7 Days in May | Tarzan of the Apes and other silent films

I've been slacking off big time on blogging lately, so in the interest of getting back on track and having something here, how about a quick rundown of stuff I've been watching and reading lately? I'm on a silent movie kick, so let's start with what's been on my TV:

What the Daisy Said (1910)

This is a short DW Griffith movie. I've been curious about Griffith and talk about one of his other films below, but I didn't watch this one for him. It was included on the DVD for Mary Pickford's Daddy-Long-Legs that I'll also talk about below. Like Daddy-Long-Legs, Daisy stars Pickford, this time as one of two sisters who fall in love with a Romani man.

The movie seems to be trying to make a point about love, but I'm not entirely sure what it is. The daisy of the title is the "he loves me, he loves me not" flower, which seems to represent romantic destiny. The sisters try either to circumvent or second-guess their destinies by visiting a Romani fortune teller, but events punish them for that. So is the movie just about accepting fate? Because that's pretty lousy, but I haven't really found Griffith's other movies (I've seen Birth of a Nation, the first part of Intolerance, and Broken Blossoms) to be especially profound either.

I do like the movie though just for the beauty of its locations. Griffith shoots the action on some sets, but there are a couple of recurring locations - a flower field and a waterfall - that I loved returning to.

Dante’s Inferno (1911)

As plotless as the poem it's based on, but impressive. Basically a series of dioramas that are tied together with intertitles describing the action. They're faithfully and inventively adapted though and use the art of Gustav Doré for inspiration. And in my print, the whole thing is accompanied by a beautiful, haunting soundtrack by Tangerine Dream.

Tarzan of the Apes (1918)

My opinion hasn't really changed since I wrote this review.

Carmen (1918)



I never know how to feel about Carmen. I like her as a character, but I hate what she does to Navarro. I want to say that it's totally on him that he betrays everything he thinks he stands for in order to be with her, but she so clearly wants to manipulate and change him that she needs to be on the hook with him.

I watched the 1921 version with English title cards, renamed Gypsy Blood. I don't know if it's a strict translation or if the titles have been tweaked, but it really does play up the Roma angle more than the other silent version I've seen, Cecil B DeMille's from 1915. It even tries to give it a spooky, "gotcha" ending.

Daddy-Long-Legs (1919)

I wanted to see a Mary Pickford film just because she sounds like such a remarkable woman who was able to write her own ticket in Hollywood. She was a powerful figure in the movie business and co-founded both the United Artists studio and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Daddy-Long-Legs is a cute, but precious comedy in which Pickford plays an orphan girl. The first part of the movie focuses on her growing up in a cruel asylum, but able to keep her own spirits up as well as encourage the other kids. Eventually though, she gets word that an anonymous benefactor is going to support her through college. Not knowing his real name and only getting a brief glimpse of his shadow one day at the orphanage, Judy (Pickford) refers to him as Daddy-Long-Legs.

The movie becomes a romance once she goes to college. She meets a couple of men: the brother of one of her roommates and the uncle of the other. Both fall in love with her, but she's more drawn to the uncle, in spite of their age differences. Daddy-Long-Legs also seems to have an opinion about her love life and manipulates events from afar to drive her towards the uncle.

The revelation of Daddy-Long-Leg's identity is predictable and creepy, but that's not my only problem with the movie. Pickford is cute and funny as an actor, but Judy is overly adorable. The shenanigans she gets into at the orphanage feel like manufactured gags rather than honest examples of a girl making the best out of a tough situation. I didn't trust that director Marshall Neilan was playing fair with me, so I watched at an emotional distance instead of letting myself get involved. In contrast, Alfonso Cuarón's similarly themed A Little Princess was just as manipulative, but skillful enough that I didn't mind its yanking me around by my feelings.

Broken Blossoms, or The Yellow Man and the Girl (1919)



I don't remember exactly how this wound up on my Watch List. I'm guessing I put it there shortly after watching The Birth of a Nation and getting curious about DW Griffith and Lillian Gish's other collaborations. I tried Intolerance at some point and got bored with the heavy-handed moralizing in Griffith's attempt to counterpoint the horrible racism of Birth of a Nation. Unable to handle three hours of that, I probably wrote down Broken Blossoms as an alternative.

As the subtitle reveals, the movie still suffers from casual racism. It's not the aggressive sickness of Birth of a Nation though. In fact, a major purpose of Broken Blossoms is to fight against the Yellow Peril fears that were so prominent at the time. There are plenty of issues - from having white people play the major Chinese characters to the repeated, offhand use of a particular ethnic slur - but like Intolerance, the film's clear goal is to challenge prejudices and encourage kindness.

Also like Intolerance, it does this in a really blatant, melodramatic way. But at least there's a strong, central story and a focus on characters. It's not one that I'll re-watch, but its heart is in the right place and Gish's performance as a tortured victim of child abuse is remarkable and harrowing.

Now for a couple of graphic novels I've read recently:

Violenzia And Other Deadly Amusements by Richard Sala

I'm a big fan of Richard Sala and Violenzia is more of what I love: cute girls and hapless boys trying to survive in a deadly world of madmen and monsters.

As usual, Sala suggests a deeper story than what's on the page with lots of references to mysterious characters and plots that will never be explained. Violenzia herself is an unknowable riddle and that's just the way I like it. With Sala, it's all about the story I'm reading right now. The rest of it is for me to imagine.

Baba Yaga's Assistant by Marika McCoola and Emily Carroll

Lovely drawings. I had a hard time figuring out how to take the story, but it works well enough as a contemporary fairy tale. There are suggestions that it's trying to subvert the genre, but it follows fairy tale logic so much - with its coincidences and thin motivations - that it never actually rises above the genre to comment on it. But maybe that's not what it's trying to do.

31 Days of Dracula | Little Book of Horror (2005)

In the mid-'00s, Steve Niles teamed up with some excellent comics artists to create a series of picture books called Little Books of Horror. He adapted Frankenstein with Scott Morse, War of the Worlds with Ted McKeever, and Dracula with Richard Sala.

Niles makes some changes to Stoker's novel, presumably to simplify the story, but there's nothing wrong with that. Lucy's gone, as are all of her suitors. Dracula attacks Mina directly when he arrives in England and Van Helsing is called in by Mina's dad. Van Helsing and Mina hunt Dracula alone and the end of the story is completely different (though it shares some similarities to the Lugosi film). Knowing that though, it's a fun twist on the story and Sala was the perfect choice to illustrate it, with his dark, but humorous style.

The book by itself is out of print, I think, but it's included in IDW's Big Book of Horror with the other two adaptations. I reviewed the whole collection for Robot 6 a while back.

Daffodil hates cephalopods

By Richard Sala.

Deep sea divers still hate cephalopods

While Michael's in San Diego for the Big Show, it's Cephalopod Week at the Adventureblog!



[By Richard Sala]

Elsewhere... adventure never looked so good

Fanta



Last weekend's Five for Friday assignment was to Name Five Favorite Projects/Books From Fantagraphics Not By Charles Schulz, Los Bros, Chris Ware, Dan Clowes Or Peter Bagge. I'm always glad to poke holes in the perception that Fantagraphics publishes nothing but impenetrably artsy comics for snobs. It's just not true. Here's my pick of five great adventure comics they've put out (after forgetting that they also used to publish Usagi Yojimbo).

1. Delphine, Richard Sala
2. Interiorae, Gabriella Giandelli
3. Black Hole, Charles Burns
4. Almost Silent, Jason
5. Castle Waiting, Linda Medley

Death-Day



And speaking of artful adventure comics, this week's Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs was about Sam Hiti's latest graphic novel, Death-Day, Part One.

Art Show: Hot Blue Catwomen

The Little Mermaid



Artist Unknown [Animation Backgrounds]

Pirate Girls



By Richard Sala.

Cave Batman



By Andy Kubert. [The Source]

Zorro



By Francesco Francavilla.

Captain America



By Steve Epting.

Sherlock Holmes



By Francesco Francavilla.

Zatanna



By Stephane Roux.



By Ms. Mars.

John Carter



By Larry Ivie. [Golden Age Comic Book Stories]

Daughter of Pandora



By Grant Gould.

Meanwhile...

So, here's what I've been up to elsewhere on the Internet:



I forgot to link to this last week, but I reviewed Richard Sala's Cat Burglar Black for Robot 6. Nice to see that Sala linked to it from his site too.



This week's Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs was about the third and most recent volume of Age of Bronze.

I said a couple of weeks ago in What Are You Reading that I had mixed feelings about starting this book. On the one hand, I couldn't have been more excited about visiting Shanower's ancient Troy again. On the other, I knew that this would catch me up with the collections, giving me an impossibly long wait for the next one. Fortunately, the volume was enthralling enough to keep me from thinking about the lack of any additional Age of Bronze to follow immediately. At least while I was reading it.

Not that it’s without flaws. It feels sacrilegious to say after so thoroughly loving the first two volumes, but there were a couple of times in this one that I had a hard time connecting to what was going on in the story. Not because Shanower couldn’t find the emotional hook – he’s always brilliantly able to do that – but because I had a hard time figuring out the way a particular subplot supported the main story.

The biggest example of this is a long sequence about a king named Philoktetes who’s bitten by a snake during a sacrifice. It happens as the Greeks are camped on the island of Tenedos, their last stop before arriving at Troy. Over the next few days, as the poison begins to spread through the Philoktetes’ body, he’s in such pain that his screams and curses can be heard all over camp. It’s horribly distracting for High King Agamemnon and the rest of the army.

You can read the rest here and marvel at my stupidity in misplacing Odysseus' nationality. Yeesh.



I usually don't hit the window in time to contribute to Tom Spurgeon's weekly Five for Friday post, but I made it last week. The assignment was to Name Five Songs You'd Like to See Turned into Comic Stories and Your Artist of Choice.

Love the illustration (above) that Tom picked to go with my answers:

1. "Take on Me," a-ha -- Tatsuo Yoshida
2. "Voices Carry," 'Til Tuesday -- Colleen Coover
3. "Sixteen Tons," Tennessee Ernie Ford -- Eric Powell
4. "The Wanderer," U2 featuring Johnny Cash -- Darwyn Cooke
5. "One Night in Bangkok," Murray Head -- Mike Mignola

New Richard Sala: Cat Burglar Black

Richard Sala's got a new book coming out (and a new blog!), which should be news enough. On top of that, it's about a girl thief, a mysterious boarding school, buried treasure, hidden clues, and an ancient secret society.

Really though, with Richard Sala it could be about a tea party and I'd snatch it out of your hand to read it.