two top art museums. The film will be available through New York’s Film Forum Virtual Cinema and others.

Streaming: SURVIVING DEATH (Netflix) The new six-episode doc series is directed and exec. produced by Ricki Stern (Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work) and based on Leslie Kean’s best-selling book that looks into the possibility of an afterlife.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 7

Streaming:

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PIECES OF A WOMAN (Netflix) Kornél Mundruczó’s drama starring Vanessa Kirby and Shia Labeouf as a Boston couple who lose their baby in a difficult home delivery will hit the streamer. You can read my review of the film here.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 8

Theatrical:

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ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI… (Amazon Prime Video) Regina King’s narrative directorial debut will open in more theaters after playing in Miami over the past few weeks will expand to other cities nationwide for a one-week theatrical release before streaming on Prime Video. You can read my reviews of the film here and here.

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THE REASON I JUMP (Kino Lorber) Naoki Higashida’s best-selling book that was translated into English by David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas) is turned into an arty doc directed by Jerry Rothwell. It’s based on Higashida’s revelations as a 13-year-old boy suffering dealing with autism blended with portraits of five other young people with autism.

Quick Thoughts: I haven’t read Higashida’s book or its English translation, but it makes a beautiful and lyrical accompaniment, as narrated by Jordan O’Donegan, for this look inside the life of a number of young autistic people, as their parents talk about trying to help their children without fully understanding what they’re going through. In many ways, this doc may offer some of the best insights into what it’s like to be autistic or dealing with an autistic family member in order to create some much-needed empathy for a condition so many face. The film is haunting and even horrifying at times, but it’s beautifully filmed to create a fully immersive experience.

REDEMPTION DAY (Saban Films) Hicham Hajji’s action thriller stars Gary Dourdan (CSI) as U.S. Marine Captain Brad Paxton whose wife Kate (Serinda Swan) is kidnapped by a terrorist group while working in Morocco, which forces him back into action to save the woman he loves. It also stars Andy Garcia, Ernie Hudson and Martin Donovan, and it will get a limited theatrical release and be available on Tuesday, Jan. 12, On Demand and Digital.

Quick Thoughts: While Hajji seems to bring some authenticity to this Mideast revenge thriller, the film starts out as a tribute to our fighting troops but then soon turns ridiculous, first with the kidnapping of his wife less than 24 hours after going to Morocco, and then some of the politics involved with helping her. Eventually, Dourdan goes in guns a-blazin’ in a way more apt for a movie from the ‘90s, and Hajji undoes a lot of the good will the film would have received if things were handled even somewhat tastefully. Appearances by better-known actors like Garcia, Hudson and Donovan tends to distract from the story more than adding or enhancing what was already a problematic premise.

IF NOT NOW, WHEN? (Vertical) Actors Meagan Good and Tamara Bass make their directorial debuts with this movie about four high school friends (Good and Bass are two of them, presumably) who are brought back together to help one of them during a crisis. From the official summary: “It’s a story of love, forgiveness and the incredible bond between women.)

Digital/On Demand:

STARS FELL ON ALABAMA (Samuel Goldwyn Films) V.W. Scheich’s romantic comedy stars James Maslow as successful Hollywood agent Bryce Dixon who returns to Alabama after 15 years for his high school reunion, only to learn that he is one of his few friends not married with children, so he pretends his client Madison Belle, to pretend to be his girlfriend. American Idol winner Taylor Hicks appears in the movie as himself.

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THE DISSIDENT (Briarcliff Bryan Fogel’s documentary about the murder of journalist Jamal Kashouggi will be released On Demand today via ITunes. Reviewed in the previous Weekend Warrior column.

Deon Taylor’s thriller Fatale (reviewed last month) will also be available to watch via VOD starting today.

Streaming:

WORTH WATCHING!

PRETEND IT’S A CITY (Netflix) No less than Martin Scorsese directs this 7-part limited series about his long-time friend, critic and essayist Fran Lebowitz, as they explore New York City, presumably pre-pandemic. As someone who is celebrating my 34th year in New York City this week, I absolutely loved the series. Lebowitz is absolutely hilarious and Scorsese really pulls some amazing stories from out of her in this series that’s like a “how-to” for anyone who might ever want to live here. A truly joyful albeit crotchety take on New York living, which is the perfect combination to keep this series entertaining.

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HERSELF (Prime Video) Phyllida Lloyd’s dramedy, starring Clare Dunne (who co-wrote the script) as a single mother trying to create a home for her two daughters and who decides to build an affordable home for them, hits the streamer today. Also reviewed in the previous Weekend Warrior column.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 10

Critics Choice Super Awards The inaugural edition of the Critics Choice’s genre film and television awards show will be broadcast on the CW tonight, hosted by Kevin Smith and Dani Fernandez.

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TUESDAY, JANUARY 12

Digital/VOD: SKYFIRE (ScreenMedia) The Simon-West directed thriller is set on the Tianhuo Island in a Pacific Rim volcanic belt where a young scientist (Hannah Quinlivan), who has invented a volcanic warning system, returns to prevent more death only to find that it’s been turned into a volcano theme park by Jason Isaacs. Okay, then. This will available On Demand.

THE BID (GVN Releasing) Marquis Boone’s directorial debut has him and co-writer Richard Harris (not that one) playing Philadelphia rappers who get framed by a police officer who sends them to prison to fight the prison system from the inside. As I started that last sentence, I presumed it was a comedy until I got to the last half of it.

CURSE OF AURORE (Freestyle Digital Releasing) Mehran C. Torgoley’s horror film is about a “Dark Web” thumb drive found by a YouTuber that involves a trio of American filmmakers including Liana Barron’s Lena, who are in Quebec researching the true crime case of a young girl named Aurore Gagnon, murdered in 1920 by her parents in a case of child abuse. As the filmmakers investigate the place where she was killed, they experience paranormal occurrences… and yes, it’s 2021 an we’re still getting Blair Witch Project “homages.”

GO/DON’T GO (Gravitas Ventures) Alex Knapp writes/directs and stars in this “psychosexual thriller” in which he plays the sole survivor after an unknown cataclysm with visons of his best friend Kyle (Nore Davis) introducing him to Olivia Luccardi’s Kay, the love of his life. It will be out via digital and cable VOD platforms.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 13

2021 New York Jewish Film Festival This long-running series from Film at Lincoln Center will run virtually this year, beginning with the Ophir Award-winning Here We Are from director Nir Bergman (who won Best Director), a road trip tale of a divorced dad hitting the road with his autistic son. The festival’s centerpiece is Winter Journey, co-directed by Anders Østergaard and Erzsébet Rácz, and starring the great Bruno Ganz. The festival also includes Israel’s entry to this year’s Oscars, Ruthy Pribar’s Asia. You can read all about the films in the program here and can get a 17-film All-Access pass for the entire line-up for $125.00.

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THE WHITE TIGER (Netflix) Ramin (99 Homes, Man Push Cart) Bahrani directs this comedic adaptation of Balram Halwai’s 2008 Man Booker Prize-winning bestseller. Halwai is played by Adarsh Gourav, as it follows his journey from being a poor driver who uses his wit and cunning to become a successful entrepreneur in India. Although Balram has been trained by society to only be a servant, he finds a way to work his way up through the system and try to change things from a new position within society. This will get a very limited theatrical release today before hitting Netflix on January 22.

Streaming: STALKER: THE HUNT FOR A SERIAL KILLER (Netflix) Tiller Russell’s docuseries tells the story about a serial killer that struck Los Angeles in 1985 in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave, the victims ranging from six to 82 years old.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 14

Theatrical/On Demand: BLOODY HELL (The Horror Collective) Alister Grierson’s violent horror-comedy stars Ben O’Toole as a man with a mysterious past who flees the country to escape his personal hell only to end up somewhere much worse. It opens in select cities and On Demand, and then will be on DVD and Blu-ray on Tuesday, January 19.

Streaming:

LOCKED DOWN (HBO Max) The Doug Liman-directed romantic comedy, starring Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, about a heist set during a pandemic that’s written by Steven Knight will hit the streamer today. This movie was fully made during the pandemic.

HUNTED (Shudder) The live action English debut from Persepolis and Chicken with Plums director Vincent Paronnaud will stream on Shudder today. It stars Lucie Debay as Eve, who becomes the target of a misogynistic plot against two men who pursue her through the forest where she’s forced to survive. From the synopsis: “But survival isn’t enough for Eve. She will have revenge!” (Okay, that exclamation point is my own. Definitely sounds like something that would require one.)

FRIDAY, JANUARY 15

Note: This is Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday weekend, so many government agencies and schools are off on Monday. Not sure that will really have an effect on anything.

Theatrical:

THE MARKSMAN (Briarcliff/Open Road) (NEW REVIEW!) Liam Neeson stars in his second theatrical release in the past six months, Robert (Trouble with the Curve) Lorenz’s action-thriller in which Neeson plays a rancher on the Arizona border who ends up defending a young Mexican boy who is trying to escape from cartel assassins that followed him into the States. I haven’t seen this yet, nor do I know if I’ll have a chance. I’m guessing this is being released as a typical January release and not as an awards contender with the Oscar deadline pushed back to February 28.

Mini-Review: Here we’re into a brand new year, and yet, we’re getting the third movie about an old man watching over a young child. This time it’s Liam Neeson as Vietnam sniper Jim Henson, who is living on his ranch in an Arizona border town with his dog Jackson with financial problems that might take his home away from him. A chance encounter on the border when Jim witnesses a single mother with her son being chased by the cartel, leaves the mother dead and the young, Miguel (Jacob Perez), in danger of being next. Jim decides to take the boy across the country to his family in Chicago, chased the entire way by the cartel.

While The Marksman attempts to create a topical action-thriller, it isn’t one that necessarily feels very timely, only because we’ve seen so many border-set movies over the past few years, maybe for obvious reasons. Director Robert Lorenz is a long-time Clint Eastwood collaborator, both as producer and assistant-director, and you probably will notice a number of similar stylistic flares in common – you also can totally see Eastwood playing the Neeson role if he was twenty years younger.

The movie comes across more like last year’s Let Him Go rather than Neeson’s own 2020 movie, Honest Thief, and maybe that’s for the better since this seems to be better suited for his specialized skills, both in terms of action and drama. Not that there is a ton of action in the movie, but the few shootouts and chases are decent enough, but nothing too insane. I’m sure ultra-liberals might have issues with certain scenes like how easy it is for Jim to buy a gun or teaching the young Miguel to use one, but that just seems creating an unnecessary political overlay.

While the majority of the film is Jim and Miguel on this road trip, there’s a nice role for Katheryn Winnick as Jim’s border police—well, it’s never really clear if she’s his daughter or not--but otherwise, the Mexican actors are not particularly good compared to Neeson – sadly, very stereotypical – and the writing is probably on the weaker side compared to the score by Sean Callery that goes a long way towards enhancing the emotions and tension when needed.

The Marksman is a decent enough dramatic thriller that feels a little by-the-books but gains enough humanity from Neeson’s performance to make it a worthwhile watch.

Rating: 7/10

THE DIG (Netflix) Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes star in this drama that takes place just before WWII with Mulligan playing a wealthy widow wo hires Fiennes’ archeologist to excavate the burial mounds on her estate in which they make a historic discovery. I like when movie titles are very literal like this one. Will be released to select cinemas before its Netflix debut on January 29.

MLK/FBI (IFC Films) Sam Pollack’s doc that’s had a successful festival run will get a small limited run as well as be available On Demand today. As the title implies, it studies the FBI’s attempts to discredit Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as his movement towards the Civil Rights Act continues to gain momentum. I didn’t like this as much as a few of Pollack’s other docs, including the recent Two Train Runnin’ and his co-directed doc, Mr Soul!

SOME KIND OF HEAVEN (Magnolia Pictures)

Lance Oppenheim’s first feature doc, co-produced by Darren Aronofsky, looks at the largest retirement community in America, the Villages in Central Florida, where a few residents are unable to find happiness despite the community’s pre-packaged paradise.

Quick Thoughts: This was a very different movie than I was expecting, since at first it seemed to thrive on the quirky personalities of the resident and their party-centric activities, but it then quickly focuses on three very particular cases, an elderly man named Dennis who is living in his van on the site of the Villages, trying to find himself a relationship (hopefully one with money). There’s also a couple who has been married for 47 years with a woman who has to deal with her husband’s ever-increasing eccentric behavior that involves drugs and troubles with the law. Lastly, there’s a widow who is trying to find happiness and companionship in the Villages, which is a particularly lonely experience as she goes from one group or club to another. All three of these stories keep the viewer invested but especially Oppenheim’s look at loneliness of people in that age group, which made it impossible for me not to think of my mother who has been suffering through the loneliness of the pandemic and not being able to be around other people her own age because of it. A terrifically insightful film that makes you think and hard about your own aging and mortality.

FLINCH (Ardor Pictures) Camron Van Hoy’s crime-thriller stars Daniel Zovatto as a young hitman who lives with his mother (Cathy Moriarty) who falls in love with a girl (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) who sees him kill someone. Since he can’t kill her, he instead brings her home and learns there’s more to her than he thought. This will ALSO be on TVOD starting on Tuesday, Jan. 21.

ACASA MY HOME (Zeitgeist, Kino Lorber) Romanian filmmaker Radu Ciorniciuc’s directorial debut doc, which premiered at Sundance last year (receiving an award for its cinematography), about the Enache family who lives in harmony with nature in the wilderness of the Bucharest Delta. When the area is turned into a public national park, they’re forced to move to the city where things are very different. It will open in select cities and via virtual cinema.

GOODBYE, BUTTERFLY (Gravitas Ventures) Tyler Wayne’s directorial debut is this crime thriller starring Adam Donshik (House of Cards) as Ryan Olsen, a family man whose five-year-old daughter is murdered, but with no leads, Ryan starts suspecting his oddball neighbor Stan (Andy Lauer), so Ryan takes the law into his own hands. This is getting day and date theatrical with TVOD (no idea what that is) and digital.

VOD:

AMERICAN SKIN Nate Parker’s second film as a director following the Sundance Prize-winning Birth of a Nation has him starring as a Marine veteran working as a school janitor who tries to fix things with his son, who is killed by a police officer who isn’t even put to trial for the death so he takes matters in his own hand. The drama also stars Omari Hardwick and will be available on iTunes and other VOD platforms.

Two of my favorite movies of 2020, Emmerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman (Focus Features), starring Carey Mulligan, and Paul Greengrass’ News of the World (Universal), starring Tom Hanks, will be available starting today via PVOD, rentable for 48-Hour rental. These both should be in the Oscar race, so don’t miss them!

Virtual Cinema:

TRIBUTE TO SAM POLLARD Film at Lincoln Center is running a one-week retrospective to editor, producer and director Sam Pollard to tie in with the release by IFC Films of MLK/FBI, which played at the New York Film Festival last year. It will include some of his own docs (including, hopefully, the excellent Mr. Soul!), as well as his collaborations with Spike Lee, St. Clair Bourne and Henry Hampton. Hopefully, there will be a line-up as it gets closer to the series start, and I’ll add that when it becomes available.

FILM ABOUT A FATHER WHO (Cinema Guild) Over a period of 35 years between 1984 and 2019, Lynne Sachs used various media, including 8 and 16mm film, videotape and digital images to capture a portrait of her father, Ira Sachs Sr, a Park Cit, Utah businessman, in order to understand the web that connects a child to her parents and a sister to her siblings. This will open in Virtual Cinema through the Museum of the Moving Image, Laemmle and others around the country. MOMI will also be holding a 30-year virtual retrospective of Ms. Sachs’ work, starting on Jan. 13.

MY LITTLE SISTER (Film Movement) Switzerland’s official Oscar entry is Stéphanie Chuat and Véronique Reymond’s drama starring Nina Hoss (Phoenix) as Lisa, a brilliant playwright who has stopped writing and now lives with her family in Switzerland. She dreams of returning to Berlin to be with her stage acting twin brother Sven (Lars Eldinger from Proxima) who is facing an aggressive leukemia. Lisa’s attention to her brother causes a rift in her marriage, but she hopes to write something that will get Sven back on stage before the inevitable. You can find a list of theaters showing this via virtual cinema here.

THE WAKE OF LIGHT (Laemmle) Renji Phillip’s drama stars Rome Brooks as a young woman who has to choose between seeking love with Cole (Matt Bush), a young man she meets who wants her to join him on his road trip, or caring for her aging father . This will have a virtual theatrical release through Laemmle Theaters today and then be available through Digital Platforms on February 15.

MANDABI (Janus Films) Senegalese novelist and the “father of African film” Ousmne Sembène’s 1968 film about an unemployed man who finds a windfall of money will get a release through Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema.

Streaming:

OUTSIDE THE WIRE (Netflix) Anthony Mackie stars in Mikael Håfström’s sci-fi thriller, playing android officer Leo who is teamed with drone pilot Harp (Damson Idris) to locate a doomsday device in a militarized zone before insurgents do.

WANDAVISION (Disney+) The long-awaited Marvel Studios television series that ties directly into the MCU, spinning-off Elisabeth Olsen’s Wanda and Paul Bettany’s Vision into their own series that seems to be playing with other dimensions and worlds but also

ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI… (Amazon Prime Video) Regina King’s powerful drama will finally stream on Prime Video, so those who haven’t had a chance to see it at a festival or awards screening or in theaters will get to see it. Woohoo!

SATURDAY, JANUARY 16

Streaming: SERVANT (Apple TV+) Season 2 of the M. Night Shyamalan produced thriller series will debut. I hope to have some more to write about as it gets closer, since it’s currently under embargo.

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MONDAY, JANUARY 18 VOD/Digital:

STALLONE... FRANK, THAT IS (Branded Studio) Derek Wayne Johnson’s documentary takes an in-depth look into the life and career of Frank Stallone, the younger brother of the far-more-famous Sylvester Stallone, whose own four decade career has earned him three Platinum Albums, ten Gold Albums and five Gold Singles… which is odd, since I don’t think I could name a single one of his songs. He’s also done soundtracks for many of his brother’s films including The Expendables 2, the first three Rocky movies, Rambo II and more and appeared in 75 films and TV shows. Obviously, I’ll need to watch this doc to learn more about him.

YUNG LEUN: IN MY HEAD (Momento Film/Nonstop Entertainment) Henrik Burman’s doc about Swedish hip-hop artist Yung Leun aka Jonathan Leandoer, who turned his love for rap music into a career by making music on his computer and putting the results up on YouTube, but soon, the imaginary character he has been portraying starts to take over, leading to drugs and mental illness.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 20

Virtual Cinema:

THE SALT OF TEARS (Distrib Films) Philippe Garrel’s black and white drama about toxic masculinity involving one young handsome man put amidst three vulnerable women will play as part of Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 22

Theatrical:

NO MAN’S LAND (IFC Films) Conor Allyn’s thriller stars Frank Grillo as border “vigilante” Bill Greer, whose son Jackson (Jake Allyn) accidentally kills a Mexican immigrant boy while on patrol. Although Bill tries to take the blame, a Texas Ranger, played by George Lopez, urges Jackson to flee south via horseback into Mexico to hide out, chased by both rangers and Mexican federales, as he seeks forgiveness from the boy’s father (Jorge A. JIminez). Simultaneous theatrical and VOD.

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OUR FRIEND (Gravitas Ventures/Universal) Casey Affleck, Dakota Johnson and Jason Segel star in Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s adaptation of Matthew Teague’s novel The Friend: Love is Not a Big Enough Word (adapted by filmmaker Brad Ingelsby), which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2019. It tells the story of the Teague family – Afleck’s Matt, a journalist, his wife Nicole (Johnson) and their two daughters – and how their life is upended when she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer, forcing Matt to take on more responsibilities as her caretaker and parent, so the couple’s friend Dane (Segel) offers to help out. The film will be in select theaters and On Demand.

THE HUMAN FACTOR (Sony Pictures Classics) Oscar-nominated doc The Gatekeepers director Dror Moreh takes a look at the peace process between Israelis and Arabs over the past thirty years through the eyes of American mediators, spending time with all of the key players in the conflict trying to find a solution.

BROTHERS BY BLOOD (Vertical) Jérémie Guez’s revenge thriller, based on Pete Dexter’s novel, stars Joel Kinnaman as Peter Flood, who as an 8-year-old saw his little sister be killed in a reckless driving accident, for which his father sought violent revenge. 30 year later, he’s still trying to deal with his guilt and tries to distance himself from his family crime business and his cousin Michael (Matthias Schoenarts) who has been rising up in the business. In select theaters, and on VOD/Digital.

PG: PSYCHO GOREMAN (RLJfilms/Shudder) Steven Kostanski’s horror-comedy follows siblings Mimi and Luke (Nita-Josee Hanna, Owen Myre), who resurrect an ancient alien overlord who had been entombed million years ago, nicknaming the evil creature “Psycho Goreman” aka PG (Matthew Ninaber), using an amulet to make him obey their wishes. Soon, lots of PG’s friends and foes from across the galaxy realize he’s been released, and they come to Mimi and Luke’s town to resume their battle. This will also be in select theaters, On Demand and digital.

BORN A CHAMPION (Lionsgate) (NEW ADDITION!) Dennis Quaid and Sean Patrick Flanery (The Boondock Saints) star in this mixed martial arts film directed by Alex Ranarivelo (American Wrestler: The Wizard) that hits select theaters, digital, and On Demand today before being released on Blu-Ray and DVD on Tuesday, January 26. Flannery plays fighting legend Mickey Kelly, who lost a blood-soaked jujitsu match in Dubai only to learn many years later, that his opponent cheated, so he has to get in shape for a revenge match.

Digital/VOD/Virtual Cinema:

IDENTIFYING FEATURES (Kino Lorber) (NEW ADDITION!) Having just won the Gotham Award for Best International Feature on Monday (after winning the audience and screenplay awards in the World Cinema category at Sundance last year), Fernanda Valadez’s Mexican border thriller will be released on Kino Marquee and via various virtual cinemas nationwide. It stars Mercedes Hernandez as middle-aged Magdalena, who has lost contact with her son after he’s left their town to cross the border into the U.S. to find work. She ends up following on an equally dangerous journey to find him while a young man named Miguel (David Illescas), recently deported back to Mexico crosses paths with her.

ATLANTIS (Grasshopper) Ukraine’s Oscar selection is this film from Valentyn Vasyanovych set in a desolate post-war Ukraine where former soldier Sergiy delivers the rare resource of water and volunteers his time to recover the dead bodies of fellow soldiers in hopes of healing. This will open exclusively in Metrograph’s Virtual Cinema system Friday.

NOTTURNO (Super) (NEW ADDITION!) Gianfranco (Fire at Sea) Rosi’s new documentary is Italy’s entry to the Oscars, as the filmmaker spent three years on the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria and Lebanon capturing the day every day life that follows the tragedy of the dictatorships and civil wars within those countries. It will get an exclusive virtual cinema launch today and then be available on Hulu and On Demand starting Jan. 29.

COMING CLEAN The new doc from Ondi Timoner (Dig!, We Live in Public) takes a comprehensive look at the opioid crisis, and the part in it played by Purdue Pharmaceutical and how it deceived patients (and doctors) to lure them in and get them hooked. Available via Virtual Cinema after its virtual festival run.

PREPARATIONS TO BE TOGETHER FOR AN UNKNOWN TIME (Greenwich) Hungarian filmmaker Lili Horvát makes a love story set in the male-driven world of neurosurgery, starring Natasa Stork as Márta Vizy, who returns to Hungary after time in America to discover that a colleague with whom she had a passionate affair says he’s never seen her before. This will open in Virtual Cinema at Film at Lincoln Center and other places. Part of Lincoln Center’s Virtual Cinema, as well as Hungary’s official entry for the International Film Oscar.

BREAKING FAST (Vertical Entertainment) Mike Mosallam’s romantic dramedy set in West Hollywood stars Haaz Sleiman as Mo, a practicing Muslim who recently had his heart broken. When All-American Kal (Michael Cassidy) agrees to come to nightly Iftars (the traditional Ramadan meal), they soon learn that they have more in common than they thought. Available on VOD and digital.

Streaming:

THE WHITE TIGER (Netflix) Ramin (99 Homes, Man Push Cart) Bahrani’s comic adaptation of Balram Halwai’s bestseller hits the streaming service today.

THE SISTER (Hulu) Neil Cross adapted his own novel Burial into this four-part original series starring Russell Tovey as Nathan, who has been keeping a secret from his past, a party that ended with the shocking death of a young woman. Only Nathan and Bob (Bertie Carvel) knew what happened, but then Bob appears on Nathan’s doorstep with horrifying news.

PIXAR POPCORN (Disney+) The Disney streamer debuts a series of short films starring your favorite Pixar characters from Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Cars and The Incredibles.

Blown Away and Busted! (Netflix) Season 2 of the glass-blowing competition reality series and Season 3 of the amateur celebrity sleuth series begin.

Fate: The Winx Saga (Netflix) Brian Young’s live-action version of the Italian cartoon “Winx Club,” a coming-of-age journey that follows five fairies as they enter the magical boarding school called Alfrea.

Derek Delgaudio’s In and Of Itself (Hulu) The comedy directed by Frank Oz and exec. produced by Stephen Colbert that’s “a new kind of lyric poem.” Telling “the story of a man fighting to see through the illusion of his own identity, only to discover that identity itself is an illusion.” Yeah, no idea what that means but even Oz isn’t able to describe it, so that’s pretty weird.

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TUESDAY, JANUARY 26

Theatrical:

WRONG TURN (Saban Films) Mike P. Nelson’s remake of the 00’s horror franchise will debut as a Fathom Event today. It stars Charlotte Vega, Adain Bradley, Bill Sage, Emma Dumont, Dylan McTee, Daisy Head, Tim DeZarn and Matthew Modine. It involves a group of friends hiking the Appalachian Trail who… you guessed it… make a wrong turn and end up in the land of the Foundation, a community of mountain dwellers who want to protect their lifestyle.

Digital/VOD:

CAGED (Shout Factory) Aaron Fjellman’s thriller stars Kenyan-born actor Edi Gathegi (The Blacklist), Melora Hardin, Angela Sarafyan, Tony Amendola and James Jagger. Gathegi plays an affluent African-American psychiatrist who is convicted of murdering his wife (Sarafyan) and sentenced to life and put in solitary. While trying to file an appeal, he’s pushed to the breaking point by an abusive female guard (Hardin), causing him to question his innocence and sanity.

#LIKE Sarah Pirozek’s thriller stars Sarah Rich as a Woodstock, NY teenager named Rosie who a year after her sister Amelia’s death from suicide after being cyberbullied learns that the man responsible (Marc Menchaca) is back online looking for new victims. It will be available via TVOD on iTunes, Amazon Prime, Vudu, FandangoNow and more.

A WOMAN’S WORK: THE NFL’S CHEERLEADER PROBLEM (1091) (NEW ADDITION!) Yu Gu’s documentary, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2019, will be released on VOD today. It looks at a couple cases of professional NFL cheerleaders who re making far less than deserve, almost working at minimum wage while having to pay out of pocket for their own beauty, transportation and uniforms, putting them into debt. So they sue the Oakland Raiders in a class-action lawsuit.

WEDNESDAY, JANURY 27

Streaming: PENGUIN BLOOM (Netflix) Glendyn Ivin’s adaptation of Bradley Trevor Greive’s novel stars Naomi Watts as Samantha Bloom, an Australian mother of three boys who travelled with her husband Cameron (Andrew Lincoln from The Walking Dead) in 2013 and became paralyzed from the waist down after falling from a rooftop. She ends up bonding with a black and white bird her kids name “Penguin” that helps her heal.

THURSDAY, JANUARY 28 The Sundance Film Festival begins today, running until February 3. Hope to have some coverage here and on Below the Line.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 29

Theatrical:

FEATURED FLICK! THE LITTLE THINGS (Warner Bros/HBO Max) John Lee Hancock directs this psychological thriller that puts Oscar winner Denzel Washington back into Bone Collectormode, as he plays Kern County Deputy Sheriff Joe “Deke” Deacon, who is sent to Los Angeles to gather evidence but ends up looking for a killer terrorizing the city with a local Sergeant, played by Oscar winner Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody). Getting involved in the case, brings up secrets from Deke’s past. A third Oscar winner, Jared Leto, presumably plays the killer. This will be in theaters and streaming on HBO Max day-and-date. I will have a review for this closer to release.

FEATURED FLICK! SUPERNOVA (Bleecker Street) Harry Macqueen’s drama stars Colin Firth and Stanely Tucci as twenty-year partners Sam and Tusk, who travel across England in a camper van visiting friends, family and places from their past after a life-changing diagnosis that will test their love for each other. Look for my review of this very soon.

FEATURED FLICK! MALCOLM AND MARIE (Netflix) (NEW ADDITION!)

A week before its debut on the stream, Euphoria creator Sam Levinson’s new drama, starring John David Washington and Zendaya, will hit select theaters. Made during the pandemic, Washington plays a filmmaker on the night of the premier of his first feature gets into a very heavy conversation about their relationship with his partner (Zendaya) who doesn’t think he appreciates her and her contribution to his craft. Will have a review of this sometime later this week.

SAINT MAUD (A24) (NEW ADDITION!) Rose Glass’ acclaimed directorial debut starring breakout star Morfydd Clark as Maud, a hospice nurse who becomes obsessed with saving the soul of her dying patient (played by Jennifer Ehle) but sinister forces try to stop her. This will get a theatrical release today and then will get some sort of Epix Pay TV release on February 12. The movie just received eight nominations from the London Film Critics Circle, but honestly, I saw the movie so long ago, I don’t really remember it very much.

APOLLO 11: QUARANTINE (NEON) (NEW ADDITION!) This new doc short by Todd Douglas Miller follows up his Emmy-winning documentary, Apollo 11, this one covering the astronauts of the first spaceflight to the moon as they quarantine for three days after arriving back on earth. This will open in IMAX theaters this day and then be available On Demand starting February 5.

FINDING YOU (Roadside Attractions) Brian Baugh’s adaptation of Jenny B. Jones’ novel There You’ll Find Me is a romantic drama starring Rose Reid as violinist Finley Sinclair who is studying abroad at an Irish coastal village after failing to get into a New York music conservatory. Once there, she meets heartthrob movie star Beckett Rush (Jedidiah Goodacre) who is there filming his fantasy-adventure franchise, and a romance blooms between them.

THE NIGHT (IFC Midnight) Kourosh Ahari’s horror-thriller stars Shahab Hosseini and Niousha Noor as a married couple with a baby who take shelter in the eerie Hotel Normandie after a night out partying with friends. Over the course of the night, they realize they’re locked in with a malevolent force.

HAYMAKER (Gravitas Ventures) Nick Sasso wrote, directed, edited and stars in the action-thriller in which he plays a retired Muay Thai fighter working as a bouncer who rescues a transgender performer (Nomi Ruiz) from a thug and becomes her bodyguard and protector in a relationship that also forces him back into the world of fighting. It will open in select theaters, On Demand AND Digital.

Virtual Cinema: DEAR COMRADES! (NEON) (NEW ADDITION!) Andrei Konchalovski’s 1962-set Russian drama about a rebellion and a strike following the rising of food prices in the industrial town of Novocherkassk and the massacre that follows. Following its December one-week qualifying, it will open in virtual cinemas this Friday (Jan 29) and then will be available On Demand and on Hulu starting February 5.

On Demand/Digital:

SAVAGE STATE (Samuel Goldwyn Films) David Perrault’s French-tinged Western takes place at the start of the Civil War as a family of French colonists in Missouri decide to return to France, but first they have to cross the entire country to get back to New York, led by a dangerous mercenary named Victor (Kevin Janssens).

Virtual Cinema: WHAT HAPPENED WAS... (Oscilloscope) Actor Tom Noonan’s 1994 directorial debut is a dark comedy about dating based on his own play, starring Noonan and Karen Sillas as co-workers who are stuck together on a Friday night after an intimate dinner that goes sideways. This won the Grand Jury Prize and Screenwriting Award at the 1994 Sundance, and will be added to Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema.

THE FUNERAL HOME (Uncork’d Entertainment) (NEW ADDITION!) Mauro Iván Ojeda’s supernatural thriller, which premiered at the Fantasia Fest last year, will hit virtual theaters today before its digital release on Tuesday, February 2. It’s about the dysfunctional family of an undertaker who experience all sorts of paranormal manifestations, but it could just be that they’re all MAAAAAD!

THE REUNITED STATES (Dark Star Pictures) (NEW ADDITION!) Ben Rekhi’s doc is about a group of unsung heroes trying to bridge the political and racial divides in the country as it’s being ripped apart at the seams.It will be available via virtual cinema today and on VOD platforms February 9.

Streaming:

THE DIG (Netflix) The Cary Mulligan-Ralph Fiennes drama is scheduled to hit the streamer.

PALMER (Apple TV+) Justin Timberlake stars in the Fisher Stevens-directed drama as an ex-convict who strikes up a friendship with a boy from a troubled home, played by Ryder Allen. It also stars Juno Temple and June Squibb.

BEGINNING (MUBI) (NEW ADDITION!) Georgia’s (the country, not the state) Oscar entry is the debut feature from writer-director Dea Kulumbegashvili, a drama about a Jehovah’s Witness who undergoes a dramatic crisis of faith. Ila Sukhitshvili plays Yana, the wife of a Jehovah’s Witness leader whose community is attack from an extremist group that creates Yana’s discontent to grow.

WE ARE: THE BROOKLYN SAINTS (Netflix)

The new four-part docuseries from Rudy Valdez (The Sentence) looks at the youth football program in East New York, Brooklyn, where the Brooklyn Saints program gets 7 to 13-year-old boys ready to play and succeed in athletics, while also creating a community.

That’s it for January. Again, check back over the course of the month to see what reviews/movies have been added. Hopefully, we’ll be back to your normal weekly Weekend Warrior by February, but we’ll see.

#TheWeekendWarrior #MonthlyPreview #Reviews #Movies #Streaming

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blackkudos · 4 years

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Ernie Barnes

Ernest Eugene Barnes Jr. (July 15, 1938 – April 27, 2009) was an American artist, well known for his unique style of elongation and movement. He was also a professional football player, actor and author.

Early life

Childhood

Ernest Barnes Jr. was born during the Jim Crow in "the bottom" community of Durham, North Carolina, near the Hayti District of the city. He had a younger brother, James (b. 1942), as well as a half-brother, Benjamin B. Rogers Jr. (1920–1970). Ernest Jr. was nicknamed "June". His father, Ernest E. Barnes Sr. (–1966), worked as a shipping clerk for Liggett Myers Tobacco Company. His mother, Fannie Mae Geer (1905–2004), oversaw the household staff for a prominent Durham attorney and local Board of Education member, Frank L. Fuller Jr.

On days when Fannie allowed "June" (Barnes' nickname to family and childhood friends) to accompany her to work, Mr. Fuller encouraged him to peruse the art books and listen to classical music. The young Ernest was intrigued and captivated by the works of master artists. By the time Barnes entered the first grade, he was familiar with the works of such masters as Toulouse-Lautrec, Delacroix, Rubens and Michelangelo. When he entered junior high school, he could appreciate, as well as decode, many of the cherished masterpieces within the walls of mainstream museums – although it would be many more years before he was allowed entrance because of segregation.

A self-described chubby and unathletic child, Barnes was taunted and bullied by classmates. He continually sought refuge in his sketchbooks, finding the less-traveled parts of campus away from other students. One day Ernest was drawing in his notebook in a quiet area of the school. He was discovered hiding there by the masonry teacher, Tommy Tucker, who was also the weightlifting coach and a former athlete. He was intrigued with Barnes' drawings, so he asked the aspiring artist about his grades and goals. Tucker shared his own experience of how bodybuilding improved his strength and outlook on life. That one encounter would begin Barnes' discipline and dedication that would permeate his life. In his senior year at Hillside High School, Barnes became the captain of the football team and state champion in the shot put.

College education

Barnes attended racially segregated schools. In 1956 he graduated from Hillside High School with 26 athletic scholarship offers. Segregation prevented him from attending nearby Duke University or the University of North Carolina. His mother promised him a car if he lived at home so he attended the all-Black North Carolina College at Durham (formerly North Carolina College for Negroes, now North Carolina Central University). At North Carolina College he majored in art on a full athletic scholarship. His track coach was Dr. Leroy T. Walker. Barnes played the football positions of tackle and center at NCC.

At age 18, on a college art class field trip to the newly desegregated North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, Barnes inquired where he could find "paintings by Negro artists". The docent responded, "Your people don't express themselves that way". 23 years later, in 1979, when Barnes returned to the museum for a solo exhibition, North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt attended.

In 1990 Barnes was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by North Carolina Central University.

In 1999 Barnes was bestowed "The University Award", the highest honor by the University of North Carolina Board of Governors.

Professional football

Baltimore Colts (1959–60)

In December 1959 Barnes was drafted in the 10th round by the then-World Champion Baltimore Colts. He was originally selected in the 8th-round by the Washington Redskins, who renounced the pick minutes after discovering he was a Negro.

Shortly after his 22nd birthday, while at the Colts training camp, Barnes was interviewed by N.P. Clark, sportswriter for the Baltimore News-Post newspaper. Until then Barnes was always known by his birth name, Ernest Barnes. But when Clark's article appeared on July 20, 1960, it referred to him as "Ernie Barnes," which changed his name and life forever.

Titans of New York (1960)

Barnes was the last cut of the Colts' training camp. After Baltimore released Barnes, the newly formed Titans of New York immediately signed him because the team had first option on any player released within the league.

Barnes loathed being on the Titans. He said, "(New York team organization) was a circus of ineptitude. The equipment was poor, the coaches not as knowledgeable as the ones in Baltimore. We were like a group of guys in the neighborhood who said let's pretend we're pros."

After their seventh game on October 9, 1960 at Jeppesen Stadium, his teammate Howard Glenn died. Barnes asked for his release two days later. The cause of Glenn's death was reported as a broken neck. However, Barnes and other teammates have long attributed it to heatstroke. In a later interview, Barnes said, "They never really said what he died of. (Coach) Sammy Baugh said he'd broken his neck in a game the Sunday before. But how could that be? How could he have hit in practice all week with a broken neck? What he died of, I think, was more like heat exhaustion. I told them I didn't want to play on a team like this."

San Diego Chargers (1960–62)

Barnes decided to accept a previous offer from Coach Al Davis at the Los Angeles Chargers. Barnes joined their team at mid-season as a member of their taxi squad. The following season in 1961 the team moved to San Diego. It was there Barnes met teammate Jack Kemp, and the two men would share a very close lifelong friendship.

During the off-seasons with the Chargers, Barnes was program director at San Diego's Southeast YMCA working with parolees from the California Youth Authority. He also worked as the Sports Editor for The Voice, a local San Diego newspaper, writing a weekly column called "A Matter of Sports."

Barnes also illustrated several articles for San Diego Magazine during the off-seasons in 1962 and 1963.

Barnes' first television interview as a professional football player and artist was in 1962 on The Regis Philbin Show on KGTV in San Diego. It was Philbin's first talk show. They would see each other again 45 years later when Philbin attended the tribute to Barnes in New York City.

Denver Broncos (1963–64)

Midway through Barnes' second season with the Chargers, he was cut after a series of injuries. He was then signed to the Denver Broncos.

Barnes was often fined by Denver Coach Jack Faulkner when caught sketching during team meetings. One of the sketches that he was fined $100 for sold years later for $1000.

Many times during breaks, Barnes would run off the field onto the sideline to give his offensive line coach Red Miller the scraps of paper of his sketches and notes.

"During a timeout you've got nothing to do – you're not talking – you're just trying to breathe, mostly. Nothing to take out that little pencil and write down what you saw. The shape of the linemen. The body language a defensive lineman would occupy... his posture... What I see when you pull. The reaction of the defense to your movement. The awareness of the lines within the movement, the pattern within the lines, the rhythm of movement. A couple of notes to me would denote an action... an image that I could instantly recreate in my mind. Some of those notes have been made into paintings. Quite a few, really."

On Barnes' 1964 Denver Broncos Topps football card he is shown wearing jersey #55 although he never played in that number. His jersey was #62.

Barnes was called "Big Rembrandt" by his Denver teammates. Coincidentally, Barnes and Rembrandt share the same birthday.

Canadian Football League

In 1965, after his second season with the Broncos, Barnes signed with the Saskatchewan Roughriders in Canada. In the final quarter of their last exhibition game, Barnes fractured his right foot, effectively ending his professional football career.

Retirement

Shortly after his final football game, Barnes went to the 1965 NFL owners meeting in Houston in hopes of becoming the league's official artist. There he was introduced to New York Jets owner Sonny Werblin, who was intrigued by Barnes and his art. He paid for Barnes to bring his paintings to New York City. Later they met at a gallery and unbeknownst to Barnes, three art critics were there to evaluate his paintings. They told Werblin that Barnes was "the most expressive painter of sports since George Bellows."

In what was one of the most unusual posts in the history of the NFL, Werblin retained Barnes as a salaried player, but positioned him in front of the canvas, rather than on the football field. Werblin told Barnes, "You have more value to the country as an artist than as a football player."

Barnes' November 1966 debut solo exhibition, hosted by Werblin at the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York City was critically acclaimed and all the paintings sold.

In 1971 Barnes wrote a series of essays (illustrated with his own drawings) in the Gridiron newspaper titled "I Hate the Game I Love" (with Neil Amdur). These articles became the beginning manuscript of his autobiography, later-published in 1995 titled From Pads to Palette which chronicles his transition from professional football to his art career.

In 1993 Barnes was selected to the "Black College Football 100th Year All-Time Team" by the Sheridan Broadcasting Network.

Artwork

Barnes credits his college art instructor Ed Wilson for laying the foundation for his development as an artist. Wilson was a sculptor who instructed Barnes to paint from his own life experiences. "He made me conscious of the fact that the artist who is useful to America is one who studies his own life and records it through the medium of art, manners and customs of his own experiences."

All his life, Barnes was ambivalent about his football experience. In interviews and in personal appearances, Barnes said he hated the violence and the physical torment of the sport. However, his years as an athlete gave him unique, in-depth observations. "(Wilson) told me to pay attention to what my body felt like in movement. Within that elongation, there's a feeling. And attitude and expression. I hate to think had I not played sports what my work would look like."

Barnes sold his first painting "Slow Dance" at age 21 in 1959 for $90 to Boston Celtic Sam Jones. It was subsequently lost in a fire at Jones' home.

Numerous artists have been influenced by Barnes' art and unique style. Accordingly, several copyright infringement lawsuits have been settled and are currently pending.

Framing

Ernie Barnes framed his paintings with distressed wood in homage to his father. In his 1995 autobiography, Barnes wrote of his father: “... with so little education, he had worked so hard for us. His legacy to me was his effort, and that was plenty. He knew absolutely nothing about art.”

Weeks before Ernie Barnes’ first solo art exhibition in 1966, he was at the family home in Durham as his father lay in the hospital after suffering a stroke. He noticed the usually well-maintained white picketed fence had gone untended since his father’s illness. Days later, Ernest E. Barnes Sr. died. “I placed a painting against the fence and stood away and had a look. I was startled at the marriage between the old wood fence and the painting. It was perfect. In tribute, Daddy’s fence would hug all my paintings in a prestigious New York gallery. That would have made him smile.”

Eyes closed

A consistent and distinct feature in Barnes' work is the closed eyes of his subjects. "It was in 1971 when I conceived the idea of The Beauty of the Ghetto as an exhibition. And I showed it to some people who were Black to get a reaction. And from one (person) it was very negative. And when I began to express my points of view (to this) professional man, he resisted the notion. And as a result of his comments and his attitude I began to see, observe, how blind we are to one another's humanity. Blinded by a lot of things that have, perhaps, initiated feelings in that light. We don't see into the depths of our interconnection. The gifts, the strength and potential within other human beings. We stop at color quite often. So one of the things we have to be aware of is who we are in order to have the capacity to like others. But when you cannot visualize the offerings of another human being you're obviously not looking at the human being with open eyes." "We look upon each other and decide immediately: This person is black, so he must be... This person lives in poverty, so he must be..."

Jewish community influence

Moving to an all-Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles known as the Fairfax District in 1971 was a major turning point in Barnes' life and art.

"Fairfax enlivened me to everyday life themes," he said, "and forced me to look at my life – the way I had grown up, the customs within my community versus the customs in the Jewish community. Their customs were documented, ours were not. Because we were so clueless that our own culture had value and because of the phrase 'Black is Beautiful' had just come into fashion, Black people were just starting to appreciate themselves as a people. But when it was said, 'I'm Black and I'm Proud,' I said, 'proud of what?' And that question of 'proud of what' led to a series of paintings that became “The Beauty of the Ghetto.'"

"The Beauty of the Ghetto" exhibition

In response to the 1960s "Black is beautiful" cultural movement and James Brown's 1968 "Say it Loud: I'm Black and I'm Proud" song, Barnes created The Beauty of the Ghetto exhibition of 35 paintings that toured major American cities from 1972 to 1979 hosted by dignitaries, professional athletes and celebrities.

Of this exhibition, Barnes said, "I am providing a pictorial background for an understanding into the aesthetics of black America. It is not a plea to people to continue to live there (in the ghetto) but for those who feel trapped, it is...a challenge of how beautiful life can be."

When the exhibition was on view in 1974 at the Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, Rep. John Conyers stressed the important positive message of the exhibit in the Congressional Record.

Sports art

The Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee named Barnes "Sports Artist of the 1984 Olympic Games". LAOOC President Peter V. Ueberroth said Barnes and his art "captured the essence of the Olympics" and "portray the city's ethnic diversity, the power and emotion of sports competition, the singleness of purpose and hopes that go into the making of athletes the world over." Barnes was commissioned to create five Olympic-themed paintings and serve as an official Olympic spokesman to encourage inner city youth.

1985: Barnes was named the first "Sports Artist of the Year" by the United States Sports Academy.

1987: Barnes created Fastbreak, a commissioned painting of the World Champion Los Angeles Lakers basketball team that included Magic Johnson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, James Worthy, Kurt Rambis and Michael Cooper.

1996: Carolina Panthers football team owners Rosalind and Jerry Richardson (Barnes' former Colts teammate) commissioned Barnes to create the large painting Victory in Overtime (approximately 7 ft. x 14 ft.). It was unveiled before the team's 1996 inaugural season and hangs permanently in the owner's suite at the stadium. Richardson and Barnes were Baltimore Colts teammates briefly in 1960.

1996: To commemorate their 50th anniversary in 1996, the National Basketball Association commissioned Barnes to create a painting with the theme, "Where we were, where we are, and where we are going." The painting, The Dream Unfolds hangs in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. A limited edition of lithographs were made, with the first 50 prints going to each of the NBA's 50th Anniversary All-Time Team.

2004: Barnes was named "America's Best Painter of Sports" by the American Sport Art Museum & Archives.

Other notable sports commissions include paintings for the New Orleans Saints, Oakland Raiders and Boston Patriots football team owners.

"The Bench" painting

Shortly after Barnes was drafted by the Baltimore Colts, Barnes was invited to see their Colts' NFL Championship Game vs. the New York Giants at Memorial Stadium in Maryland on December 27, 1959. The Colts won 31–16 and Barnes was filled with layers of emotion after watching the game from the Colts' bench. At age 21, he had just signed his football contract and met his new teammates Johnny Unitas, Jim Parker, Lenny Moore, Art Donovan, Gino Marchetti, Alan Ameche and "Big Daddy" Lipscomb.

After he returned home, without making any preliminary sketches, he went directly to a blank canvas to record his point of view. Using a palette knife, "painting in quick, direct movements hoping to capture the vision...before it evaporated," Barnes said, he created "The Bench" in less than an hour. Throughout his life, The Bench remained in Barnes' possession, even taking it with him to all his football training camps and hiding it under his bed. It would be the only painting Barnes would never sell, despite many substantial offers, including a $25,000 bid at his first show in 1966.

In 2014, Barnes' wife Bernie presented The Bench painting to the Pro Football Hall of Fame for their permanent collection in Canton, Ohio.

"The Sugar Shack" painting

Barnes created the painting The Sugar Shack in 1971. It gained international exposure when it was used on the Good Times television series and on the 1976 Marvin Gaye album I Want You.

According to Barnes, he created the original version of The Sugar Shack after reflecting upon his childhood, during which he was not "able to go to a dance." In a 2008 interview, Barnes said, "The Sugar Shack is a recall of a childhood experience. It was the first time my innocence met with the sins of dance. The painting transmits rhythm so the experience is re-created in the person viewing it. To show that African-Americans utilize rhythm as a way of resolving physical tension."

The Sugar Shack has been known to art critics for embodying the style of art composition known as "Black Romantic," which, according to Natalie Hopkinson of The Washington Post, is the "visual-art equivalent of the Chitlin' circuit."

When Barnes first created The Sugar Shack, he included his hometown radio station WSRC on a banner. (He incorrectly listed the frequency as 620, though it was actually 1410. Barnes confused what he used to hear WSRC's on-air personality Norfley Whitted saying "620 on your dial" when Whitted was at his former station WDNC in the early 1950s.)

After Marvin Gaye asked him for permission to use the painting as an album cover, Barnes then augmented the painting by adding references that allude to Gaye's album, including banners hanging from the ceiling to promote the album's singles.

During the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever anniversary television special on March 25, 1983, tribute was paid to The Sugar Shack with a dance interpretation of the painting. It was also during this telecast that Michael Jackson introduced his famous "moonwalk" dance.

The original piece is currently owned by Jim and Jeannine Epstein, and is on display at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh. A duplicate created by Barnes was created in 1976 on display at the California African American Museum (CAAM).

Music album covers

Barnes' work appears on the following album covers:

The Sugar Shack painting on Marvin Gaye's 1976 I Want You

The Disco painting on self-titled 1978 Faith, Hope & Charity

Donald Byrd and 125th Street, NYC painting on self-titled 1979 album

Late Night DJ painting on Curtis Mayfield's 1980 Something to Believe In

The Maestro painting on The Crusaders' 1984 Ghetto Blaster

Head Over Heels painting on The Crusaders' 1986 The Good and Bad Times

In Rapture painting on B.B. King's 2000 Making Love is Good For You

Other notable art and exhibitions

1992: In the wake of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Mayor Tom Bradley used Barnes' painting Growth Through Limits as an inspirational billboard in the inner-city. Barnes contributed $1,000 to the winner of a slogan contest among the city's junior high school students that best represented the painting.

1995: Barnes' work was included in the traveling group exhibition 20th Century Masterworks of African-American Artists II.

1998: Barnes' painting The Advocate was donated to the North Carolina Central University School of Law by a private collector. Barnes felt compelled to create the painting from his "concern with the just application of the law... the integrity of the legal process for all people, but especially those without resource or influence."

2001: While watching the tragic events of 9/11, Barnes created the painting In Remembrance. It was formally unveiled at the Seattle Art Museum. It was later acquired on behalf of the City of Philadelphia and donated to its African American Museum. A limited number of giclée prints were sold with 100% of the proceeds going to the Hero Scholarship Fund, which provides college tuition and expenses to children of Pennsylvania police and fire personnel killed in the line of duty.

2005: Three of Barnes' original paintings were exhibited at London's Whitechapel Gallery in the 2005 Back to Black: Art, Cinema & Racial Imaginary art exhibition.

2005: Kanye West commissioned Barnes to create a painting to depict his life-changing experience following his near-fatal car crash. A Life Restored measures 9 ft. x 10 ft. In the center of the painting is a large angel reaching out to a much smaller figure of West.

October 2007: Barnes' final public exhibition. The National Football League and Time Warner sponsored A Tribute to Artist and NFL Alumni Ernie Barnes in New York City.

At the time of his passing, Barnes had been working on an exhibition Liberating Humanity From Within which featured a majority of paintings he created in the last few years of his life. Plans are under way for the exhibition to travel throughout the country and abroad.

Television and movies

Barnes appeared on a 1967 episode of the game show To Tell the Truth. The panelists correctly guessed Barnes was the professional football player-turned-artist.

Barnes played Deke Coleman in the 1969 motion picture Number One, which stars Charlton Heston and Jessica Walter. Barnes played Dr. Penfield in the 1971 movie Doctors' Wives, which starred Dyan Cannon, Richard Crenna, Gene Hackman and Carroll O'Connor.

In 1971 Barnes, along with Mike Henry, created the Super Comedy Bowl, a variety show CBS television special which showcased pro athletes with celebrities such as John Wayne, Frank Gifford, Alex Karras, Joe Namath, Jack Lemmon, Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett and Tony Curtis. A second special aired in 1972.

Throughout the Good Times television series (1974–79) most of the paintings by the character J.J. are works by Ernie Barnes. However a few images, including "Black Jesus" in the first season (1974), were not painted by Barnes. The Sugar Shack made its debut on the show's fourth season (1976–77) during the opening and closing credits. In the fifth season (1977–78) The Sugar Shack was only used in the closing credits for five early episodes during that season. In the sixth season (1978–79), The Sugar Shack was only used in opening credits for the first eight episodes and in the closing credits for five early episodes during that season. In the fifth and sixth seasons (1977–79), The Sugar Shack appears in the background of the Evans family apartment. Barnes had a bit part on two episodes of Good Times: The Houseguest (February 18, 1975) and Sweet Daddy Williams (January 20, 1976).

Barnes' artwork was also used on many television series, including Columbo, The White Shadow, Dream On, The Hughleys, The Wayans Bros., Wife Swap, and Soul Food, and in the movies Drumline and Boyz n the Hood.

In 1981 Barnes played baseball catcher Josh Gibson of the Negro League in the television movie Don't Look Back: The Story of Leroy ‘Satchel' Paige with Lou Gossett Jr. playing Paige.

The 2016 film Southside with You (about Barack and Michelle Obama's first date) prominently features Barnes' work in an early scene where the two characters visit an art exhibition.

Death

Barnes passed away on Monday evening, April 27, 2009 at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, California from myeloid leukemia. He was cremated and his ashes were scattered in two places: at his hometown Durham, North Carolina, near the site of where his family home once stood, and at the beach in Carmel, California, one of his favorite cities.

#07/15 #04/27

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