The Adventures of Peter Weller Across The Eigth Dimension

OK, that might be exaggerating a tad but the guy certainly gets around.  Recently I was working up a jokey idea for a sticker using the image of Detroit's favourite police cyborg - Robocop - when I ran across an article on the varied career of the man in the suit himself, Peter Weller. It reminded me to post the sketch in the previous update, but there's also a couple of details about his offscreen life that really need to be shared. I promise this is a one-off & the blog isn't about to become Entertainment Tonight.

It seems like after the promise & fun of the Actor's Studio, Buckaroo Banzai, Robocop & Naked Lunch, Weller had a stretch of bad luck direct-to-video experiences. Anybody who saw Screamers surely had to feel for him in this rough patch. Or at least that's how it looked from the outside. But in fact Weller was doing exactly what he wanted, apparently enjoying the cop shows & exploitation as much as the arty fare, seeing it all as breadth of experience. That's what he's always after. And it turns out he's quite the polymath - as well as acting he also directs, plays jazz trumpet (in the Three Men From Italy group with friend Jeff Goldblum), runs in marathons, speaks fluent French & Italian and - this is my favourite part - while living in Italy discovered a passion for history which led to his becoming a university lecturer on ancient civilizations, literature & fine arts. Showing up for class & discovering your teacher is Mr Banzai has gotta be a little weird. Now all he needs is a touch of physics & medicine and he's totally ready to fight aliens. Weller is currently working towards a PhD in Italian Renaissance Art History from UCLA. A few years back he fitted in hosting the Engineering An Empire series for the History Channel. Also he's in the fifth season of Dexter. Not a lazy man.

And here he is. PW, the renaissance man.. with a shoebox on his head. That's really him, helping out a campaign to get a statue of Robocop built in Detroit. Google "RoboCop Speaks To Detroit" for his funny, rambling video plea. And relax - they raised the money. The statue will be built. 
Love this guy.  

One more subject I've learned about from the web trawling - The Robocop Unicorn craze. I don't know how I missed it til now, but it seems to be weirdly popular. Far as I can tell, it started with a fake political ad, (you tube ahoy for this one) urging citizens not to vote for ED-209, who has problems negotiating stairs, but to give it up for "Robocop Unicorn." It caught on. I have no idea why. But it led to a lot of pictures like this:

It's a strange world. 
Thank you for your cooperation. Good night.

Sketchy Details Emerge From Bug Powder Dust.

Some recent rummaging in the bottom drawer turned up this quickie sketch of Peter Weller, playing everybody's favourite Exterminator in Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. Really had forgotten about this one - made at a time when some friends & I were trying to figure out a good plot for a gangster-monster clay animation. We watched & read a LOT of pulp, but sadly never did quite crack it. I guess this pic must be about 15 years old now.. drawn by pausing the VCR & working out or fudging details through the videotape haze, just using pencil on cheap butcher's paper. It's rough, but seeing it again I didn't mind it - worth sharing for the Weller/Cronenberg/Burroughs fans out there anyways. And I still think a gumshoe splatter flick would be fun. You know the drill - something boiled so hard it's head explodes. Down these tentacle-infested streets a man must go who is not himself tentacle-infested, and so on. Yeah. Hard to give up on that. Maybe one day..

Eisenstein Could Really Get Prickly If You Rubbed Him The Wrong Way.

Well this is terrible. Once again I wake up from a quick nap to find I've got a foot-long beard, everybody's dressed funny and we've declared our independence from England.. OK maybe that last part was optimistic - regardless, I've let way too much dust gather on the Arsegravy. By way of apology & with the promise of a proper update soon, I offer this stirring image of Sergei Eisenstein - director of Battleship Potemkin, father of montage, and lover of the saucy holiday snap. It's 1930, he's in Mexico, and his enthusiasm is clearly huge. Action!

You Gotta Fight For The Wright.

A couple of weeks back I went off to see the latest film from this man:

That's English director Edgar Wright, experiencing the soothing touch of Michael Cera. It occurred to me on seeing his new flick that he's someone who's made me laugh a lot in the last ten or so years. Apart from that, he's got a wonderful way with a camera. Perfect whip pans, zooms & close-ups, intense colours, strong composition - this is plainly a man who enjoys his work. Reminds me of Sam Raimi or Robert Rodriguez on their best days. His sound design & musical choices are very distinctive too - just listening to his film & television work is great fun.  Given all that, I figured I should do a quick Yay Him, just in case he'd escaped the eagle eyes of any Arsegravy readers out there.

For a good long while Mr Wright has worked with these people:

As my dear Dad would say, that is holding the man. And the man is Simon Pegg. The one with the handfull is Nick Frost. These days Pegg is a busy lad, with TV shows, movies, books & a huge round of promotional appearances on the go, all of which is fair enough really, given that he does seem to be a very funny & talented chapotle.

He's always on the job, as you can see. But there was a time when Wright, Pegg & Frost were just starting out. Actually the thing I'm about to mention isn't quite where they all started out, but it certainly got them a lot of attention & besides I'm really just doing the edited highlights, so without detailing the short-films, tv shows & stand-up.. lets skip to the sort-of beginning, with this:

The sharehouse sitcom like no other sharehouse sitcom, Spaced was a TV series directed by Wright, produced by Nira Park & written by Jessica Stevenson & Simon Pegg that aired as two seasons in 1999 & 2001. It was honest, sweary, stylish & wonderfully free of the hellspawn of canned laughter. It also felt like it had been written by people who'd grown up with exactly the same TV shows, books, movies, comics, video games, food & music that I had. For me, the second series is the one where they really hit their stride perfectly - but that could just be because it's the one I saw first. I know plenty who go for season 1. Either way, its short, sweet run of 14 episodes is well worth a look.

Spaced also featured the work of artists Jim Murray and Jason Brashill. These two provided the comic book art that Tim's character makes in the show plus a series of caricatures used in promotions, like the one above the above. (If anyone can tell me which of them produced this particular cartoon please do drop me a line as I'd love to figure out the division of labour & give proper credit.)

The success of Spaced got them into trouble. Zombie trouble.

I won't go on & on. If you've seen it you already know, if you haven't I don't want to spoil it. But I will say a quick word about zombie films - and I'm only including yer actual undead here, not the voodoo variety.. I have to admit that even though I have a soft spot for Romero's Night & Dawn, (and also against popular opinion enjoy the Spierig brother's Undead) there are really only three zombie flicks I've seen to date that I love & can go back to over & over. One is the fabulously loopy Delamorte Delamore by Michele Soavi with Rupert Everett, the next is Danny Boyle's Triffids rewrite, 28 Days Later, and the last is Shaun.

With it's well drawn characters, follow through on the dramatic aspects of the story that give the serious side some weight, beautiful photography & editing and absolutely cracking gags, it's hard not to be a fan. Also it knows it's genre inside out & clearly loves it, which means it never feels half-hearted or condescending. A tasty undead morsel.

And then the cops arrived.

Like The Bill remade as a Hammer horror or The Wicker Man with a sense of humour & way more ammunition, Hot Fuzz is a film that, like Shaun, densely quotes it's sources while affectionately pointing out their failings, capitalizing on the well-trodden genre-territory by piling on ever-more inventive twists. Plus it has the biggest baddest cop show theme never used in an actual cop show by Bond composer & John Barry devotee David Arnold & the small matter of Edward Woodward, Billie Whitelaw, Jim Broadbent, Paddy Considine, The Daltonator and that bloke who played Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark! HOW CAN IT LOSE? It just can't. It's science. Oh, and it doesn't completely shy away from the careful-what-you-wish-for implications of its enforcement-utopia conclusion. Perhaps that hag was right. Perhaps he is just another fascist. To be able to imply that without endorsing it and get a cheer from the crowd is a particularly neat trick.

Maybe it's the friendships of the people behind the camera, maybe it's their affection for the material, but all 3 of their projects I've mentioned here have a sense of genuine fun that comes across strongly on screen. It's also work that has the noticeable quality of something made with actual care.

Like I said at the start, what brought this lot to mind in the first place was Wright's newest film:

Sounds like it's had a rough trot both at the box office & from a fair chunk of the critics. And maybe it's not quite as personal as Wright's work with Frost & Pegg - but if you grew up through the Atari or even the Playstation years & love music & comic books.. and particularly if you ever went out with someone who had a very dodgy dating history, then Scott Pilgrim is for you. It's a surreal, hyperactive, romantic smack-down. Also it has a tiny little bit just for the kids who saw the Flash Gordon movie one time too many. Bonus points.

I must admit, it does feel a little strange to want to go to bat for someone in the privileged position of making relatively high-budget crowd-pleasers like these last few. But none of the films I've mentioned here seem remotely like the soulless, plastic multiplex spam that usually fills that category to bursting. So far Wright and the gang have had idiosyncratic ideas and expressed them with beautiful craftsmanship. The more crowds pleased this way the better.

The catch to all of this is, comedy isn't very predictable. Humour is so personal. I think Anchorman is funny. My older sister hates it. The French think Jerry Lewis is a riot. I think he's a git. That's the rub. So if my recommendations end up giving you about as many big belly laughs as 100 Years of Solitude, my apologies. You really just never can tell.

Oh, one last thing - any illustrators n such looking for image resources related to these guys should probably check out the Blood & Ice Cream blog . It's gold. Many thanks to them!

Eureka. It's Greek For Knob Gag.

Today at Arsegravy Headquarters I've been rummaging through the carefully arranged piles of newspapers, bills, sketches, junk mail & biscuits and from out of the dusty clouds two old cartoons of mine shook loose.

I think the first one is from about 8 years back, & while it was never used I do at least remember having a lot of fun making it - any time hideous rubbery faces & deformed human organs are required is a good time, right? This was also a project done before my current thin grasp of search engines & the interwebs had been established, so it involved lots of library visits checking out medical books, magazines & movies to see what surgeons & patients should look like. Also to see how minimal I could be with drawing surgical equipment while still making it obvious that the guy in the picture was in hospital & not just being tortured.. The extracted organ ended up combining tongue, intestine, heart, stomach lining, scrotum & some blistery disease I forget the name of. Good times.

In the past I'd been happy to do cartoon inks using just a couple of different gauge ball-point pens - the way you can vary the line thickness through more or less pressure on the tip always appealed - but this time I swapped over to the UniPin series. They've got a good range of nib sizes plus water & fade proof ink, don't cost a fortune & they seem to be available everywhere. Unfortunately the scan I've managed of the inked version is a tad lacking in fidelity, but the original is holding up well. The colour was added using the cheap student acrylic Chromacryl - great colour range & so non-toxic you could probably eat it. Having said that - kids, don't eat it.

The other picture was a quick one done for the Mechanics Institute, marking the 150th anniversary of the Eureka Stockade. Their request for a cartoon on this subject was not immediately inspiring. I just didn't see a bloody revolt by goldfield miners over taxation without representation translating into a laugh riot. I remember talking to my friend Nick K about this & as usual he had good advice. He basically reminded me that being overly respectful of those caught up in an historical event wouldn't help make the point, or the joke - be honest & be blunt about it.  Then I thought about all those pictures of guys panning for gold. Bent at the waist.

Yeah. When in doubt, knob gag wins every time.

This Lady Reanimates Parts The Others Can't.

I love a good bit of exploitation. Or is that a contradiction? Good exploitation? Regardless, it's a love that's led to the presentation of Arsegravy's first Beautiful Trash entry - 1971's Spaghetti-Horror exploitation classic, Lady Frankenstein. The director of this film, Mel Welles, was a New York clinical psychologist, fluent in five languages, who traded the couch for the camera while also finding time to be a radio DJ, writer, producer & actor. You might recognise Mr Welles' face from Roger Corman's original 1960 Little Shop Of Horrors, in which he appeared as Mushnik, the undertalented but edible florist.
Welles' association with Corman proved to be a lucky one in the making of Lady Frankenstein. Just as production was about to begin in Italy, one of his financiers wrote a dodgy cheque - leaving him short $90 000. With actors & crew already hired & sets built, he made a last minute appeal to Corman, who was happy to make up the shortfall on a film that already looked like one of his own.  Mixing the faded star of Joseph Cotten with the undisputed talents of game Eurohotty Rosalba Neri, as well as some truly appalling monster makeup & an entirely overdubbed cast of backing players..well, it's obvious this is one for the ages.
But none of that would matter if it weren't for the poster. The poster is what thrusts this film's mismatched head & shoulders above the Beautiful Trash competition. Looking at the handmade movie art of this period through the photoshop-montage dulled eyes of today is a wonderful and tragic thing for an old school illustrator. Maybe it's a side-effect of the corporatisation of production - fun or invention in design are often minimised as too risky. (A similar effect can be seen in trailers - the early 90's saw studios make it a standard contractual agreement that directors would have no say in cutting the trailers for their own films, so the marketing department & nervous execs took over, resulting in the substitution of enticement with synopsis.) Sorry, digressing..  Poster.  In a nutshell, it's work made on a shoestring budget with a crazy deadline to hustle punters for cheap thrills, yet with a style & vibrancy that really grabs you & stays in the memory.  Also it's hilarious. Talk about selling the sizzle. That creature is seriously packing.
I'm not saying it's high art. It's pulp. But in its own trashy way, I think it's beautiful. 

Did I mention how much I admire the art of old Detective magazines & 70's comic books? This's surely a close relative.
And you've gotta love a movie that doesn't even spell the director's name right on the poster.

The Shipping News. Now With More Flying.

Time to get back to some regular politics-free illustration. In an earlier Arsegravy post I think I mentioned taking way too long on a tattoo design of a flying ship for a friend. For myself, I've never trusted my own tastes to be long-enough lasting to take the inky plunge. Combine that with changes of general style, obviously happening all the time but usually in a very noticeable way say every ten years or so, & the idea of choosing poorly in the pretty permanent department of skin art has put me off. Sure, with the right person & design they can look great. But when it goes wrong, it can REALLY go wrong - how bout a picture of your fiance that comes out looking like Mr Potatohead? Fail. Then there's a photo in one of the art books at work of a fella whose back is one big glorious, full colour presentation of all the characters from... A Nightmare On Elm Street. Gotta wonder if he's still happy with that.

With this in mind I opted for a cooling-off period & dragged my heels. Not that I didn't like his idea - I really enjoyed the dreamy, Munchausen steampunk aspects of it - but I did want him to be sure. Kieren - the man with the plan - had given me a sketch of what he was after & as the months went by (3 of them I think) I slowly looked at references but kept it on the backburner. Eventually he spelled it out - super keen, classic idea, get a wriggle on. Even kept a shoulder reserved for it. So I made a start. 

In retrospect I'm very glad to have done this job - it was a great reminder of how rusty I'd got taking time away from constant illustration in the last decade. My perspective work was - well frankly, a total guessing game. After way too many stabs in the dark I bit the bullet & reread my old notes from uni. It meant a lot of redrafting but felt like it was good for me. An odd side-effect was the tendency to trace vanishing points for random objects wherever I went. Just double checking that everything was obeying the rules, I guess. Still, when you catch yourself being quietly entertained establishing the horizon by guessing the intersection of the lines of the supermarket lights & floor it probably is time to get a grip & take the groceries home.

From that point on I looked at a mountain of material dealing with hot-air balloons & dirigibles, steam engines, boat design & everything that stemmed from them - seafaring knots, anchors, mastheads, netting, boilers, paddlewheels, lamps, gas-burners, steam-whistles, rigging.. the works. Partly I went into the little details because the research side of illustration is something I enjoy - don't judge - but also it was because I've never been big on technical or machine drawing. I was never one of those kids who could sit down in school & draw a beefed up racing car or a Robotech monster from memory. People, faces, landscapes or cartoons, sure. But if you wanted to cross a Monaro with the Batmobile, not so much for me.

Despite the unfamiliar territory - or maybe because of it - the work was fun. One of the rules was not to make it too posh - no Spanish Galleons, much more functional & industrial. Also not to go over the top with minute detail, given it was going to be tattoo sized. So no pinching from Baron Munchausen, sadly. But I did find one really terrific & obscure image that turned out to be a big influence - it was a print from the early 1800's detailing the plan of a Belgian physicist, painter, ex-priest, balloonist & showman named Etienne Gaspard Robertson to build "La Minerve". Robertson (extending his name from Robert for the stage) was notorious for his exaggerations & seems to have "borrowed" substantially from previous designs. The seriousness of his suggestion is also doubtful, with one contemporary commenting that La Minerve was "of such baroque extravagance.. that Roberson was either mad or clowning.." And it really was a big idea - a massive 160 foot diameter balloon carrying a 150 foot ship below & a crew of 60, whose aim would be to travel the world on voyages of discovery for up to 6 months at a time. It would feature an observatory, kitchen, library, church, gymnasium, theatre & launching platforms for smaller balloons. It's goal was pure research & it took its name from the owl-loving Greek goddess of wisdom. She was goddess of a whole bunch of other stuff too & also showed up in Rome but that just complicated things, so I ah.. ignored it.

Unsurprisingly, Robertson's project never happened. People weren't keen. Hanging the toilet underneath the ship from a silk ladder probably didn't help. And admittedly the epic scale wasn't overly practical. But I did love the concept, and I felt like it was a nice sideways-reference to the enquiring mind of the tattoo's recipient. Just bring down the size & haul in the facilities, and we had a ship with a purpose - and a name. The Minerva.

^ Robertson's original Minerva design.

^Just a few of the references & sketches stacked up in the designing process..

^The finished Minerva tattoo design.

One last note - if there happen to be any odd format issues on the page, my apologies, but I really do struggle with the Blogger programming sometimes! A while back they changed some part of their code which deliberately or not, led to captioned photos being inactive. Which is to say no longer able to be enlarged by clicking on them. Although the old captioned ones still seem totally active & fine. So unless that changes I'll just be writing below the pics from now on I guess. Unfortunately Blogger also only allows you to write below pictures  from the left margin of the page if the image is medium size. I know that makes no sense, but them's the breaks.
Sorry folks, I'm just not the IT crowd.