A Pith Productions’ Oscar Pool 2004, virtually representing the opinion of the blogosphere.

Except, alas, it seems to be gone from my DNS at least, for pity’s sake. No pings, ‘unknown host.’ Hopefully you’ll have better luck than I. Anybody got an IP address for it?

(Here’s a web-based toolset, if you care.)

Andy Inahtko runs his picks and promises to blog the ceremony from the comfort of his couch.

Don’t forget the MPAA’s official site.

I’m off to make dinner.

Everybody is either stunned or entertained by Quiznos’ adoption of the spongmonkeys, it seems. The truly amazing thing to me is just what a well-kept secret Joel Veitch’s work apparently has remained these past couple years. Those of us fortunate enough to be exposed to the beloved earworm in its’ primary incarnation are unsurprised by the hubbub, though.

I’ll remind the reader that lyrics and chords are to be found, as well.

In the comments over at Dear God Damn Diary, where B² is hosting a windows-media capture of the Quiznos ad, reasonable speculation has erupted over what dada-flash masterwork is destined to next burst forth upon the world.

The current frontrunner would appear to be, naturally enough, the works of j. picking in the form of either Weebl and Bob or (my pony in this race) Badgers.

It’s interesting, and I think probably not coincidental, that both weebl and spongmonkey are (in my mind anyway) associated with the hugely entertaining b3ta.

Any others out there? I’m sure by now if I had resurrected the Ken Goldstein Project I’d have a shot. I do have a brief clip of Ken singing the Hampsterdance song over the phone. It does leads one’s mind in a certain direction…

Your local public library carries a wide selection of videos, DVDs, and audio CDs.

Seattle Cinerama: MARCH 4-11, 2004. THE SECOND ANNUAL “REEL” CINERAMA FILM FESTIVAL.

Thursday, 3/4
11:00 p.m. – 2001

Friday, 3/5
7:00 p.m. – Lawrence of Arabia

Monday, 3/8
3:00 p.m. – Lawrence of Arabia

Wednesday, 3/10
3:00 p.m. – Lawrence of Arabia

There are other films playing, of course, including some 3-strip Cinerama flicks but mostly I must say:

LAWRENCE

ARABIA!

(Here’s a review.)

I’m doing some backfill homework tonight, watching the 1997 documentary Trekkies, which for whatever reason I missed the first time out. I’m laying ground work for my long-mused-about look at fanfic flicks.

At fifteen minutes in there’s a five-second or less clip of two costumed fans I can name, Jimm and Josh Johnson, who will, I expect, appear in the forthcoming Trekkies II for their Starship Exeter fanflick.

It startled me. It’s not every day you recognize a Starfleet captain and his Andorian first officer when you pop a documentary into the box.

Also, I’m pretty sure we saw Al Roker (warning, silly plane SFX, turn audio down) at Blue Canal on Broadway, with a full entourage of about twenty folks. A photo was snapped in front of the (Thai?) bas-relief in the waiting area, but not of or by me. Maybe Al will update his journal.

If I had to guess, I’d say the Cheery One was hereabouts due to the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Next week, it’s the College Art Association a-comin’ ter town. I’ll be hooking up with long-lost childhood drinking buddy Herb “Herbie” Reith.

He’s not been known as “Herbie,” actually, since he crossed the far side of the six-foot-plus construction-worker-physique line. But I knew him when he was but a wee sprat!

Today we went to the Frye Art Museum, which devotes itself to figurative art, by and large. It has an interesting collection of non-modernist works up roughly through the turn of the nineteenth century. Viv and I go fairly frequently; I’d say about once every six months. The rotating exhibitions there often feature cartoonists, as with the one up currently featuring the Pulitzer-winning long-time Seattle P-I cartoonist David Horsey.

The other rotating exhibit at the moment features the work of Bo Bartlett.

The museum was also featuring a show revisiting a selection of works drawn from a number of exhibitions over the past few years.

Horsey may be the most accomplished draftsman working in editorial cartooning today, and it’s a pleasure to see his brushwork on paper. His politcal cartoons don’t generally wow me with their incisive analysis, but sometimes they do make me laugh. I don’t really hold him responsible for what I see as the often-facile nature of his satire; appealing to the sensibility of the majority of his paper’s subscribers is a part of his job, after all. Also, Some mention must be made of the fact that he does work for a Hearst paper.

It appears that they have begun to offer him some leeway in the wake of his multiple Pulitzers, however. Similarly, Hearst has allowed, or possibly encouraged, the P-I to take on the role of a persistent critic here in Puget Sound toward both the foibles of local government (Sound Transit) and national (the Iraq war). I don’t doubt my grandpa, a lifetime P-I subscriber from the dry side, would be troubled by this evolution of his paper, but I’m all for it.

Looking at Horsey’s cartoons, which cover roughly the last quarter century, one can trace an evolution in both his line and the politics expressed. I don’t view it as accidental that his 1980 cartoon ‘Liberalism’ has been signed not only with the artists’ name but also with the icthus, the symbolic fish used of late by evangelical Christians to signify shared values. The cartoon depicts a troupe of black-suited Republican elephants carrying a coffin with the word of the title emblazoned on it. It’s classic Hearstian cartoon, worthy of the indignities cranked out by Winsor McCay as illustrations for Old Man Heart’s fulminations against such controversial subjects as Hunger and Poverty back in the day.

Turning to the funniest material on display, all concerning the departed President from Arkansas and the foibles and follies of his era, the fish has – if you’ll pardon my putting it this way – gone for a walk. Nearby, a drawing of the Pope in his popemobile is captioned ‘Pope embraces evolution,’ a reference to a Vatican pronouncement on the subject. On the popemobile’s rear panel is the Puget Sound area’s response to the use of the icthus on autos, the Darwin fish.

Now, I doubt that Horsey’s renounced his faith. But it seems clear that the later cartooning is much less polemic and more observational in nature, and this is what lends the Clinton-era material its’ punch. In one, we see a two-panel, stacked layout. The caption is something like (sorry, didn’t take notes, as I had no idea I was going to go on and on about this) “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” The caption is presented as a quote (probably from Karl Marx). The top panel depicts Richard Nixon and a prosecutorial figure in togas, as Nixon hands over his laurel wreath. The panel beneath? Two clowns in full regalia are engaged in a pursuit. The greasepainted faces belong to (if I recall correctly) Ken Starr and Bill Clinton.

Recently Horsey has been quite merciless in his depictions of President Bush as would-be Caesar, images which are so strikingly out of place in the traditional canon of Hearst editorial cartooning that one fully expects him to be fired every day. However, the peculiar niche that the P-I has carved out for itself appears to provide sufficient shelter. Will David Horsey one day go on to provide the nation itself with images that reach beyond political commentary, analysis and humor as Bill Mauldin’s work and Herblock’s work have done? It’s hard to say. But he does appear to be an artist who is continuing to grow, and one supposes that as he does so his increasing depth of reference and observation will lend him the opportunity to craft an image so succinct and poetic that it sums up the zeitgeist of the moment.

In other news, there was a guy at the museum who looked and sounded just like a twenty-seven year old Ken Goldstein, with darker hair and more of it. He wore squared-off, narrow, dark-framed hipster glasses and at one point I noticed him speaking familiarly with some quite arty looking folks in the cafe, so I surmise he’s involved in the art scene here. He was wearing black and carrying a single-shoulder-strap military satchel. I had initially dismissed Viv’s observation that he looked like Ken, when he walked by speaking to a friend, and my friends, he sounded like him too.

I went up to him in one of the galleries and asked him if he knew Ken, and he did not. I thought about giving him a “Ken Goldstein has a posse” sticker, on the assumption that he probably knew the work of Shepard Fairey, but did not. I did not ask his name.

That’s a new one. The file itself is not screwy. Who knows why it displayed like this?

Matthew at defective yeti reviewed The Triplets of Belleville recently, and mentioned that a review he’d read likened the film to Delicatessen and City of Lost Children, a resemblance that he did not see.

I did, and in a review, so I assumed that he was among the five people who read my film stuff in Tablet.

Tonight Viv and I went out for dinner and film, and Triplets was the most interesting film in the neighborhood, so we went. Viv rarely gets to see films with me when I attend a review screening (they’re usually during the day), so it was her first time seeing the film and my second.

At dinner, I picked up a Stranger to check film schedules, and what did I see?

Writer-director-animator Sylvain Chomet invokes the same absurdly entertaining and overwhelmingly brown nostalgia that Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro tapped into for Delicatessen and City of Lost Children (all three filmmakers are indebted to Terry Gilliam’s Brazil).

That’s from Andy Spletzer’s film short. Ah. So Matthew probably read Andy’s review, not mine. Oops. For all that, Matthew’s feeling that Jeunet and Caro’s flicks are unlike Triplets is ungrounded; all three feel very much like a certain breed of Francophone comics, which is where all three creators began their careers.

The film is playing Seattle with the recreated/restored Salvador Dali / Walt Disney production, Destino, a project initiated and shelved in the late forties by the two moustachioed creators. The recreation is, uh, underwhelming – limited, frame-fade animation is used for no apparent reason. The film looks very computer-assisted. Why not let the app do the tweening? Additionally, the postwar era is not the high point for either man’s creative powers, and the film reflects the constricted boundaries that both artists were turning to.

Entertainingly, I did see something new in Triplets – a supporting character, a mouselike midget engineer inventor, looks suspiciously like a well-known studio head, famed for his association with an animated mouse. The engineer character designs and builds a film-projector that is driven by pedaling athletes held captive by the French wine mob. Chomet, Triplets‘ director, goes so far as to show us a photo of the engineer wearing mouse ears. I’m pretty sure it’s a poke at Disney’s dominance of animated entertainment; the engineer is the flunky of murdering kidnappers and his audience is held in bondage.

Happened across Sam Raimi’s ’93 classic Army of Darkness last night and chuckled my way through it.

In the sequence where the Deadites attack Arthur’s castle, I was struck by the similarities between it and Jackson’s Helms Deep sequence from The Two Towers. Not in scale of course; but both are night sequences, certain shots from the Raimi film appear to anticipate much larger and more polished shots in Helms Deep, and there were enough rough paralells that I began to muse on the topic.

Consider Jackson’s 1992 Dead Alive. Though much more over the top than AOD, it also takes the slapstick approach to horror as a genre. An aside: what is up with the goatse reference on that poster?

Fast forward to three years ago. Note that Raimi’s Spider-Man actually beats each one of Jackson’s LOTR films at the box office. It also entered release as Jackson was probably fine-tuning TTT.

Finally, I think it should be noted that many of the folks that worked on LOTR worked for Raimi even longer than they worked for Jackson: Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules were shot in NZ for the series’ entire run.

So I think a reasonable case can be made for the two filmmakers being aware of each others’ work. I suspect they like each others’ stuff, actually. But did Jackson insert certain sequences into Helms Deep as a tip of the helmet to Raimi?

Cursory Googling did not yield others wondering about this. A similar lack of attributed quotes by Jackson on this specific proposition or on Raimi’s work in general leads me to guess that no-one’s spent time with Jackson talking about Raimi’s work of late.

I shall add it to my list of questions for the bearded one!