Green Lantern/Green Arrow

Green Titans

Green Lantern/Green Arrow -
Hard-Travelling Heroes
By Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams
DC ISBN: 9781401280420

“In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight.
Let those who worship evil’s might, beware my power… Green Lantern’s light.”
Green Lantern

One of those fragmented, early childhood memories I have is from the very early seventies. I would have been maybe two or three years old but I was already into comics, especially the American superhero stuff which was a lot more intriguing than some of the British comics at the time (unless you were really into Disney). Note to parents: if you want to start your kids reading early so they are way more advanced than the other readers in class, give them comics like Superman and Batman and they’ll soon want to know what’s being said when these characters take on monsters from space and such like in the colourful drawings.

I remember I used to regularly stay with my nan and uncle for a few hours one evening a week in the early 1970s and my uncle would always be reading at least three science fiction novels at any one time plus there would be one or two comics laying around. These were mostly DC comics (although I remember those non-coded drug issues of Spider-Man turning up) which he would either pick up with the novels from a cornucopia of sci-fi, crime and sleazy novels called Comyn’s Books* in Tottenham (if I remember the name correctly... now sadly long gone) or from one of the nearby news stands or possibly the only other news stand I knew that sold American comics at The Angel, Edmonton (that news stand is also now, alas, long deceased).

Anyway, I remember one of the titles he used to read was definitely this Green Lantern/Green Arrow run of comics from 1970 and I can just about remember flicking through the first issue, number 76, and taking in the pictures. Of course, I didn’t know how important this run would become in the history of comics at the time, nor how influential but, I did love the artwork by Neal Adams (who didn’t) and I kinda knew it was very different to a lot of the other DC comics at the time because the two heroes featured on that classic cover of Green Arrow destroying Green Lantern’s power charger (yeah, like a lot of comic covers in the day, that didn't actually happen in the issue itself) were to be found inside constantly at loggerheads with each other in this and later issues. I knew something was going down here but I was too young to know what.

Of course I’ve caught up with the odd back issue of this relatively small run of about 13 issues (and short story appearances in The Flash) in the intervening decades but, somehow, not most of them and this beautiful deluxe edition hardback from DC (also available now in paperback) finally allowed me to catch up with these guys in a complete reprint of this important run of comics. Why is it important? Well… at the time it was…

The Silver Age Green Lantern, despite being mentioned in Donovan’s groovy hit song Sunshine Superman, was a failing character by this time in that sales had really hit a dip and cancellation was looming. So editor Julius Schwartz gave the character to comic book writer extraordinaire (as he would certainly be known by some after this take on the character) Dennis O’Neil, who writes not one but two introductions to this collected edition, to see if he could do something to turn around the fortunes of this ailing character. And he certainly did… taking on the political and social issues of the day and giving Hal Jordan (Green Lantern) a counter balance in the form of Oliver Queen (Green Arrow… who somehow seems to be known as just Arrow these days in TV land). The whole point was to keep away from the cosmic adventures (that didn’t quite happen but even the stories set on other worlds were metaphors for what was going on in the then and now, such as overpopulation) and to send the two emerald avengers on a road trip around America to argue out and find compromise on the issues of the day. This was no longer going to be a world of black and white problems with easy solutions… this was going to be a world of barely discernible greys when one or the other of the two title characters, sometimes both, would end up being shown that they were making bad judgements and, sometimes, they would fail to get the happy resolution they might be expected to get in any other DC superhero title at the time.

So the banner with the distinctive masthead I loved as a toddler came into being on the first issue of this legendary run, Issue 76, for the first story No Evil Shall Escape My Sight. This one starts off with an absolutely beautiful Neal Adams splash page of Green Lantern flying towards the reader over the top of some traffic in a busy New York City street while various credits are rendered in funky lettering and integrated onto the side and back of a truck. This is gorgeous stuff and demonstrated why Neal Adams was so highly regarded as an artist in his day and is still considered as very influential with his mix of realistic drawing style combined with dynamic layout design.

O’Neil’s story quickly sets the tone for what was to come as, instead of a super villain, we have Green Lantern rescuing a villainous slum landlord who is being ‘attacked’ by some kids. After he tries to do what’s right in the eyes of the law the people in the street throw cans and bricks at him to suggest their displeasure at Green Lantern’s intervention and neighbour Green Arrow gives Hal Jordan a quick lesson in the issue of Law Vs Justice. After dealing with the strips villain under circumstances written to ensure the two are still seen by readers as the ‘heroes’ of the strip, it’s proposed that Green Lantern and Green Arrow (accompanied by one of the Galactic Guardians, for a while) go on a road trip of America to explore the dark underbelly of a nation still labouring under the horrors of the war in Vietnam and turning their hand at trying, not always successfully, to find some kind of a solution or compromise to the social injustices of the day.

And that’s more or less what this run of issues did… until it finally got cancelled but, not after it got itself noticed by the rest of the comics world, for sure. This handsome tome faithfully reproduces (sadly, sans the adverts of the day) the entire run and, even now, I found myself surprised at the direction some of these issues go as the two heroes take on pollution, racial intolerance, drug dealers, political corruption and even handle religious imagery in what must have been a very risky way for the day.

In their adventures, they are often accompanied by Oliver’s on/off girlfriend Black Canary, who is very much a feminist icon, I reckon (even at three years old I was a big fan of her costume incorporating fishnet stockings). I love the way that she’s described and drawn in action here as a total powerhouse who hates violence but is forced to use it to keep the bad guys at bay. Love the pained expression on her face as she is obliged to make short work of her adversaries.

Another impressive thing is the running continuity between issues, which take place in the same real time as the issues were published (so after a few issues the guys have been on the road for six months, for instance). As the characters get injured during their various confrontations, their wounds (not to mention their emotional scars such as when Green Arrow discovers that his perpetually young sidekick Speedy has turned into a junkie), stay with them over a number of issues. Another example is when Green Arrow gets shot in the arm, for instance. He’s still complaining about that bad arm and it becomes a major plot point even in the last story in the series. This is good stuff.

I also appreciated some of the pop cultural references in the strip too. Such as when the characters are attacked by birds under the influence of a mind controlling child and Black Canary compares the incident to the Alfred Hitchcock movie version of Daphne Du Maurier’s The Birds. Sure enough, there’s a wordless cameo of Hitchcock himself in the left foreground of the panel. Wonderful stuff.

This was a great and important comic and, comparing the social issues described within the pages, you’ll soon realise that many, possibly all, of these problems are still with us today… some in an even more magnified form. So, yeah, great comic and a truly lovely and respectful reprint of them can be yours to read now. Green Lantern/Green Arrow - Hard-Travelling Heroes is an absolutely excellent book and a must read for anyone who considers themselves interested in the history of the form. Grab this one while it’s still relatively easy to get hold of. You really won’t want to miss it.


*If anyone remembers this bookshop or has photos of it, please share with me on Twitter.

Unsane

The Unsaneable
Frightless of Seeing

Unsane
2017 USA
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
UK cinema release print.

Warning: A slight spoiler in that I tell 
you what doesn’t happen at the end.

Okay... so here we have a new Soderbergh movie. I quite like Soderbergh, for the most part. Been following him off and on since he hit big with Sex, Lies and Videotape back in 1989 and I still think his great masterpiece was The Limey. However, he does do some stupid stuff on occasion... I’ve not seen his version of Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, for example (although I am getting more curious about it as the years go by) but I honestly don’t know why anyone would think they could make a better film than the great Andre Tarkovsky’s ‘beyond brilliant’ adaptation of it. Still, whenever I can stop seeing red about that artistic choice, I have to admit that Soderbergh is one of the more interesting and chameleon like of modern Hollywood directors.

Unsane is somehow being touted as Soderbergh’s first horror movie and I’m really glad I didn’t know that before going to see it because, frankly, it would have made me angry as it’s in absolutely no way, shape or form a horror movie. People seem to have forgotten what the words ‘psychological thriller’ mean these days but that’s exactly what this is... with he emphasis on psychological.

Now, Unsane is a bit of a hard one for me to talk about because, on the one hand, it’s brilliantly put together by the director, has great performances by the likes of Claire Foy as main protagonist Valentine Sawyer and Amy Irving as her mum but... well... it’s a bit of a let down in some ways. It’s like the whole movie comes together so well but the writers forgot to create an engaging or noteworthy story.

The plot set up as it is, is of a woman who is being stalked long term by an unwanted suitor and who accidentally ends up voluntarily committing herself to a mental hospital, only to find her stalker has followed her and gotten a job there to be close to her. All the way through this I was pretty sure I knew what the end twist of the film was going to be. Even when I first saw the trailer I was convinced that Claire Foy was going to turn out to be the man she thinks is stalking her and that s/he was sitting in a sanatarium projecting his own fantasies onto his immediate reality. Well... one of the most positive things I can say about this movie is that this is not the twist that happens at the end of this film. Instead though... there is no twist. Which is a bit of a let down.

For the most part, everything you see in the film is pretty much to be taken at face value. The only slight sting in the tale, if you want to call it that, is a quick epilogue where the long term effects of the story content on the central character are shown. However, as it happens, that was one of my favourite moments in the film so, although the disappointment that there was no clever spin at the end of the film was palpable, it was tempered by the fact that I did quite like the closing moments because it was stylistically very close to the kind of mood I felt the director was trying to portray in the rest of the film.

And by that I mean that, even though this movie is firmly set in the present... with cell phones, modern TVs etc... the style of this movie is definitely projecting back about 45 years in the past.

The whole thing was shot on an iPhone but it doesn’t look like it has been and the actual framing on it seems closer to a 4:3 ratio than anything else (at least as they showed it at my cinema). However, the whole thing is cut together as if it’s a Brian De Palma or David Cronenberg movie... if they had been shooting something to go on North Canadian TV in the early 1970s. That’s the kind of vibe I’m guessing Soderbergh was after here and, therefore, it certainly made sense that he would cast someone like Amy Irving in a role here.

Since the film is set in a mental hospital and is filled with the kind of stereotypes you meet there, it makes sense that the director chose this ratio and he seems to be deliberately using a lot of close-ups of people in those frames because it helps give it a claustrophobic look to things. Walls and people crowd in and loom large on the giant screen in front of you and you often get a feeling that the rooms are closing in on you. It’s also a natural symptom of framing two or more people within the same small space so... like I said, the choice of aspect ratio made a lot of sense.

He also tends to add a lot of layers of depth to the shots. In addition to a lot of verticals, you often get set ups where information from other levels of the shot are also clamouring for attention... through a window behind the main action, for eample, or through a doorway off to the right somewhere. This kind of opens up the screen space in an unusual arrangement, rather than make use of a widescreen canvass and it serves him well in giving the film an unusual visual identity.

There’s also an especially nice sequence in the film where Sawyer is slipped a psychotropic drug which completely interferes with her head and Soderbergh presents this as a kind of double exposure POV shot of both her face and the back of her head as she runs around an empty room while the faces of the other inmates look on at her through a window. It’s nice stuff like this that keeps the movie alive and interesting to watch.

As is the writer’s tactic of withholding key information until later in the film...

At the start of the movie we are 'filled in' by Sawyer that she is being stalked and that she tends to see her antagonist everywhere. We even have an ‘almost’ sexual encounter with a random stranger to highlight the full effect of this unseen presence but nothing tangible is really given to the audience and so, when the character ‘accidentally’ has herself committed, there is a lot of uncertainty in the minds of the audience as to whether she does actually deserve to be in this institution or not. The director uses this vibe to coast through the first part of the movie before we are filled in, during a flashback sequence, on the identity and history of her stalker. At which point, in some ways, it becomes a much less interesting story arc, to be honest.

Ultimately, Unsane never fails to grab attention and the final shot perfectly sums up 1970s TV in a way... while still, almost blatantly recalling the last shot of Francois Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, to some extent. Then we get some end credits music playing while some extremely fast rolling titles are superimposed on the final shot of the film and the combination captures the mood wonderfully. However, as I said before, the ending is also a real let down when it comes to showing us something we haven’t seen before and it’s almost like the director was exceeding some kind of brief to seem somehow much duller than the time period films he was, in some sense, imitating. So, a good time at the cinema if you are into looking at the whole way the thing was put together but, in terms of an exciting storyline... no, it didn’t quite make it for this particular cinema goer I’m afraid. Probably not one I’d recommend.

Viva

Leave It To Viva

Viva
USA 2007
Directed by Anna Biller
Anna Biller Productions/Shameless DVD Region 2

It’s really interesting seeing what is, effectively, Anna Biller’s first full length feature only a few weeks after seeing her second, The Love Witch (reviewed here), because I can now pick up on the tremendous similarities between the two and, temporarily at least, assign director signature traits to her (woohoo!). It also means she pretty much demonstrates, through her various artistic choices which follow through in both films, that she’s very much an ‘auteur’ director in the sense of captaining her specific celluloid ships through the same route. If you see what I mean.

Like The Love Witch, Viva uses a slightly surreal, ‘on the surface’, over the top acting style which I personally associate with American TV sitcoms from the 1950s - 1970s. It’s more overtly signposted within the text here, to a certain extent, due to the fact that Biller seems to be trying her best to make an early to mid-1970s US sexploitation picture and, although the highly comical acting method demonstrated in Viva (and in The Love Witch, for that matter) is certainly not endemic to that genre (although obviously some movies, like Doris Wishman’s films, use it almost by default in terms of the talent of the actors and actresses available), it’s at least ‘of the time’. Biller seems, to me, a little more subversive in that, while she is, after all, very definitely making an exploitation movie - this one has tons of nudity including Biller herself as lead character Barbie/Viva - she seems, at least to me, to be very much expressing it in the same way that an episode of The Brady Bunch or Bewitched might try and portray it. Which is... you know... kinda interesting and certainly makes for the cinematic equivalent of a page turner, in this case.

The opening follows Biller’s character Barbie from the bath where she’s reading a magazine and drinking before she vacates said vessel to get made up and dressed. Roaring off in her red, open top car which, since this is an Anna Biller movie, matches the same shade as the outfit she is wearing. And, that’s another stylistic tag which I’m going to lumber Biller with here... the exceptionally groovy colour palette she uses matches what she did nine years later in The Love Witch in that everybody’s outfits seem designed to either perfectly match to, or contrast against, the decor of the set they are seen in. For example, in one scene where Barbie and her husband are visiting her best friends, Sheila and her husband - two perfect nuclear families with cracks hidden beneath their ‘beautiful people’ surface - one guy is wearing a green top and the other guy is wearing a white shirt but with trousers which match the exact shade of green of the first guy’s top. It’s pretty nice stuff and, although one might say she’s taking a page out of the era in which she’s set this film... Los Angeles 1972... that certainly doesn’t hold for The Love Witch and I think it says more about the director’s impeccable taste when it comes to pulling all the details and colours of the mise en scène together in the most exquisite way. I’m telling you right now people... I’d love to see this woman make an Italian giallo.

She also, like in her later film, uses the decor to express the motivations of her characters... often through the use of paintings which make overt their attitudes towards certain issues. It’s not an uncommon modus operandi but it’s a nice touch and I’ll add that quirk to my ever growing list of Anna Biller signature marks, if I may (at least until she grows in a different direction, as most directors do).

The scene following on from the opening where Sheila and her husband talk about Playboy and drink an alcoholic breakfast ends up with Sheila about to strip down so her good, wholesome husband can take ‘artistic’ shots of her... seems more like a porn movie but it’s incredibly heightened, with lots of fake laughter by all the actors who perform their roles wonderfully (including Biller herself), before Barbie turns up and then both girls strip off for the ‘arty photos’. Biller seems both inspired by Playboy in this movie while similarly poking fun at the people who read it (Shelia proclaims, at one point, that old chestnut “I only read it for the articles...”). It’s a brilliant little parody of the kind of ‘soft porn logic’ combined with deliberately ‘bad acting’ which really nails and telegraphs the mood Biller is going for in a very quick way. She even goes so far as to deliberately mis-match shots to create little continuity errors between them to further authenticate the delivery of her agenda. At least... I assume it was deliberate?

Of course, one of the things which this is doing, in a film inhabited by generally stupid characters, male and female, is to show the sexism and attitudes of either sex in a repressive social set up. You have the guys getting together to talk about their latest technological equipment like their new stereo or TV (actually... that doesn’t sound too different to where we are now, to be honest) and the ladies getting together for conversations which, quite frankly, don’t just fail the Bechdel test but defy it in the most spectacular fashion. One husband, for example, sits patiently for his wife to give him his pipe and light it for him. Now, I grew up in the 1970s so it’s probably harder for me to identify where these common occurrences of everyday sexism (at least as it is perceived these days) begin and end but Biller makes it crystal clear for the audience in one lovely moment when a pampered guy looks straight into the camera and says...

“There's never been a better time to be a man. The willing women. The dandy clothes. The frills. The big rings and jewellery. The open shirts. The sense of entitlement. Take it from me: savour this time. For it will soon be gone, never to return.”

As the film progressed I found that, rather than get bored by what might, at first, seem like a one joke movie, I was witness to a minor masterpiece with something new and rewarding in most scenes. There’s some great stuff in here... the stereotypical gay male hairdresser who is working on Barbie’s hair and the neighbour who comes in to ‘borrow a cup of sugar’ (both Barbie and the hairdresser get turned on by the watching neighbour’s sugar eating shenanigans), the silly songs (which are a heck of a lot more on the nose in this than they were in The Love Witch, it seems to me), the old “Give it to me! Love it! Oh yes!” rapid shoot photographer scene (I used to be a child model in the early 1970s and I can tell you now, stereotype or not, that’s exactly how some of them behaved) and the fact that when her husband is taken ill and being treated in hospital with stress because she comes home late one night rather than have the dinner waiting, she feels it’s appropriate to go to the hospital in a sexy nurse outfit to show how much she intends to care for her husband. There’s some crazy stuff in this film.

Now I was a little puzzled, as I was with The Love Witch when I saw this because, while the director is doing her best to evoke America in the early 1970s, the soundtrack sounds more like it’s been needle-dropped in from Italian composers and, as it turns out once again, that’s exactly what is happening here. However, I figured it out after a while because there were a few scenes which sounded like they were being tracked in from Piero Piccioni’s score to US sexploitation director Radley Metzger’s Camille 2000 and, by about the third time it turned up on the soundtrack in one guise or another, I was pretty sure. This is further enhanced during a big orgy scene where Viva, as the reimagined call-girl variation of Barbie is known, is being drug-raped. Biller actually uses the same differential focussing and refocussing trick, timed to the main character’s breathing, that Metzger used in Camille 2000 and which you can find fully described by me in my review of that film here. And this, coupled with the score in this scene, very specifically identifies at least one of the director’s main inspirations for this movie... albeit with a much different motivation towards the subject matter.

About that sequence... although the mise en scène in this shot isn’t nearly as accomplished as Metzger’s original version, Biller takes it all to the next absurdist level. In this one, instead of focussing on flowers, Biller focusses on apples and then, after the shot I just described, the colours posterise and the apples become animated, floating fruits licking and then continuing with one eating the others. That cartoon apple then stretches or warps out to become a load of swirling, psychedelic flowers before the blood or juice of the apple starts to shower down over the live action screen of Viva being molested. It’s almost like the artist is criticising the original scene by going so over the top with it that you can’t help but see how ridiculous it is... at least in this context. I was blown away by the shot in Camille 2000 and still am. However, it’s a great visual moment from Biller in a film which is filled to the brim with amazing stuff like this.

And that’s about as far as I’m going with this review, I think, other than to say that Viva was a total blast to watch and, with lines like (on being informed a man’s wife has got a job interview) “Will you be back in time to cook dinner?” and a parody of Just Two Little Girls From Little Rock from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the film has enough surprises and little tricks up its sleeve to keep you entertained for its considerable two hours (a fair amount longer than most of the sexploitation films the director is parodying to make her points here). A solid recommendation on this one with the reminder that you need to keep an open mind about the style of acting in this and not dismiss it until you realise how skillful the artists are being here. Now I just have to wait around while the lady in question makes another movie. Can we have a giallo next, please?

The Nice Guys

Of Nice And Men

The Nice Guys
2016 USA Directed by Shane Black
UK cinema release print.

I have to be up front here and say that I’m not the biggest fan of either of the two leads of The Nice Guys. In the case of Russell Crowe, that stems from some of his behaviour off screen when it comes to journalists and it’s nothing to do with his skill at the craft of acting, which he's obviously very good at and which really should be what I’m looking at with an unclouded view here, anyway. Especially since it seems to be a fact these days that any stories reported by various ‘news machines’ are either fabricated to cause sensation or are, at the very least, not often showing all the sides of a story. So I’ve been slowly going through a process of letting the guy off the hook over the last few years, as far as my appreciation of him as an artist is concerned, at any rate.

As for Ryan Gosling. Well, I’ve only seen him in Drive and, to be honest, although I was quite impressed with him in it, I really wasn’t the biggest fan of the movie and, again, it’s probably not something I should let put me off going to see another movie with him in. However, that’s how it is with these two actors and their effect on me and if I’d have only heard of the title of this movie and the principal leads, unfairly or not, you probably wouldn’t have gotten me into a cinema to see this one... that’s for sure.

However, I saw the trailer for this, which was quite engaging, and it also mentioned the writer/director of the movie and... that’s where I sat up to take notice. The Nice Guys is written by Shane Black, who is one of the all time great, modern screen writers with such classic, fun movies like the original Lethal Weapon movie, The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and, yes, even Iron Man 3 to his name. He’s one of the few modern Hollywood scriptwriters I will bother giving some time to and this is the main reason why The Nice Guys was on my radar and why I got myself to a cinema to see it.

The other reason was because I’d heard some samples from John Ottman and David Buckley’s score a couple of weeks before and.... it sounded awesome. The trailer hadn’t managed to make me aware of the time period the film is set in before hearing these samples but the movie takes place somewhere in the mid to late 1970s (you’ll notice things like Jaws 2 playing at the local cinema in the film) and the score certainly highlights this with an amazingly funky, seventies cop show aesthetic which wouldn’t be out of place in an old episode of Starsky And Hutch, to be honest with you.

But how was the actual movie... asides from the excellent score?

Well, it was exactly what I would expect from a Shane Black movie, to be honest. A pretty darn good, fun time at the cinema with some characters who, although you probably won’t be able to identify with them, will certainly have you rooting for them as the plot thickens throughout the movie and they find themselves more in jeopardy at every twist and turn. Black’s camera eye is absolutely perfect with some great shots and a lot of his, almost trademark, zooms across the city landscape but the chemistry between the two principals is pretty great and, coupled with Black’s absolutely beautiful script, the two work absolutely brilliantly together.

Crowe and Gosling play tough guy Jackson Healy and, not so tough, private detective Holland March, who find themselves caught up in a web of big corporation treachery, starting off with the death of ‘adult’ movie star Misty Mountains... a death scene which looks like it was ripped straight off the cover of my old 1970s Panther edition of J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash. As the two try to find another of the women who starred with Misty in a certain ‘experimental movie’ which actually plays an important part of the plot, the two steal the show in a series of set pieces and comedy routines which will have you laughing out loud. In fact, it was only when Gosling goes into as much of an ‘homage’ to an old Abbott and Costello routine as the director thinks he can get away with, that I realised that Crowe is playing the ‘straight man’ and Gosling is playing the ‘funny guy’. Of course, being as it’s Shane Black, he layers the characters with a lot more depth and, dare I say it, pathos... and this stops the two characters becoming too much like cyphers for old time Hollywood comics. He does manage to indulge himself in the writing without doing any damage to the credibility of the characters, though, so that really helps and, as you can imagine, the movie zips along at high speed.

Another element which helps keep the movie afloat is the awesome actress Angourie Rice, who plays Holland’s daughter Holly. She is the light of reason and sanity in her dad’s world and Rice really does an amazing job with this character throughout the running time. Of course, Black is no stranger to having credible and gutsy teenagers in his scripts. It was a strong element in almost all of those movies I mentioned earlier and something of a cliché for him as a writer. Of course, the film is full of clichés but it reminded me a lot of Stephen Sommers’ version of The Mummy in some respects. As in that the film is very aware of itself. It knows it’s milking every cliché and, doing it quite stylishly, but it’s also not afraid to let the audience know it’s in on the joke. It knows the audience is going to see things way before they happen... the villain of the piece is very obvious when that character first appears on screen... but it’s kind of the point, I think. Black is very clear about foreshadowing a lot of the things which will happen later on in the movie and he wants the audience to be free to be thinking about other things rather than the story elements, I suspect. Either way, it makes for a very entertaining ride so I really don’t care too much that a lot of the movie is quite obvious... it just seems to work well.

Now, I can see why the box office isn’t as great as might be expected on this one. The two anti heroes aren’t exactly role models and, although the film doesn’t feel exactly anticlimactic (even with a slightly awkward couple of epilogues to the main action to round the movie off), I think it maybe could have done with souping up in the action department a little more in a couple of scenes. Maybe a car chase moment would have been nice.

That very minor grumble aside, though, I would absolutely recommend The Nice Guys to anyone who is a fan of modern, action cinema. And it’s also nice to see people like Kim Basinger and Gil Gerard on our screens again... although I was too caught up in the one liners to actually spot Buck Rogers in the movie but... I will go back to take another look for him when this one comes out on Blu Ray. A terrific picture, some solid and very fun performances, nice and definitely not confusing editing and a terrific score. Not much to not like in this one and definitely the best time at the cinema this week, I reckon. Catch it there while you can.

Noirish Project Design Process

Noirish Campaign 

Clarification Disclaimer: Please note that, while I freely gave my time and costs to Noirish Project, I produced three campaigns (60s UK/US, Italian 70s and modern) and a couple of early teaser pieces only... comprising around 30 finished designs (and generating hundreds of files). I also designed one set of title cards and a “video on demand” header. Since my work on the project, other factors have come into play and, as far as  know, my artwork is now not being used. I don’t know whether my title cards are still in the film but I would guess/hope not since that would, obviously, further dilute the brand strength of the movie in relation to the poster campaigns. I am clarifying this here, not so much as to distance myself from the project but to firmly establish to any future collaborators who require my expertise in design matters that some of the stuff surrounding the project has not been produced by me and therefore the quality and consistency of the layout and typography on certain pieces should not be mistaken for my own. I actually have a degree in graphic design and over a quarter of a century in the field, so I’m not in the habit of making any typographic mistakes or poor judgemental decisions within the realm of my work unless insisted on by a client. So please don’t judge me by some of the  stuff you may have seen surrounding this project as I may well not be guilty. I wish James Devereaux every success with this and future projects and, as always, I hope you enjoy his unique spin in his work.   

When actor/writer/director James Devereaux contacted me privately to find out what was the best software to acquire to tag stills from his debut feature Noirish Project as “a bit of fun”, I was pretty up front that I thought his work was better than for him to just tag the odd photo with a snippet of type as a promo. I talked to him about the idea of letting me work on a full campaign for the film and he liked the idea so, after a little while, I volunteered my services and was ‘in’.

Now as a graphic designer for over 20 years, my normal approach to doing something like this would be to ask James a lot of questions regarding details about the film and maybe badger him to see the script... and that’s what I almost got into with him. But something held me back. I remembered a couple of things which made me think that, maybe for this one project, the results I produced might be better off if I went in a little more blind on this one. I know, for example, that James welcomes improvisation and the opportunity for serendipity in his work... so a locked in script might be only a guide as to what really gets up on the screen in the final cut of the movie anyway. Added to that was the fact that the window between completion of the final version and the release probably wouldn’t have been enough time for me to come up with anything useful anyway... not with my regular day job hogging all my time and with film reviews to write most evenings.

Also, I know that some of the best campaigns, especially from one of my design heroes in the fifties and sixties, were much more effective by not selling the actual content of the film but by selling the “idea” of the event and attraction of the film. This was something I wanted to try but, keeping with James’ idea that whatever I did, it had to be fun for me to do (a work ethic I gather he instills, or at least expects, from all his collaborators), I also suggested something which, frankly, meant a lot more work for me but which I thought would be ultimately more rewarding for the audience, for James and for myself.

So I suggested that I made not one but three campaigns for the movie... campaigns that would be, like Billy Pilgrim, the main protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, “unstuck in time.” With this in mind I suggested I work on the following...

1. A set of black and white (as the movie is shot in monochrome) lobby cards in the style of something you might see in the UK in the 70s and then topped off with a colour, 1970s style montage poster.

2. A set of Italian fotobusta, in the style of something from the 1950s/60s with bright, hand coloured looking shots combined in a dynamic layout and then followed up with a locandina of some sort.

3. A modern character teaser campaign depicting primary characters and followed by a poster or two as the film might be advertised today (which is fair enough, it is after all, a contemporary film). This actually ended up as two sets but I’ll get to that later.

4.  I also threw in some quick teasers which were not aligned to the other campaigns as a fast response to some other things James was doing, but I won’t cover those here.

James liked the idea so I ran with it quick, before he changed his mind. I asked him for the credits, the four main character names, and a choice of quotes from the movie that each character says so I could build the character teasers around the phrases... as well as loads of high resolution stills from the shoots. As many as he could get me.  But first things first, the project needed a logo...


The Logo
Saul Bass is my design hero so I asked myself what Saul would have done for this.

James produced the first of what ended up as two short ‘preludes’ to his film and, like a few of his other shorts, I noticed the prominence of a phone conversation as a catalyst to get things moving. Everything always starts with a phone call so I figured I would use that as an icon to encapsulate that everything in the narrative has that starting point. I knew (or hope I know) that James will be screening both of his preludes with the main feature, so it kinda made sense. I came up with something very fifties and Saul-like and which, despite appearances, gave me a few problems to wrestle with but eventually got to something which looked defined enough and didn’t camouflage itself in various coloured backgrounds too badly.


The 70s Campaign
The lobby cards were the easy bit, once I’d discovered the more common sizes and ratios used. In the end, for the sake of memory size and storage space, the final poster was just done as an A size to make printing easier, if that’s required... but the lobby cards and fotobusta are all in the correct aspect ratios.

The lobby cards are just the black and white stills where I’ve fiddled about with the levels and contrasts etc and then just applied into a template. Pretty much as the ones I was looking at when I was researching these things.

The poster was a montage of elements I’d cut out from the stills... which I then heavily filtered the f**** out of to make it resemble one of those very impressionistic poster artworks you would sometimes see back then. I remembered as a kid realising that some of the people in the backgrounds of these posters were just a head and an odd squiggle for a feature or two and that’s the kind of distancing I was going for with what I did here.


Fotobustas and Locandina
This is where I really had fun. My initial mock up visual to James was something where I’d converted the colour still he gave me to a black and white image, removed all the white and then coloured up the background layers with a paintbrush tool behind the blacks of the main image. It was okay and James liked it but I wasn’t completely satisfied with it so I tried to do something else. I experimented and in the end came up with something which gave me just the look I was trying so hard to match for this kind of material.

What I did in the end was take each shot and make a duplicate version of it on two separate layers. The bottom layer retained the colour and I increased the saturation to absolutely outrageous levels, something which would make anyone looking at it recoil at the vibrance of it but not to the extent that the original hues were completely lost (although definitely getting near that territory, for sure). This was then covered with a top layer of the shot in exactly the same place, which I then turned into a mono image. Then I played around with the levels a little bit before posterising the mono image to just two channels... like a sixties photographer might do for a screen print. This meant that all the whites to mid greys and just above were turned into white space, and all the mid to dark greys and above were turned into black. So far so good...

Then I started playing with the opacity of the top layer and quickly saw my idea had worked. The oversaturated colours from the layer below shone through the white in a muted state which brought them down to something which mirrored the real, brightly hand coloured locandina of the 50s and 60s very well. The bonus, of course, was that the dark areas over the blacks already in the bottom layer were also magnified, but in the other direction... they became darker in certain tonal areas and helped define the shapes of the people in the photos even more.

This all looked pretty "dead on" to me and, after redesigning the logo into an Italian version with a longer top leading in, I created a template I could drop the flattened versions of these new “alternate” shots into and was very pleased with the results.

For the locandina, I tried to pick elements which I thought the Italians would use to sell the film in their own country. These would not necessarily be important elements of the film, of course... just the bits they would expect their target audience to latch on to. I used a similar (although not quite the same) process as the earlier seventies poster to assemble the final locandina and was pretty pleased with this one.


The Modern Campaign
For the modern campaign I used isolated shots of the characters and played around with colour level saturation before sharpening up the shot and just posterising certain parts of the features. I wanted something stark but colourful and I then used the phrases I chose from the ones I’d been given and cut them up into little chunks to emphasise them and make them something more as isolated features than they would probably be when experienced as lines in the main film. This was okay though, that’s what advertising is all about... trickery and persuasion.

I wanted a background that was colourful, ragged and textural to contrast the things going over the top of it. In the end I took a shot of the palm of my hand and did all kinds of things to it (including multilayering in different positions) to get to the state you see in the teasers and final posters. I really liked what I achieved here. I also did versions where the actual characters were in mono and, since neither James or myself could figure out which ones we liked best, we used both as the US and UK equivalents of the same campaign (I’m pretty sure I’ve actually seen this done before but can’t remember which films did this with the colour in the US version and the black and white in the UK versions).

The final posters were an amalgamation of the four character posters and the added element of Alfie holding his sign. I did both portrait and landscape versions and got something I was pleased with in the end. I used the elements from this campaign when James asked me to come up with some opening title cards for the film... but I pushed them all in a slightly different way because of their context.

And that’s an insight, as James has asked, into my approach for the multiple campaigns for Noirish Project. Now, like you, I’m just waiting to see what he came up with in his final movie... so no pressure James!

Argo

Cogito Argo Sum

Argo
2012 USA
Directed by Ben Affleck
Redemption BluRay Region B

“Argo f*** yourself.”

A phrase which takes on a little (just a little) extra resonance during the course of this movie, which I finally caught up with on Blu Ray... although I really had wanted to go see it at the cinema and found myself thwarted by a “too full up” life at the time. That I wanted to go see a movie involving some politics, a subject I know little about nor have any interest in, may have surprised a good deal of my friends but I’ve always been a bit of a Ben Affleck fan after his sterling work in his films with Kevin Smith, particularly the third and fourth of the Jay And Silent Bob movies, Chasing Amy and Dogma.

I also wanted to see the old Saul Bass Warner’s logo, which this movie opens with, on a big screen again... another thing in which I was stymied but that’s okay. People will keep coming back to that logo in homage for many years to come, I reckon. It also signals the kind of film Ben Affleck is trying to make... that is to say... something mired in the style of seventies Hollywood filmmaking and which stands up against such political thrillers as The Parallax View and All The President’s Men. Indeed, I’d heard that the style of the filmmaking was very close to those kinds of movies but I think that might a bit of wishful “interpretation” in this case.

Certainly, the film does more than hold up against the two films I just mentioned and many more of their ilk... Argo is a great movie and a great achievement and, perhaps, even deserved its Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards this year, in as much as any of them deserve it (which is pretty much never, in my book, but that’s another story). But, though it does eschew a few obvious modern film making techniques, and while Ben Affleck has certainly gone to some lengths to keep the film very close in style to a seventies movie (copying sequence structures and blowing up film so the grain is more prominent), I think the film still has quite a strong feel of the contemporary about it and I think there’s more than a little of nostalgia, as it relates to post-modernism, in the make-up of this movie than was perhaps required.

And that’s not a dig at Ben Affleck (nor the movie) as I don’t think that “looking back” symptom of nostalgic reverence is something that can easily be escaped or ignored and, I think, it’s probably a mistake to think you can do that... and possibly box office suicide too if you were 100% successful.

Having said that, the film does have long sequences where it does feel very “1970s” like and hats off to Mr. Affleck for making this all work so well. There’s an unwillingness to use hand held camera for most (if not all?) of the film but that doesn’t stop there being a lot of motion in the camera and the long smooth tracking shots which twist and turn and then are cut against other similar kinds of shots and then broken up completely by little short shots is something which works really effectively as a modus operandi here and, dare I say it, kinda brings a modern sensibility and thrill to a movie by subverting the very techniques it is intending to imitate.

What this leaves us with is a brilliantly shot (actually) motion picture which, even at it’s most Hollywood near the end when a series of freak coincidences, which I in no way believe happened that tightly in real life, are drawn out to make the suspense almost unbearable... is a very satisfying film to experience. I now look forward to seeing the extended cut of the film which is also, apparently, on the Blu Ray disc... as well as some of the fascinating documentaries included with the two versions of the movie.

Also, as would be expected for an enthusiastic individual like Affleck, he’s got some of the best actors giving amazing performances in this film, with no one really being narrowed down as actually owning the film (although Alan Arkin comes close) and with Affleck giving a very downbeat and reflective performance which allows the people around him to also come to the fore - Affleck is wise in that he really doesn’t let loose with anything showy in this one, performance wise, because I’m not sure this kind of delicately toned drama could have held itself together if he, or any of the others for that matter, had gone the more “theatrical” route (after seeing his performance as Bartleby in Dogma, I’m pretty sure this guy could have just dominated the movie if he wanted to... but he cleverly reigned it all in and showed a certain amount of taste unexpected from someone entrenched in the Hollywood community).

The film is a powerful masterwork because it takes a very real, intense situation and manages to keep the tension on it when the way it would have been filmed by many other people would have lessened and devalued what is at stake. It is, after all, a very simple story about a very simple incident. However, because of the way Affleck approaches the material, that is to say, as a true artist (or as much as one can be a true artist in the crazy and collaborative world of movie making), it means the audience never once loses sight of just what is at risk (seven lives) and is kept at the edge of their collective seat because of this approach.

The great Alexandre Desplat’s score is something I wasn’t really picking up on in the context of the movie and is something I need to hear again, but it certainly doesn’t sound out of place in this and the choice of someone who can be as subtle as Desplat is another brownie point for the production team. A very well put together package.

My only regret on my first watch is that I didn’t know the guy playing the storyboard artist for the fake film within a film was actually playing real life comic book icon, Jack Kirby... so I’ll have to look out for him again when I watch the other cut. Amongst other things.

Argo, then, is a great and powerfully entertaining movie and one of the best American films made in the last few years (although I still would have given Moonrise Kingdom - reviewed here - the Oscar for best picture last year) and certainly something any serious lover of cinema is going to want to add to their “watched” pile, if only to have some kind of opinion, good or bad, on it.

And to anybody who says anything any different, well there’s a phrase in the movie which would best sum up my response to that. I’m sure you can remember what it is.