For decades, people have ridiculed Rob Liefeld for this masterful drawing of Captain America:
People have speculated what Liefeld was thinking when he draw… that… drawing… like:
But now, finally we know where Liefeld got this pose from:
Liefeld was right all the time! VINDICATION!
Remember a couple of days ago when I said that I had refreshed the Diamond/Lunar previews web site I’ve been doing for a few years? No?
But when I first start futzing around with a project, more and more little annoyances become clearer, and improvements present themselves, so I always end up sitting for days, just tweaking and tweaking… the code! Dude! I’m tweaking the code!
So there’s now phrase search “like this”, and backwards search, and highlighting the search hits. And you can now filter on unnumbered books. And many CSS tweaks to make things really stay put — the idea is, after all, that nothing should move on the page as you advance through the catalogue, so that you can scan things fast without hunting for things with your eyes on the page.
Oh, and I grew tired of the monochrome background, so I er appropriated some art from the all time favourite fine art artist among cartoonists. Guess who!
The mobile version is basically the same as the desktop version (but with things rearranged), so these improvements are there, too.
goshenite.info is the address in any case.
I’ve seen this movie several times before, and it’s not new on this year’s Top 100 (it was the only movie directed by a woman on the 2012 list — at #91). But I’ve got at 2K restoration recently, so I’m watching the movie again.
In a recent interview with Alice Diop in Sight & Sound magazine, Diop described Denis’ way of filming something like… er… that she’s always filming as if she loves the character and/or actor that’s in front of the camera? Something like that. It’s very accurate.
It’s such a tense movie. It doesn’t let up.
This movie has the best ending in the history of history.
Beau Travail . Claire Denis. 1999. ⚅
This blog post is part of the Officially The Best 2022 series.
I’ve watched this before, of course — last time three years ago. And this movie isn’t new on the Top 100 (it jumped from #75 to #22, though). But I’m re-watching this anyway, because Studiodigital (I think) has done a new 4K restoration, and Criterion has released the bluray.
More pixels! More bandwidth! More mystery!
And, of course, this movie is one that rewards rewatchings. If you consider it a puzzle movie, there’s all these hints to get excited about. But it’s also just so… engrossing to watch even if you’re not trying to decode anything, but just let it all wash over you.
Those are some odd lens flares.
I remembered this movie as doing the switcharoo about halfway in, so when we were getting towards the two hour mark, I wondered whether I was totally misremembering the film.
It’s still a great movie, but this time around, I was just kinda overwhelmed by the last part. There’s so much to process that you want to pause the film and give things a good think-through…
Oh, right: I’d forgotten that this was originally meant to be a TV series, but ABC passed on the pilot:
Most of the new scenes were filmed in October 2000, funded with $7 million from French production company StudioCanal.
Anyway — it’s mostly a delight to watch and re-watch. Some bits are kinda weak, but it’s mostly amazing.
Mulholland Dr. David Lynch. 2001. ⚅
This blog post is part of the Officially The Best 2022 series.
I’ve now updated the world’s least-used (certified by the Guinness Book of Records) service, Goshenite, so that it also scans the DC portions of the Lunar Distribution previews — it no longer just gets data from Diamond Distribution.
OK, since nobody knows what Goshenite is, I should probably explain a bit, right? Right.
So, I’m one of those people who order comics from the previews instead of doing the sensible thing and buy stuff after it’s in a bookshop and I can take a look at the comics. I’m just lazy that way. So for decades, I’ve been frustrated with how crappy and inefficient the previews thing is (unless you use the papery version, I guess).
Take, for instance, the web interface of the largest US comics retailer, DCBS:
You have tiny cover images, where you can’t really make much out. You have a snippet of text that’s so short that it’s pointless. There’s no way to say “only show me first issues”, or “only graphic novels”. When you scroll, you have to move your eyes around a lot. And you have to wade through variant cover version after variant cover version, and it’s just all so annoying.
So I whipped up a web site where the primary design goal was to allow quickly scanning though comics, without everything being tiny teensy, so I went with a one-comic-at-a-time thing… but with no scrolling, and where you can keep your eyes at the same point all the time, and just hit <Right> and <Left> to navigate quickly, and hit <Enter> when you see something you want to buy. With the Goshenite approach, I can cover the stuff I’m interested in in about ten minutes once a month, which is doable even for somebody as lazy as me.
(Other necessary features: Being able to filter out stuff I’m not interested in, and being able to “favourite” certain publishers so that I never miss whatever, say, Uncivilized is publishing.)
But a couple years ago, DC Comics left Diamond Distribution, which is where I was scraping the data from. And, like, I virtually never buy anything from DC anyway, so I wasn’t much bothered… but it’s been nagging at me.
So I finally spent an afternoon whipping up some code to give Lunar Distribution the same treatment as Diamond, and voilá souffle:
Oh, and while I was at it, I added a simple “search” facility so that you quickly can find all the books by Kevin Huizenga:
The user interface is probably too idiosyncratic for most people, but if you wanna use it, go ahead.
The UX on the phone version is probably more intuitive — you just swipe left a lot. (Which says something about the quality of the comics, I betcha.)
The site is goshenite.info — an easy-to-remember name for sure.
