Fourth Dose of Flaming Sword Pics

All, right, I’m going to go all out and post all the remaining paintings at once. This is turning out really well...the pics look pretty swell all blown up when you click on them. Here goes...

Remember, in the last installment, there was a picture of a Nightmare? Well, the first picture here shows a whole mess of them. Zorachus has a huge fight with them.

The picture with the frogs riding other frogs is called, unsurprisingly, Frogriders. These guys show up right at the beginning of Killing Brother Forty, the Third and final volume of Flaming Sword.

The second and third pictures show a big pseudo-parrot named Interpreter Bird. He lives with a bunch of good Nightmare-like creatures called the Jugglers (that’s them behind him in the third painting), and he translates for them.

The fourth picture shows the trilogy’s mightiest monster, a flying napalm-dripping leviathan who’s so big you can see him from orbit. His name is The Ourak-Huroum, and if the other monsters haven’t gotten you, he probably will.

The next to last picture is of Brother Forty. He’s the angel responsible for the creation of organic life, and he stands at the threshold of the Garden with his freaky flaming blade, although he’s always present in the rest of the canyon as well. Generally, he appears to be a cranky old hermit (if there’s a movie he should be played by a Bollywood actor named Naseeruddin Shah), but he’s not even remotely human...the picture shows him just beginning to transform into something very very strange.

The final painting shows a creature who guards the southern wall of the Shuddering Mountains. He has orders to kill anyone who comes in, but will let you pass if you’re on the way out...

I’m going to paint a lot more of these things...I’ve sold all of these...I’d like to do an art book called One Hundred Monsters from the Khudah Darya. What do you think?

Hunger Games Review

Okay, I just saw a midnight show of The Hunger Games. I’ll admit right up front that I never read the book; also that I came to the flick with a real axe to grind. You see, there’s this murderous Japanese movie from 2000 called Battle Royale, and when I saw the trailers from Games, I said to myself, this looks like a giant rip-off of that....and it is.

Now just because something’s a ripoff, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be bad. But doing a good ripoff of Royale would be a pretty tall order. It’s an absolutely amazing piece of work...hard to believe that something so visceral and ill-tempered was helmed by a guy in his seventies, namely, Kinji Fukasaku. The movie was so in-your-face ferocious that it never even got a US release, even on video, until now...somebody’s come up with a US version to cash in on Games, which is only Goddamn effing fair, since Games isn’t a patch on Royale. It doesn’t have any teeth, and it’s slow enough to let you think about the premise (and a lot of other stupid shit besides), whereas Royale had the sense to throw you into the horrible thick of things pretty quick.

The central conceit in both films is that kids are being forced to fight and hunt each other to the death, Most Dangerous Game style, by evil adults. In Royale, this is happening because Japan sucks in the future, and kids are getting increasingly rowdy in school, and these nasty tournaments, held on an island, are a ploy by the government to make the kiddies behave. Now, that’s just kinda wacky...I don’t know why anyone would do that. But as I said, we get to the killing right quick, and the carnage is so persuasive that you find yourself forgetting about how senseless it all is.

In Hunger Games, we’re in some sort of strange alternate future America called Panem, where a big revolt was put down, and all the various districts have to send a girl and a boy to slaughter and be slaughtered in the titular games. Why they’re called the Hunger Games, we never find out, although that sort of stuff doesn’t bother me too much...why is Straw Dogs called Straw Dogs, anyway? I am bothered by consistent vagueness and arbitrariness, however,...and this flick relies heavily on both. The future is a ridiculous mishmash of goofy costumes, hair-styles, and awful production designs, unleavened by a lot of special effects that aren’t any good. The movie really looks like ass...the photography sucks. Everything is fully lit and there’s a whole whole lot of shaky-cam, which has got to be the most tiresome cliche in cinematic history. Among other things, it makes all the shitty production design look even shittier, and it neuters the action sequences.

The story has young Katniss(?) Evergreen (Jennifer Lawrence) taking the place of her little sister when the latter is picked out in the Hunger Games Lottery...Katniss winds up being shipped out with her male counterpart, Peeta(!) Mellark, (Josh Hutcherson), who has a secret crush on her. They come under the wing of a Hunger Games vet (Woody Harrelson), who’s been assigned to show them the ropes so that they’ll put on a better show. They get to the capitol and engage in some ridiculous training. At one point, Katniss is presented to a bunch of upper-crust assholes, whereupon she shoots the apple out of their roasted pig’s mouth. The audience seemed to think this was just great, although I found myself thinking...why would the assholes allow this chick a clear shot at them with her bow? Moreover, all the powers that be decide her behavior is really swell...puzzling.

There’s a bunch of puppy love between Katniss and Peeta which slows the film down...it seemed like it was nearly a hour and a quarter or so until we finally got the running around. And even though the film really dragged up till that point, there were a whole lot of premises which weren’t established...do the Games take place under some kind of dome? Do the bad guys hem the kids in with actual forest fires, or are the forest fires mere illusions? Can the bad guys just project matter into any point in the arena? Can they generate giant evil pitbulls out of nothing?

All the stupidity is televised, of course...which is sheerly ludicrous, about as dumb as that stuff with the cameras salted about in the jungle in Tropic Thunder. At least that was a comedy, though. In this flick we’re asked to believe that there are cameras literally everywhere (because that’s what you’d need to televise the running around), including airborne shaky cams which follow you or fly on ahead, looking back at you. There isn’t even a stab at rationalizing things. But I don’t think the braintrusts behind this mess even realized they had a problem. Some of the silliness is real James Fenimore Cooper stuff. At one point, our heroine has to climb a tree to get away from pursuers. They have bows and arrows, but they can’t shoot her for some reason. One of them tries to climb the tree and fails because he's holding a sword, although he could've just shoved the sword into his belt. The baddies fall asleep under the tree in full view of our heroine. She doesn’t try anything because she falls asleep too. When she wakes up, she still doesn’t try anything, even though the malefactors are still asleep. Then her attention is directed (by a cute little sympathetic black girl) to a giant wasp’s nest---full of genetically altered wasps--- which she somehow hasn’t noticed before. Katniss decides to drop the nest on the sleepyheads by sawing---with the serrated top of her Rambo knife---through the branch it’s hanging from. Even though she’s only about two feet from the nest, the wasps let her saw through four inches of wood. Eventually the nest drops and the wasps do a number on her foes, but you really have to wonder why they didn’t do the same to her...and so on.

The action is repeatedly interrupted by young love, and when it does happen, it’s miserably directed by Gary Ross. His sole idea about action direction seems to be shaky-cam, and he uses it much less skillfully than most guys who wallow in it. The fights are generally hard to follow, and the climactic fight is the worst. There isn’t any good violence, and the material cries out for it. Ultimately there’s some arbitrary twaddle about the guys who run the games changing the rules to let our young lovers escape, then changing them back, then changing them back again...

Stinko.

I did like some of the North Carolina locations, however.

Bottom line...watch Battle Royale. It’s fast and real ballsy. You’d be vastly better off with Apocalypto, too. Or this Korean flick which I just watched called War of the Arrows. There’s also too much shaky cam in it, but it’s much better employed, and the film truly rips, and there’s a ton of bitchin’ Manchu armor...

Even more Flaming Sword Pics

I hope you're enjoying these, because I'm going to pitch eleven more at you.

That first pictures shows one of those big Crocodilian Hogs, being hunted by Chiselteeth, which are pack-hunting predators who have long nasty teeth sticking straight forward from their mouths...they run at their prey real hard, drive their teeth in, then bounce back. You'll notice they have padded upper lips.

The second picture shows Tyanyo-Ne, who could be described as a subarctic ninja woman...she's buddies with Spear of Terror, and they're riding on Hero Eel, Spear's "Big Brother," a giant talking otter.

Painting number three shows the chief of the evil otters, Scorpion Head, so-called because he wears a live scorpion as a headdress.

The fourth picture shows a Nightmare. What the hell these things evolved from, I don't know. They start off small, but grow as long as they live, putting on extra arms. There are zillions of them, and they're extremely vicious.

More Flaming Sword Pics

Okay, here are some more Flaming Sword Critters.

In places where side canyons meet the big canyon, monstrous tree-like herons take up position on either side of the tributaries and try to pick you off...that first painting shows a couple.

The second shows Spear of Terror, a talking miniature otter. There are a lot of talking otters in the book. Some are good, some are bad. Spear poisons his enemies with a powerful hallucinogen.

After hooking up with Spear, two of our protagonists are threatened by a horde of giant crocs who run on their hindlegs. In the canyon, crocodilians became the dominant reptiles, and the birdlike and mammal-like critters evolved from them.

Which brings us to the Demoniac Hog, which you see in that fourth pic. Some other good guys decide to cut across the headlands above the main canyon, and they meet this pseudo-mammalian behemoth, who’s very hard to put down.

Flaming Sword Pics

I was just at an Sf convention called Lunacon...sold a bunch of paintings that illustrate stuff from my unpublished novel Flaming Sword....posted the first chapter of that a while ago. Anyway, I thought you guys might like to see some of the art; over the next few days, I'm going to post eighteen or so pictures. Click on 'em, and they get much bigger.

Re the book, it's the latest installment in the Zorachus series; it involves an attempt by some really demented bad guys to invade an alternate-universe Garden of Eden and make themselves gods. The Garden in question is located in a vast canyon ringed by The Shuddering Mountains---that's them in that first picture---and the passes are guarded by some pretty freaky fauna, such as the Slotbeast, who's that fire-drooling curled-up fella in the second picture. The third painting shows an Antlerbeast, a creature who guards her young with a hutlike canopy of horns...

Hey, this is just a test...wanted to see what the blog would look like with more than one new image...The wierd picture is my visualization of The Dunwich Horror, and the girl is my model Hanna...if this works, more art soon.

Both these pictures are for sale, by the way---$250 plus shipping.

John Carter Review

Okay, so I just got back from a midnight screening of John Carter. There was practically no one in the theater. Not a good sign, although I think it has a lot to do with the totally half-assed sleepwalking ad campaign that the numbnutses at Disney dreamed up. I never saw a trailer for the movie on TV or in the theaters. The posters were boring, downright terrible, never gave you the slightest idea that the movie's a great big creaturefest, and that there's quite a bit of good epic violence, and that there's a whole lot of dishy Lynn Collins on display. Nope, it was almost as though someone had decided they weren't going to spend any more money on the film, and they might as well just about bury it.

Well, it's going to be a real pity if the franchise dies at the gitgo. The movie's not perfect, but it's a whole lot better than any of those latter-day Star Wars abortions, or godawful crap like Transformers. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I've been lusting for a proper John Carter movie for most of my life. I grew up on Edgar Rice Burroughs, used to read three Burroughs novels a day (they were short, I didn't get any sleep, and I used a flashlight under my blanket), and this flick strikes me as the first genuinely Burroughsian movie ever made. Yeah, it takes a bunch of liberties, but some of them are a good idea...most of all, it propels you into an vivid alien world cooked up by one of the master imaginations of fantasy fiction. Like L. Frank Baum, Burroughs was an idea guy par excellance, and the film really capitalizes on that. There are, of course, all sorts of idiots out there who are complaining about a lack of "freshness," but of course, Burroughs was plundered by just about everybody. Moreover, there's a bunch of stuff in the movie that you really haven't seen before. The Thark hatchlings and Woola pretty much justify the price of admission all by themselves.

The titular character, played by Taylor Kitsch, is an ex-confederate cavalryman who's war-weary but  nonetheless loves to fight...yep, the characterization is rather incoherent. And we do have to wade through some lame Indian-fighting stuff before Carter finds himself in a weird cave where he's transported to Mars, the reason for his going hence rather stronger here than it was in the source material.

 Once he gets to Mars, or Barsoom, as it's known to its inhabitants, things pick right up. We get a ton of splendid Utah scenery, and pretty much everything with the Tharks, giant tusky four-armed green barbarians, is very cool. Woola, the aforementioned Martian doggy, is just great. Willem Dafoe aces his voice and mo-cap duties as Tars Tarkas, the Thark chieftain. Tars is inclined to help our hero, while his evil rival, Tal Hajus, is not; the green guys have no love of the red Martian humans, but get enmeshed in their feuds when Princess Dejah Thoris, fleeing a forced marriage, is rescued in spectacular fashion by Carter, who, it turns out, can leap real high and has all sorts of super strength because Mars has weaker gravity than earth...so it goes. There is mucho running around, occasioned by the plotting of some mysterious guys called the Holy Therns, who are led by Matai Shang, chrome-domed Mark Strong. Seems the Therns have been controlling everybody's destiny throughout the solar system, it really needs to be stopped, and Carter's just the guy to do it...

As I recall, in the books, the Therns were purely Barsoomian phenomena, running a vile religious racket, but having them extending their reach to other worlds does allow for a certain tightening of the story. The very end of the film, involving a young Edgar Rice Burroughs, who's been reading his uncle John's diary, is particularly satisfying. A lot of the other writing is less good...the dialogue is standard at best, and the characterizations could be better...they are, however, much better than anything turned out by Lucas lately. Also, I must say that I didn't care for Kitsch(!). He's just sort of dull. On the other hand, Mark Strong (who seems to be in every movie coming out these days), is effective, and a strong villain is, if anything, more important than having a compelling hero. Lynn Collins is luscious and charismatic in bitching red bodypaint; Ciaran Hinds, Dominic West, and James Purefoy are solid. Some of the action scenes, notably, the fight with the white apes in the arena, are excellent; one, the battle with the Warhoons, could've been absolutely classic if hadn't been intercut with a bunch of senseless flashbacks. There are a couple of expository sequences where the film just stops dead, but it gets going again.

I wouldn't bother with the 3D, if I were you...I saw it in 3D because I had to, and I didn't care for it. I think 3D is generally a bad idea, because it's unrealistic and darkens the images...it's even worse when it's applied as an afterthought, like in Clash of the Titans, or this. When I go see the movie again, in 2D tomorrow night, I expect I'll enjoy it a lot better...for one thing, it does have those amazing Mormonland locations (the Fisher Towers, Caineville Badlands, Onion Creek, Lake Powell), and they were all muddied up in the version I saw. I'm sure even Lynn Collins would look a whole lot better without 3D, and she's pretty hot as it is. As for the direction, Pixar vet Andrew Stanton is at his very best dealing with the animation, and some of that, as with Woola and the Warhoon battle, is just amazing. He's less good with the people, but what the Hell.

In short, I had a good time, I'm looking forward to seeing the movie again, and I hope we get another installment. The second Barsoom book, Gods of Mars, is maybe Burroughs's masterpiece...it's got a lot of his very best invention, the first hundred and twenty pages are a marvel of sustained action, the bad guys are horrific, and the end is a mind-blowing cliffhanger...actually, if you’ve never read the Mars books, you should just go out and get them.

It may be a long time before we see a good ERB adaptation again.