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Snow is a feature of our climate that I don't use enough of in drawings.
It provides the kind of extreme black and white contrasts that are ideally suited to pen & ink. Could use a bit more practice with "spotting blacks"... though I suppose I could just use more practice in general. Shawshackers may recognize the location of the 2nd pic. There hasn't been much to lure me into theatres lately, so I've been dipping into the well of oldies in the hopes of finding a few more forgotten gems. Hopscotch is a spy/comedy I saw once on TV many years ago. Made in 1980 at the tail end of the 1970s cold war detente, Walter Matthau plays an aging spy whose intelligence and experience allow him to handle his assignments without resorting to the indignities of foot or car chases or using a gun. Matthau is extremely charming in this. It's a bit like if James Bond were approaching retirement age, and was faced with working for a younger, more paranoid and incompetent generation of bureaucrats. The classical music soundtrack and sharp writing make this movie a lot of fun. Surprisingly prescient too, considering the political shift from Carter to Reagan. Highly recommended. The Mechanic stars Charles Bronson and Jan Michael Vincent as a teacher-student duo in the busniess of contract killing. The writing and characterization is cold blooded enough to give the script a certain amount of authenticity. I think one line sums up the idea of this movie: "[Being a hitman] isn't that strange, it just means you play the game using your own rulebook." The Ninth Configuration was, oddly enough, a 1980 movie written and Directed by William Peter Exorcist Blatty that I'd never heard about. A strange story about religion, set in an asylum for astronauts who've gone mad. It's tricky to describe (mostly because I zoned out for a good part of it) but interesting, nonetheless. Some of the antics in the asylum are a bit grating however, resulting in the aforementioned zoning out. And finally, I got around to watching The Omen (the original from 1976.) It was a bit creepy, but suffers from the fact that going in, you already pretty much know what's going on and have to watch all the main characters catch up for most of the film. This, however, allows the filmmakers to stage a number of disturbing and gory deaths. The Omen seems to sit somewhere between The Exorcist and Friday the 13th. The movie did make me wonder though: if you knew of the existence of this child of the devil, and believed that he was going to bring about armageddon, should you try and stop it? Or would killing the child be seen by God as an attempt to mess up His Plan? YouTube: Classic footage of some awesome live performances.
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