And Planet recent got itself a facebook page too. Although the clothing section has had its own page for a while, we thought we should have one to indulge our luv & wunderment of pop and off-centre culture. I'm already busy on it regularly posting pics and tubes that appeal to my sense of groovy, hip, cool and crap.
Our mascot, The Silver Turtle: Size of a Planet* says "check it out."
*I lied, we don't have a mascot called The Silver Turtle: Size of a Planet. Wish we did.
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Man From Planet X (1951)
Made on borrowed sets in just six days this modest film is basically a melodrama where a few people save humanity from a little alien guy you can't help but feel
sorry for. The fog machine is turned on full to hide the
wire and cardboard as heroes and villains wander around castle walls and out on the moors. It's like watching an epic as done by an amateur theatre company.
Earth VS The Flying Saucers (1956)
Few sci-fi inclined haven't seen this, but I'll remind you anyway. Ray Harryhausen put a lot of life into his saucers and into this film. The film itself is very pedestrian and predictable, but when saucers or aliens appear it just has that childhood thrill or fear you want to recall. And the faux epic climax over models of Washington buildings is always fun.
The Abominable Snowman (1957)
From the writer of the Quatermass stories comes an intelligent and philosophical adventure film. And yes, about the hunting of the Yeti. But despite the glorious visuals (impressive for the budget) this is mainly a psychological story and where much of its strength is from the characters and general atmosphere. There are striking moments to this small grand film and Peter Cushing shows why he's...well...Peter Cushing.
Fiend Without A Face (1957)
Feral brains with whiplash spinal cords! And these squirmy, leaping neck stranglers create a fairly effective climax to this modest British flick that is respectable to all concerned, even with the silly science and melodramatic plot twists. Without doubt the stars of this movie are the little brain bastards and they don't truly appear till near the end but it's a worthy payoff.
Atomic Submarine (1960)
The cheap look adds to the charm of submariners versus a flying saucer. The actors try to be likeable,
the director tries to be entertaining, and the narrator keeps a stiff upper-lip. Stock footage abounds! When our heroes eventually get into the saucer the real fun begins. The big bad alien is one of my cheesiest favourites and I love his alien arrogance. Take that, you!
The Day The Earth Caught Fire (1961)
The world is about to end and no special effects to stop it! That's because this is an actor's piece and more involving for it. Through a top notch cast we see people deal with the crisis in
themselves. This is drama about our own lives as much as a scientific thriller. I think it's one of the best British SF films made.
The Last Man On Earth (1964)
When don't you enjoy Vincent Price? Never does he fail to live up to a film and this Italian mega-el-cheapo mutant zombie movie tries hard to live up to him. Admittedly, this version of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (there have been three) virtually begins and ends with Vincent's performance, but the film still holds up enough on its own. It shows that even if the execution isn't the greatest, a good idea not betrayed goes a long way towards a good SF movie.
Death Race 2000 (1975)
I've always liked David Carradine even when he's in one of those ultra-cheapie rip-off flicks. And this is one of them, made quickly to cash in on Rollerball (1975). But it moves fast, keeps the right humour and beats Paul Verhoven to that satirical style
uber-violence. It's
Wacky Races for psychos. And who doesn't do pedestrian point scoring when that little old lady is taking too long to cross the road? And it has the only bad visual pun I'll let be paid.
The Hidden (1988)
Effectively a chase movie, it barrels along so fast you don't have time to realise there isn't much story. Eventually it turns into an alien and human buddy story, with all that character building stuff wanna-be writers would want to do with such a premise. But the direction and Kyle MacLaughlin's charms keep you happy to see how it all turns out. And the body-stealing alien is a nice piece of work.
Fatally flawed, but there's enough cool stuff in this Rutger Hauer low-budgeter to make you wonder why it goes so wrong. Indeed, this is a smart, sassy, stylish future cop film with quirky heroes chasing a nashy-teeth monster through a flooded London. It's going great guns till the studio, so impressed by the rough cut, thought this could go mainstream and thus rejected the original cerebral ending, forced the director to quit (he went back to commercials) and commissioned a rewrite to deliberately dumb down the last ten minutes (you can see the moment it happens). It could have been a cult classic, but instead it's another Highlander 2, except it still makes more sense than that.
It's hard to find evidence for who was the creator of the autobiographic comic and so it is easy to put that honour on Harvey Pekar. He as good as deserves it anyway. Throughout his work as a comic writer, particularly through his comic American Splendor, Mr Pekar talked of his cranky life as an office worker and music collector. He'd harp on with his observations of life and love with a dry frustration that not just lent itself to the comic medium but created a whole genre in that medium.
Pekar's work began as self published in '76. Robert Crumb was the first and most often and most important artist to illustrate Pekar's commentary of monotony, art, life and relationships. Important artists followed suit and depicted Pekar's world intermittently up until 2008, culminating in a rather decent movie.
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of what will become the legacy of Harvey Pekar is that his art, his work, was almost inseparable from the man himself. His publications weren't just biographies but part of the overall living art installation that was Harvey Pekar. And this living art began modestly and slowly ingrained itself upon the American indy unconscious to construct an unashamedly narrow window of a universe that many could identify as their own life in mundane America.
I predict and hope we'll see one last work The Death of Harvey Pekar. I'm sure it'll be as wry and self effacingly bitter as anything he's written. It'll be an art installation complete.
Harvy Pekar October 8, 1939 - July 12, 2010
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I can't be arsed writing some lengthy tribute to To Kill a Mockingbird, although it certainly would deserve it, but you can google it and get every man and his book reading dog honouring the work faster than it takes to read this and certainly for me to write it. But there are things that intrigue me as we hit half century on one of the most influential works of the English language, let alone American literature.
Here's a book that has as often been banned or burned as it and the author has been awarded the highest honours for literature and for battling ignorance and bigotry, and all in the same country throughout its 50 year life. Perhaps no other book, except Catcher in the Rye, has shown up the insane contradictions of a religious and rational nation.
Harper Lee herself has only on few occasions involved herself in that madness (great letter she wrote to a school board on her Wikipedia entry) and in fact she has refrained from much comment at all.
Often the media refer to such people as recluses, which is an utterly shallow reaction toward people who prefer to drink with their own mates than fortune seeking journos and fame touching fans (authors like Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon or Tim Winton).
Harper Lee is no recluse but she obviously enjoys a private life. Perhaps partly due to bearing witness to what happened to her attention-seeking friend Truman Capote, but I think more because she's simply wiser than many.
Harper Lee only wrote the one novel and indeed it is also her only major work. It is considered semi-autobiographical and may explain that she has always thought of herself as more of a journalist than as a novelist, even though she can happily wear the label of novelist on just the one novel (a testament to the power of Mockingbird).
Perhaps an important reason for her reticence to be interviewed or talk about the book is that she firmly believes the book can and should talk for itself. I don't think she wants the book and herself to be inseparably intertwined in the public consciousness as how both In Cold Blood and Catcher are often perceived.
Certainly I feel that the 84 year old Harper Lee (34 when she wrote Mockingbird) does not want herself to be the subject rather than the ideas she puts forward. Indeed, this may well have contributed to the book's power 50 years on.
And that I spent more time talking about her than the book probably wouldn't impress Harper Lee at all.
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Ray Harryhausen is a god among filmmakers, because he was and still is the king of movie monster makers. His Dynamation process was more than just hand animating models, which would be awesome simply by itself, but he developed film processes for this animation to work among real actors and seemingly on set. It was stunning for its time but the artistry keeps it alive even now when technically it would seem crude compared to the computer generated material of Avatar.
But I would bet you ten bucks that everyone who worked on the creatures and ships in Avatar is a proud Harryhausen fan directly inspired by his work. And I bet another ten bucks directly inspired by Jason and the Argonauts, maybe the best kids movie ever.
Ten or so years ago I had the privilege of meeting Mr. Harryhausen at a talk he gave. That would have been cool by itself and remains a firm and fond memory. But it was made very special by what he brought with him. He had various models from his films including the Medusa from Clash of the Titans and few other beasties.
Two particular items were really special to me to see, up close too. One was a skeleton from the climatic fight from Jason & the Argonauts; he was like twenty centimetres high. The other was a saucer from Earth vs the Flying Saucers, one of the small ones from the shots where they flew along in armadas.
That moment was so exciting for me, the high moment of fanboy worship, because to actually see up close one of those saucers that Ray animated by hand and know that was the saucer I saw in the film that when I first saw it, some Saturday afternoon on the family TV, I didn't even think of it as something that existed outside the screen, was like making a personal and physical connection to my sense of cinematic awe. This should really let you know where I'm coming from. And it's where a lot of fantastic film enthusiasts come from.
And Ray Harryhausen holds a rare distinction in cinema. In the early years of film, particularly during the studio system, ownership went to the producer, a Selznick or DeMille picture, later, as independents started to arise, to the director, a Hitchcock or Scorcese film, otherwise it belong to the lead actor, a John Wayne or Audrey Hepburn movie. Ray Harryhausen is the only person who is not a producer or director or actor who is given the ownership for the films he created such dazzling effects. Ray did not write, produce or direct any of his films, from It Came from Beneath the Sea to Clash of the Titans, yet all are referred to as Harryhausen films. For in the end, there is no reason to see these movies except for the thrill of what Ray Harryhausen produced for it, often as a solo craftsman and with the most modest of budgets.
And that is why he grows in reverence and stature more and more every day. You see, the coolest thing of all about Ray Harryhausen is that he gets cooler. He is cooler now than he was ten years ago, twenty, fifty years ago. I am glad that on his 90th birthday he has that knowledge that he is one of the coolest guys in the movie world. For over time, because and not despite of all the common place CGI of contemporary fantasy films, new generations can see the artistry and the unique skill of Harryhausen's achievements. Some things don't date and some things date just in the right way to keep them alive forever.
In the world of fantastic cinema, he is a legend. He is the man.
So now, let's wrap this up with what is perhaps Ray Harryhausen's finest moment as an artist, Perseus encountering the Medusa in the 1981 film Clash of the Titans, his last feature film before retirement.
Thank you, Ray.
Alfred Hitchcock was riding high as "The Master of Suspense" when he made Vertigo in '58 and North by Northwest in '59 (two of his very best films) but he was getting some lip that he was only the master because he commanded the budgets to pull it off. Plus, there were young "maverick" directors being treated as upcoming rivals to an old schooler.
Perhaps this gave Hitchcock a reason to prove something or maybe he just wanted to try something different. Regardless, he was shown Robert Bloch's new novel Psycho (inspired by Ed Gein, arrested two years prior) and Hitchcock decided this is where he wanted to go.
The major studios, previously happy to give Hitchcock the big bucks, didn't like the idea at all and refused to support it. They wouldn't even pick up the film rights to the novel to explore it. So Hitchcock picked up the rights himself (anonymously) and self funded the project as a low budgeter using the studio and crew from his Hitchcock Presents TV series.
Upon its release it immediately became one of the most controversial films from a major studio and shook up everything to do with the cinema of horror, of the thriller and of psychological drama. And of course, Hitchcock not only had another hit, but also showed he wasn't just still on the edge but ahead of the curve on almost everybody and could do so outside the studio system.
But I don't need to heap superlatives on what is as much a work of modern art as it was entertainment. No other film has given more people doctorates in psychology. No film other than Citizen Kane has been so dissected by film scholars. The shower scene has been paid homage or parodied more than any scene in any film anywhere and remained the height of modern editing till the car chase in The French Connection ('71). And the musical score by Bernard Herrmann is still one of the best soundtracks ever put to a film.
Regardless of what I'm going on about, if you haven't seen it yet then you better get on with watching it. Or see it again, because there's something new to find in it every time. And when you do watch it remember it's 50 years old and almost all of modern thriller / horror cinema owes it big time. Oh, and the original novel by Block has been reissued as part of the 50th anniversary.
Norman hopes you enjoy the film.
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Though I use layout design combined with the execution of the art, be it photography or illustration, as to judge the quality of the final product I still pretty much just go with what I like.
Eh, what ya gonna do?
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Star Wars Sequel Anyone?
I almost forgot that on May 21st 1980, The Empire Strikes Back was released to an anxious audience. No need to tell everyone it remains the most liked of the Star Wars movies and often referred to as an example of a sequel that improves on the original (I prefer to think it builds on the first). It was a film that introduced the cinematic cliffhanger to a new generation and was the first downbeat ending that teenagers had encountered. That satisfied but still yerning feeling in the stomach when the credits went up was a new sensation for millions. And 30 years on it remains the best space adventure film. And the hand animated snowwalker battle on Hoth sequence is still superior to almost all since (yes, I'm thinking Avatar).
It remains a kick-arse adventure. Gotta be impressed.
Here's the trailer to remind you.
Oops, wrong trailer.
Eh, what ya gonna do?
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Dennis Hopper May 17, 1936 - May 29, 2010
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Frank Frazetta began working in the comic industry at the age of 15 back in 1944. That began a huge career as a comic artist doing characters like Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Lil' Abner and Little Annie Fanny. You'd think that would be enough but he went on to become one of, if not, the most recognizable fantasy artist in the last fifty years. As book cover artist he defined the style of Conan the Barbarian, Tarzan and John Carter of Mars. Indeed, his influence on sword and sorcery and planetary romance is extraordinary, even seminal. He has become the leading fantasy poster artist and many of his paintings are instantly recognized as classics. Originals sell for hundred of thousands.
It's easy to understand Frazetta isn't to everyone's taste with his double Y males in loin cloths and nubile women of heaving bosom and curvy hip, but you have to admit his place in popular culture and admire his turn of the brush. Besides, Frazetta didn't want you to take his work all too seriously. Look at the Ralph Bakshi and Frazetta's film Fire and Ice, it's brimming with gusto cheese and no apologies. He may have fallen out of favour as the world's most popular poster artist but people were starting to get him again. That's why at the time of his death, May 10 age 82, his work is entering a revival. He's going to be around for a long time. Frazetta forever.
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Daisy Duck has turned 70. She is the aunt of April, May and June Duck and lifelong friend of Minnie Mouse. She has had a longtime on again off again relationship with Donald Duck and despite their reputation for volatile behaviour Daisy has successfully tempered Donald over the years while maintaining an independent career and being a role model for working women who do not have to trade femanine fancies for success. She remains an inspiration for young women, especially showing you can be strong and forceful and still wear pink ribbons.
Also turning 70 is Lance Henricksen. There aren't many people you can refer to as a cult actor. Lance is certainly one of them. An experienced stage actor he first appeared in the classic Dog Day Afternoon and has shown his versatility ever since. He was James Cameron's first choice for the Terminator but the studio wanted Arnold. Can you imagine how different Hollywood would be if they had gone with Lance? Anyway, he still was in Cameron's Terminator but it wasn't till he played Bishop in Aliens that we really got a good look at him. Never out of work playing crazies or wise men and doing three seasons of Millennium as FBI agent Frank Black. ALways liked him as astronaut Wally Schirra in The Right Stuff. And Lance is a successful ceramic artist as well.
Here's a quiz question; who's the only other actor besides Lance Henricksen to have faced a Terminator, an Alien and a Predator?
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At the age of 16 Lena Horne became a singer and dancer at the famous Cotton Club working with Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington. By the early forties she was appearing in American musicals though her songs would be removed from films when shown in the south. Still, she became the first African-American leading lady in Hollywood. Despite this she quit her film career
because of the inherent racism. By the '50s her civil rights activism and left-leaning politics got her blacklisted. She kept performing on stage and on television and in 
1981 at the age of 64 her one-woman show relaunched her to new generations of followers and her fan base only grew till she retired from fulltime performing in the late '90s. She died 9th May at the age 92 still one of the most respected performers of all time.]]>
Peter O'Donnell died on the 3rd of May aged 90. Who's Peter O'Donnell? He's the creator of that sexy feminist secret agent and adventurer who could beat up any man and take down any super villain, yes, Modesty Blaise. When not being a successful romance novelist under the pseudonym Madeleine Brent, O'Donnell was the long time writer of those endless Modesty Blaise newspaper comic serials beginning in 1963 and wrapping it up in 2001 with many papers promptly reprinting it from the beginning.
So far you can pick up 17 adventures as graphic novels with volume 18 due in August and more to follow. And due to the success of the comic strip O'Donnell also penned 11 Modesty Blaise novels & 2 short story collections. The first novel titled, naturally enough, Modesty Blaise was published in '65 and remains in print as a key cult crime/adventure novel.
There have been a number of film and TV adaptations but the one of interest is the messy but entertaining '66 film that captures the wonderful European style of the hedonistic bon vivant. It has Monica Vitti in hot '60s fashions, Dirk Bogarde in snazzy suits and Terence Stamp as Willy Garvin in trendy threads, you can't beat that for styling.
We've had some cool people through Planet. Like when the band Garbage used our toilets or when Rhianna and Bob Geldof coincidently turned up to our clothing launch. I'm not talking about when Dylan Moran asked if we knew anywhere near by that would let you drink and smoke (we had to say no, the licensed cafe isn't open yet) or when a guy I'm sure was the ghost of SunRa played awesome jazz on our piano and then left followed by his two bodyguards.
Better still havebeen the planned visits by cool people. When Booker Prize winner DBC Pierre officially opened the bookshop with a beer in one hand and a shot of vodka in the other or when Shaun Tan came in to sign his newly released Arrival to a two hour line of eager children and even more eager graphic designers and when Peter Greenaway came in to chat about how film is dead. But I think the winner for coolest visitor to Planet is Henry Rollins who stopped by and made himself available for signing.
American punk legend, cult writer, socio-political commentator, talk show host, raconteur and a star of the hard-hitting talking tour, Henry Rollins stood at the front of a long cue of people largely in black and he greeted each and every one of them.
I wouldn't call the event a signing, though that was its purpose. Henry quickly turned it into a handshake and a brief chat, a personable one-on-one. The signature he left behind had no longer been the purpose of those who lined up but now a reminder, a memento, of meeting and talking to him.
I was impressed by not just his professionalism but how it never compromised his personalism. They say never meet your idols. There are exceptions to that rule; Henry Rollins is one of them.
Planet's accounts dept. gives Mr Rollins a squee hug.
Thanks Henry
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Well, actually, I cheated with the top three. Yes, Windup Girl is a paperback release for April, but the cover art is idenitical to last years hardcover release but I somehow missed it. Incidently, Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi is fast being considered one of the hottest novels around and already slated to take numerous awards. Looks nicely po-mo which is always a bonus for me. Same with Mind Over Ship, I skipped the hardcover and also this paperback edition is a couple of months old. And oops regarding Pinion. This is the third book in Jay Lake's Clockwork Earth series and somehow I missed ordering it till April instead of March.
You probably have already guessed I'm a sucker for futuristic cityscapes and a penchant for the fantastic, so many covers usually come from genre titles. There are five graphic novels here as well. There's usually one, maybe two, but I'm seeing a growing trend by comic publishers to have the art direction more explorative. For the last three months there has been a cover by the publication house Vertigo and for April there are two, Area 10 and Luna Park.
And I assure you that the three covers with skulls is coincidence and not an indication that I have a thing for brain cases.
