Junji Ito's The Lighthouse

 It's satisfying to see Junji Ito adapting The Lighthouse. It's only a preview of two pages of the full adaptation of the comic distributed in theaters when The Lighthouse is released July 21st. 

Moebius with David Lynch at a printing press in Paris. 2013

 

This seems from around the time David Lynch did Idem Paris. 

Idem Paris has been on Youtube this whole time, yet i've still not seen it. 

I need to see this ASAP

Still haven't pursued that thread of reading more Strugatsky Brothers after discovering that Roadside Picnic is every bit as great as the hype. 

Big box suburbia is an alienation factory

This essay by Asad Raza over on 3 Quarks Daily kinda blew me away just now. Drawing from imagery from "Brazil" and "Goodfellas," and draws from the source material for "American Gangster," to paint a very ugly, sobering picture of America today.

One sentence that i'm afraid that i will be co-opting to scrawl anywhere i can is, "Big box suburbia is an alienation factory." It's a very succinct metaphor. Fuck it. That ain't no metaphor. It's concrete fact. Raza nailed it.

Weird that it seems that Juliana Hatfield coined the phrase "alienation factory" as when i googled that alone, it turns up mostly in her song lyrics. Nicely dystopian. I never really gave her or Blake Babies a chance, and still doubt her music would suit me.

Read that essay. Edifying.

By the way, another sentence that has me grinning maniacally is, " The new frontier is the first frontier, the Tigris-Euphrates valley, and our representatives act as gangster-cowboys there while we exult in the televised fictions detailing the same." I've seen that sentiment elsewhere, but i like the way that sentence is constructed.

Blood Meridian movie: nah

Even though it might cool to have a Blood Meridian movie, i'm not sure if i could watch it myself. It had better have the dead baby tree if it gets made.

As for Ridley Scott being the director of an adaptation, i'm unconvinced. A true "Blood Meridian" would come off as complete violence pornography, ugly, unjust, debauched... more like a cross between a Jordorowsky film like "Holy Mountain" or "El Topo" and the stuff that influenced Rom Zombie's "The Devil's Rejects" than oh, let's say Scott's "Gladiatior," "Alien," or "Blade Runner." (Never seen any of that stuff that influenced Zombie. Again, I can take that kind of graphic violence in books, but not in movies.) I'm going to reject all of that though. Yes, Blood Meridian's language is violence, but i don't feel like it is violence for the sake of violence. I'd rather the director going to acid cowboy allegories of Jodorowsky than snuff porn, which Scott will likely try to do.

What would be interesting is if someone focused on the spiritual or cosmic significance of the book, someone like Guillermo del Toro. It feels like he'd get down the gnostic overtones correctly. Otherwise, it's just going to be a bigger budget, less absurd "Natural Born Killers."

Oh yeah... i haven't gotten around to seeing the "Deadwood" series yet. Don't know how that might figure into the mix.

Judex

Why is Batman laughing? When a post starts with a question about Frank Miller's All-Star Batman, i really wasn't expecting it to go such fantastic places, back to Judex (who i haven't heard of) and Fantomas (who i have.) Just awesome.

Obviously i need to track down the Judex serials. If they inspired André Breton and Luis Buñuel, they're good enough for me.

Shriek: The Movie?

Apparently everyone has known for the past year or so that VanderMeer has been working on a low-budget, indie movie of Shriek: An Afterword. I haven't had a chance to see it yet, and cannot afford to look at it now, as there's a bunch of video files being crunched for work on this computer. The book is pretty damned fun though, darkly ambiguous, psychedelic, byzantine... even... um... grandly Borgesian.