Or, another entry in this particular genre where a lot of talent comes together to produce something with much ambition and affection which ends up, alas, as something of a dud. IMO, mileage may vary, etc. I'm told David Fincher produced and directed his father Jack Fincher's screenplay to honor him, which is a lovely filial gesture, but imo a better honor might have been some resolute trimming and rewriting. Which, you know, happened to Herman Mankiewicz' original script for the movie later called Citizen Kane. A lot. (Not just by Orson Welles, who as opposed to what this movie claims did deserve his co-writing credit, but also by John Houseman, whose presentation in Mank as an shy pedantic fusspot endlessly saying "but Mank, you can't!" is a far greater reality distortion than anything else. But actually the biggest problem with Mank is not how accurate, or not, it is, but that it ends up as a meandering collection of anecdotes roughly held together with the "Mank writes Citizen Kane and has flashbacks" framing narration which go in all directions and manage to hint at a great many stories about 1930s and 1940s Hollywood, each of which might have been a good subject for a movie. But together they just feel like a whole lot of crammed footnotes in search of an editor.

( As, poor Mank, I knew him )

Smart, wonderful review of Cleopatra, 1963 version, too often dismissed as campy extravaganza. (amenirdis, this one is for you!) It was, of course, scripted and directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, who in this most recent list of 100 greatest screenwriters of all time makes it to No. 23 ("Says Phyllis Nagy: “There may be a more endlessly quotable screenplay than All About Eve, but I’ve yet to find it.”).

About that list: as per usual in such lists written in the English language (US edition), what they mean is "100 Greatest American Screenwriters", with the odd foreigner thrown in. They also confess right at the start: It’s worth noting that Hollywood’s traditional exclusion of women and people of color makes it extraordinarily difficult to truly qualify the best in the craft, but acknowledging today’s urgent need for more inclusive storytelling doesn’t negate the contributions of these 100 pioneers.

That said, it's very satisfying to see pioneer Frances Marion (first scriptwriter, either male or female, to win the Oscar, twice) acknowledged at No.20), and the (imo deserved) number 1 spot goes to an immigrant to whom the English language was something he only learned as an adult (which turned out to be one of the all time successful love stories between a writer and an adopted language), the late, great Billy Wilder. Some of the other choices (even keeping the US pov in mind) are bewildering, no pun intended, but such is always the case.

In terms of Hollywood history, though, it amuses me that Joe Mankiewicz' brother Herman only makes it to No.56 while Orson Welles lands at No.41. Pauline Kael would roll in her grave. As the list writers themselves put it: Once upon a time, a small firestorm might have ignited over placing Orson Welles on a list of great screenwriters. For years, his co-authorship of Citizen Kane was in dispute, with many claiming that the credit belonged almost entirely to the great Herman J. Mankiewicz. (Pauline Kael even wrote an explosive, brilliant, deeply problematic essay arguing so, only for much of her research to be discredited later.) But even if he hadn’t co-written Citizen Kane (which he absolutely did), Welles would have been one of the great screenwriters of the 20th century. He was certainly one of the great adapters, able to take everything from the most acclaimed classics (think The Trial) to the lowest-brow pulp (think Touch of Evil) and make it his own. His Shakespeare adaptations are gems of concision and imagination, balancing respect for the text with a willingness to innovate. Look at the incredible Chimes at Midnight, where he takes pieces of several of the Bard’s plays and turns them into something completely modern.

I'm totally with them in terms of Orson as an adapter. (Which, btw, Welles biographer Simon Callow argues is what he did with Citizen Kane, too - Hermann Mankiewicz' original script - with some imput from John Houseman - was over three hours long, and Welles did what he did with Shakespeare, Kafka, and whoever wrote Touch of Evil - he cut, edited, added, rewrote, until the script had the shooting shape.) It's what makes his version of The Trial infinitely more interesting than the far more literal, bland and justly forgotten version of Kyle McLachlan as Joseph K. much later, and makes Chimes at Midnight show up later adaptions of the Henriad such as The Hollow Crown as deeply conventional and pulling their punches by comparison.

On a book-to-film note, thanks to chaila I've discovered Fall Equinox, a vid-athon wherein the vids in question are using book-based source material. I've only just started to watch my way through it, but check out Wherever I Go, a breathtaking exploration of the Gods in American Gods!

The third volume of Simon Callow’s monumental Orson Welles biography, which carries our hero from 1947, when he left the US behind and became a permanent globetrotter, to 1965, when he made Chimes at Midnight, which Callow with some justification, both artistic and biographical, sees as his opus magnum and all things coming full circle. (And of course it was the last movie (minus the mockumentaries like F for Fake) he actually got to finish, while living on another twenty years desperately trying to finish over projects.) The article which alerted me to the publication of One Man Band assumes Callow will present volume IV , covering the last twenty years, but I could understand it if Callow leaves it here; artistically, it’s just so tempting, not to mention that the theatre and film projects description are a great part of the appeal of the biographies, and without these, with “just” the life to describe, part of the motivation must be lost.

(Mind you: if The Other Side of the Wind, aka the nearly finished Welles movie with copies slumbering in archives of money men for decades and then fought over by heirs, actually finally gets released in the next few years, as has been announced there should be a LOT of new material to analyze.)

( Meanwhile, here are the impression of Welles: The European Years )

There are generally two schools of thought among the media regarding Orson Welles ("only two?" he'd have said and been mock-dissappointed): he's either the Wunderkind, the wonderboy of stage and film who created one perfect movie and then squandered his promise on self indulgence, cameos in other movies and weird projects of his own, or he's the life long patron saint of independent cinema, whom Hollywood never forgave for Kane (because of all the Heart trouble it caused) and sabotaged ever after, while he heroically took on any number of jobs in order to get his own movies made outside the studio system. Basically: it's all Orson's fault, or it's all Hollywood's fault. It won't surprise me that I'm a firm believer of "neither" or "both/and" - which is why Simon Callow is my favourite biographer of his -: I find most (not all: Confidential Report/Mr. Arkadin has the parable of the frog and the scorpion that subsequently was declared folklore, but you can keep the rest of the film) of the movies directed by Welles fascinating, some of them I love (my favourite isn't Citizen Kane, btw, though I do love it - depending on my mood, my favourite is either Othello or Touch of Evil, with Chimes at Midnight on a regular second spot). As far as Orson Welles as an actor in other people's films is concerned, he's not one who can disappear into a character - not physically: as a voice actor, he could, and of course the radio was for quite a while his favourite medium. If you have the time, check out some of the Mercury Radio productions which are available on cd; while Welles' voice was one of the most instantly recognizable in any medium, he really is amazingly flexible with it, and knew it, and had a serious case of "let me play the lion, too", which is he usually has more than one part - notoriously Dracula and Van Helsing in the radio Dracula, for example. But on film, where he has to use his entire body, the character has to fit, or he sticks out like a sore thumb. (Otoh if a part fits, you get Harry Lime in The Third Man.)

What makes Welles such a great director is that combination of extremely visual imagination, the ability to find poetry and expression via images which was already there long before he ever went to Hollywood. Here's the description Norman Llyod, who played Cinna the poet in the production of Julius Caesar Welles directed at age 22, gave of the key scene in which the mob, coming directly from Caesar's funeral and Antony's speech at same, seizes on a poet who happens to bear the same name as one of the conspirators:

Orson would argue with you as he ate, and you got angrier. I thought we'd reached an impasse. But no - he went my way. And when he went your way! - I played the first part of the scene fro pantomimic comedy. Gut a lot of laughs. Just becoming aware of this crowd and thinking they had recognised me as a celebrity. Stuffed my pockets with these poems. He seized that right away. They moved in to kill - I was playing it as the poet laureate. He moved these guys in one by one - and the lighting was fantastic - blood red - the set was red too. The way he moved me - there were laughs, and then the laughs got chilly. Taking out these poems. Orson's direction: the last thing I scream is THE POET. Rush down the ramp - I just disappeared - just this hand, bathed in red light.

You can see why film and Welles were made for each other to the same degree that Welles and the microphone were. And not just in the case of Citizen Kane, where he had all the budget and all the experts at his disposition, but also in a much later film like The Trial, where he used the abandoned Gare d'Orsay in Paris which wasn't a railway station any longer and not yet the museum for Impressionistic art, and made it into a fantastic surrounding for Kafka's story as if it was an expensively built film set. Or Othello, which took four years of filming - because he had to stop whenever he ran out of money - and was made at dozens of different locations but nonetheless give the impression of taking place in only one fantastically beautiful yet coldly claustrophobic citadel. He's also able to coax great performances out of most of the actors he used (not all: if a character is a spoiled brat like George in The Magnificent Ambersons, it needs a charming actor to make the audience believes that people put up with and love him as long as they do, and Tim Holt never manages that), and these included both actors who first achieved fame via him (Joseph Cotten, Agnes Moorehead) and actors who were already famous when they worked for him, though not necessarily in the type of part he gave them (true for both Anthony Perkins and Romy Schneider in The Trial, and famously for Rita Hayworth in Lady from Shanghai). A great many of Welles' films are based on books, and as an adapter he was, depending on your point of view, fearless or ruthless. Or is "iconoclastic" the best word? In any case, he tended to use his book sources as basic structures from which to develop the themes he was interested in, be they a trashy pot boiler like the novel Touch of Evil is based on or William Shakespeare ("...and damned be he who first calls hold, enough"). Chimes at Midnight takes bits and pieces from Richard II and Henry V in addition to huge chunks from the two Henry IV plays - and presents the net result of a life time of wrestling with these particular plays, more about that later - , unabashedly throws out anything Welles wasn't interested in, and the end result, several decades onwards, makes far newer screen productions like The Hollow Crown look tame by comparison. Just two examples of what Welles does there as a director/adapter: Henry IV, Part I early on has Hal reveal in monologue ("I know you all...") to the audience that he's actually not the dissolute party animal his father assumes he is but plans to ditch all his disreputable friends and this entire life style as soon as he's king, so that the contrast between his old and new self will be all the more impressive and effective. The Hollow Crown does what a great many screen adaptions do with theatrical monologues; it makes the scene a voice over, i.e. Hal's thoughts while he walks around the scenery. Chimes at Midnight, by contrast, makes the radical change to let Hal say this, out loud, to Falstaff directly, with Falstaff not sure whether or not this is one of the emotionally brutal games these two play with each other. (The hypothetically unspoiled audience can't be sure, either.) This makes it a lead up to the "Banish old Jack, and banish all the world"/"I do, I will" scene between them later and avoids the artifice of either monologue to the audience or voice over.

The other example from the same film is the way Welles stages the battle of Shrewsbury. Subsequently often imitated, among others by Kenneth Branagh in his Henry V, but never as effectively, because unlike Branagh, who can't resist resolving the whole thing in a Te Deum and triumph, Welles' staging of the battle sequence (via cinematic trickery, because he did not have the money for mass scenes) brings the whole muddy, gory business of medieval warfare across as a devastating indictement. If you get technical, it's all done via some clever cuts, but that's not how it comes across. Oliver Stone and Stanley Kubrick, both of whom did have masses at their disposal, can only weep in envy.

( And now for Orson Welles as a person )

Peter O'Toole has announced his retirement from acting (in very O'Toolian style), to which at his age he's more than entitled. But what with him having acted in two of my favourite films of all times (Lawrence of Arabia and The Lion in Winter), and still being splendid as late as three or so years ago in Venus, I'm a bit sad nonetheless. Also miffed that he never got an Oscar safe for the life time one, since I know he wanted the genuine article. (Sorry, Gregory Peck fans, he was fine as Atticus Finch, but O'Toole's Lawrence would have deserved more.) (And who won the year he was nominated for Venus anyway?)

Now given he's alive and hopefully well, a career retrospective would be a bit spooky, so I won't do it. Then again: back when I watched RTD's Casanova, in which David Tennant plays the young and Peter O'Toole the old Casanova, I came when discussing the miniseries across some younglings who wondered why David Tennant wears blue contact lenses in this film. When, you know, I would have thought it obvious that you do not make a legend of the theatre and screen with two of the most famous blue eyes around wear brown contact lenses, especially since Our David T., being a fanboy extraordinaire, was probably only too happy to do it. But lo and behold, said younglings had no idea who Peter O'Toole was. Why, said I, he's the ex of the Empress Livia and she left him for Ethan Rayne from Buffy! No, but seriously, a highlights of the decades post would be worth it, but right now my superstitious side warns me not to tempt fate. So, instead, something wherein Peter O'Toole is fairly low key, which he rarely was, but then he is talking with Orson Welles (who never was). It's the year 1963 (Annus Mirabilis indeed), O'Toole is playing Hamlet at the National, directed by Laurence Olivier, and Orson & Peter are talking to Huw Wheldon (the host of the program Monitor this conversation is part of) and an older actor named Ernest Milton. My favourite part is when Ernest Milton, being a nice old gentleman, says Hamlet abhorrs murder, and Welles & O'Toole team up to say OH NO HE DOESN'T, pointing to Hamlet's arranging the deaths of Guildenstern & Rosencranz (this being years before Tom Stoppard, mind), and adding Polonius for good measure. "Accident", cries Ernest Milton. Whereupon Peter corners him by pointing out that Hamlet has just left Claudius praying, thus knew the king was elsewhere, and Orson adds for good measure that it could have been anyone behind that curtain, Ophelia, Horatio, etc. Milton raises the insanity defends only to have Orson thundering that Hamlet isn't (earlier on, Welles said that the ultimate proof for Hamlet being rational is that he says "oh what an ass am I", which an insane man would never). So, here they are, young Peter, middle aged Orson, and poor old cornered Ernest Milton:

"In place of yourself, you had offered an act of magic:/ first we all become Cordelia. Then we all disappear."

These two lines Chris Welles Feder wrote about her father, her sisters and herself in a poem about him don't appear in her book "In My Father's Shadow", and I find that regrettable, because they contain more ambiguity and anger towards him than she permits herself in prose. Reading Michael Lindsay-Hogg's memoirs has reminded me I've been meaning to get around to those of Welles' oldest daughter (guest starring in MLH's book as a childhood playmate, as he does in hers).  Hers is a less well-written but at the same time immensly compelling book, the difference in gender crucial in how they relate to step parents, their mothers, and goals in life, but only partly in how they deal with Orson, with  enchantment followed by a life long habit of hopeless longing. The first Mrs. Welles, Chris' mother Virginia, who comes in for a lot of anger and criticism from her daughter (some I felt unfair, some justified) nonetheless frequently gets the best and most acerbic lines in this book when it comes to her ex,  and in the big traumatic showdown when Chris was 16 and made by Virginia to choose between her parents, she eviscerates young Chris' "but Daddy is the most wonderful man in the world" protests thusly:

No one knows better than I how seductive Orson can be. (...) He can make you believe you're the most important person in the world to him and he can't live without you. Then the next thing you know, he's fallen in love with somebody else.'
'But he's not in love with me,' I protested. 'I'm his daughter.'
'The trouble is that Orson has no idea how to be a father. Does he behave like a father when you're with him?'
'Well...' I hesitated. 'Daddy treats me like an equal, but I can't say he always behaves like a father.'
'At least you see that much. (...) I'll just say this for now: as long as you think you really matter to Orson, you're in for a lot of heartache and dissappointment.'

No kidding. And thus we get an unsettling father-daughter romance in which she does go Cordelia on him in several senses of the word: offering silence at the one point where he is willing to turn his frequent showing up in her life, whisking her away for some charmed weeks, leaving again act into something more permanent by giving in to her mother's "Orson or me" ultimatum and telling him she can't see or talk to him for a while. Being banished by him as well as a result. Reconciling when he's the powerless globetrotting former king thought mad wasted (to a degree). There is even a showdown with her sisters, though it's after his death, not before, at his funeral, to be precise, and there just who plays which daughter keeps getting reshuffled, because it's Chris and Rebecca (Rita Hayworth's kid) versus Beatrice (daughter of the third Mrs. Welles) and her mother Paola, who get the worst press in the entire book other than Chris's second stepfather, Major Pringle, and her mother, and are described as hypocrites wailing loudly but giving Orson a shabby, cheap cremation without even flowers or anyone saying anything if his over 90 years old fantasy father Roger "Skipper" Hill hadn't improvised something then and there.  Then there is the reclamation of the kingdom by Chris coming to her dead father's defense at film festivals, pointing out that his creative life did not end with "Citizen Kane", championing the later work and forming a close relationship with Oja Kodar, Welles' companion for the last 20 years of his life, until Orson the flawed is transformed to Orson the magnificent again, all is forgiven, and you almost expect her to mutter Cordelia's "no fault, no fault".

The trouble with casting Welles as Lear is that he makes a far better Falstaff (and one suspects he knew it, too). His gift for improvising, spinning ever new stories to get himself out of tight spots, the living on credit for so long, and the sense of humour that luckily never deserted him are as unlike Lear as they come. Early in the book, when Chris recalls a conversation about her name (which is Christopher - she has the reverse of the "Boy named Sue" problem), about which she's horribly teased at school,  Dad charmes her with the story of how when she was born he sent telegrams to everyone saying CHRISTOPHER SHE IS HERE.  Only at his funeral does it occur to her she never saw evidence that these fabled telegrams ever existed.

So: imagine Falstaff as the father of a daughter who tries to see him as Lear, and you have the Orson Welles featured in this book. There is a supporting ensemble of memorable characters as well, notably Virginia (prone to bitter aphorisms between cigarettes, a 20s Noel Coward person when she's not a terrifying Tennessee Williams mother), her two post Orson husbands, amiable Charlie Lederer and revolting Edward Murdstone like Jack Pringle, half of Hollywood in acting and scriptwriting terms, the Hills (frequently the heroes in any Welles biography as the one example of a functional parental unit in the entire Welles saga, both to Orson and to his oldest daughter, and they of course were not related to either) and the two husbands Chris collects, the first of whom is gay which her father spots before she does (go figure). Quotes, as ever, below the cut.

( Read more... )

Name the five best uses of Shakespeare’s work (faithful adaptations, plots inspired by his work, references to one of his plays/sonnets).

It's impossible to narrow it down to five, and "best" is a tricky denomination, but here are five that stayed with me the most. Also I tried to avoid making this a list of favourite film versions of Shakespeare plays, which would be another question.


1) A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest in Neil Gaiman's Sandman (as well as the use of William Shakespeare as a character, still probably my favourite fictional version of Will S.). These two plays who are themselves very meta, containing plays-within-plays, the magic of stagecraft versus real magic and so forth, work terrifically juxtaposed with the Sandman themes. Plus I've said it before, I'll say it again: Neil Gaiman is the only author to pull off a use of Prospero's final monologue, traditionally regarded as Shakespeare's goodbye, use it as his own farewell to his opus magnum and make that feel not pretentious but entirely apropriate.

2.) Othello in the film Stage Beauty. Stage Beauty is anything but a straightforward and accurate historical film (just try to date it when you know anything about the Restoration and the characters therein, who flit through the film despite being sometimes decades too late or too early for their appearance), but hey, neither were any of Shakespeare's histories. What it does provide is a great story doing marvellous things with acting, gender, sex and jealousy (the one fuelled by professional ambition and identity issues as well as the more sexual type), and that as much as anything makes Othello the perfect choice for the play-within-the-story. The use of Desdemona's death scene throughout, the question as to who plays Desdemona, how to play Desdemona, and how to play Othello, it's all really essential to the plot, and no other scene but the one between Desdemona and Othello could provide nearly as much suspense for the climactic highlight at the end.

3.) West Side Story (as an adaption of Romeo and Juliet brought into the then present and made into a musical). Thank you, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. (With a side of Arthur Laurents for the script and Jeremy Robbins for the original choreography.) The marvelous thing is that this works entirely as its own piece and yet when you map it against the Shakespeare play you see how entirely bit for bit it is matched. Oh, and it still cracks me up that Laurents is proud (arguably justifiably so) that he got Will one better in giving Anita a damn good reason not to deliver the right message when in Romeo and Juliet it's simply a case of bad luck that Brother Laurence's letter doesn't reach Romeo in time.

4.) Chimes at Midnight by Orson Welles. The reason why this is here despite my declaration of "no straightforward film versions" above is that Chimes isn't. Orson W., about the only director/scriptwriter who would, after a lifetime of preoccupation and previous attempts to wrangle the Henries down, used the two parts of Henry IV, bits of Merry Wives and a bit from Henry V and put it together in what is essentially a new play, The Tragedie of Sir John Falstaff. He did it with his usual post-Kane obstacles of no money and having the actors available only intermittendly as favours because he charmed them into gallivanting off with him to Spain or whereever he happened to be shooting, and created something fantastic out of it. (Francois Truffaut reviewed the film thusly, summing it up as: "I can't help being a genius, I'm dying: love me.")

5.)Hamlet in In the Bleak Midwinter (detailed raving just linked) by Kenneth Branagh. Best use of Hamlet in a film I've seen (and no, I still haven't watched Slings and Arrows - I'll get there, I promise!), including Banagh's own straightforward take on the Danish play later, it manages to be both hysterically funny and genuinenly moving at different points, says a lot about acting from an actor/director's pov in a way that simultanously pokes fun at himself (and which better play than the one where an amateur aristo lectures actors on how to play to use for that one?) and is heartfelt, and if I didn't love the film for all those reasons already, I'd always love it because Ophelia gets to slap Hamlet in the get-the-to-a-nunnery scene.

BONUS 6.), because I have to: THIS. The rehearsal photos aren't half bad, either. *shamelessly objectifies*

Something for the Sherlock Holmes fans: a radio version of The Final Problem, starring John Gielgud as Holmes, Ralph Richardson as Watson, and Orson Welles as Moriarty. The first part is here. Welles' voice is damn near ideal for Moriarty; Gielgud & Richardson are their reliably excellent selves.

Speaking of Orson W., someone made a good vid using scenes from F for Fake, Chimes at Midnight, The Third Man and Prince of Foxes to form a Wellesian reflection on death:



And another genius made a fake trailer for Orson Welles' Batman. (LOL horrible fight scene from Lady from Shanghai.) Incidentally, Welles did play Lamont Cranston/The Shadow on radio, i.e. the prototype playboy with a secret superhero identity, so it's not out of this world, but imo Orson being Orson he'd have insisted on playing Bruce Wayne and the Joker. Have a look at the trailer anyway.

In other news, here's me being upset 30 years after the fact about Robert Christgau's December 22nd obituary for John Lennon in which he uses that old journalistic contrivance, "my wife/neighbour/an acquaintance said..." for an absolutely revolting quote: "Why is it always Bobby Kennedy and John Lennon? Why never Nixon or Paul McCartney?" First of all, wishing someone dead goes way beyond expressing musical preference (which is anyone's right to express). Secondly, this is why I dig Ray Connolly as far as journalists of the era are concerned. He was a John boy as far as favourite Beatles were concerned, but he really liked/likes Paul as well and didn't see that as mutually exclusive. Still doesn't,
as this article demonstrates, which got something of the bad taste of Christgau out of my mouth. (Though I disagree about the iTunes thing.) Thirdly, if we're talking English musicians and American politicians, I wish someone had mailed Christgau a record of John hanging out with Californian governor Ronald Reagan during the December 9, 1974 Monday Night Football, complete with Reagan explaining the rules of American Football to John. (Depending on how trustworthy you regard Fred Seaman's rendition of Lennon quotes, John also said that if he could vote in the US he'd vote for Reagan in 1980 because Carter "is a wimp".) And fourthly, I wish someone would have made Christgau write the following John Lennon quote (also from December 1980) 100 times: "These critics with the illusions they’ve created about artists — it’s like idol worship. (...) What they want is dead heroes, like Sid Vicious and James Dean. I’m not interesting in being a dead [expletive] hero!”

1.) Trailer for the Tennant/Stewart Hamlet , which both brings back the joy of having watched this live and the anticipation of seeing it again. I just hope the RSC delivered that dvd I ordered eons ago as promised. Also, once the dvd is available and the film has been broadcast, I hope for lots of screencaps and plenty of icons, hopefully some of which will show both actors I tend to fangirl in the same shot. (The publicity photos by the RSC last year just weren't what I wanted in this department.)

2.) Yuletide Uploading is open. Uploading my story reminded me again what fun it was to write. I've always looked forward to the 25th because Yuletide is such a great ficathon, but this year there is that additional slight nervousness which comes with having made a contribution as well. Let's see how rare that rare fandom is...

3.) Discovered via vilakins: Pride & Prejudice via Emoticons. Who cares about adaptions with zombies if you can have adaptions via emoticons! :)

4.) Methinks Warren Ellis really hit his stride with his second arc in Astonishing X-Men. #33 is out, that's the third issue in a row which is fun to read, doesn't have wth? character moments and came without any long interruptions in between. If you really want to nitpick, you can argue Storm's role in the Ellis line-up is, the one discussion she had with Cyclops in the last arc aside, somewhat bland, especially compared with Kitty in the Whedon line-up, but that's really not much of an issue. I'm so happy Hisako continues to play a major role in AXM, and Ellis writes her absolutely delightful. He also seems to want Scott/Logan 'shippers really happy with this second arc, seeing as he continues to write their interaction. Also, the art for the second arc is way better than for the first, especially for my beloved Abigail Brand and for Hank McCoy. Speaking of my favourite morally ambigous agent, ( I continue to harbor a spoilery suspicion. )

5.) Five Minutes, Mr. Welles. I had heard about this short film (31 minutes) which premiered at the Venice Film Festival 2004, starring and directed by Vincent D'Onofrio, but I had no idea it was available on YouTube until yesterday. D'Onofrio had played Orson Welles before, as a cameo in Tim Burton's Ed Wood, but this time he gets to use his own voice. Which doesn't sound at all like Welles', but that's beside the point here. (Especially since he's great with the body language and the script.) This particular short film is set during the shooting of The Third Man, at a time when Orson Welles had long since stopped being a beloved prodigy and was now in quasi-exile from Hollywood, mostly living in Europe and hiring himself out as an actor to finance his own movies. Quite often, this meant a lot of mediocre films to play in, but occasionally, he lucked out in his quest for movie-financing cash and got a role in a great picture. But you don't even have to know that in order to enjoy this half an hour which among other things showcases some magic of acting, as D'Onofrio-as-Welles goes from memorizing the Ferris Wheel scene in a listless, lifeless manner to injecting a flicker of personality in the lines to finally, at the end, coming up with a complete performance of Harry Lime, complete with the ad-lib Welles contributed to Graham Greene's script. The second character is an invented one, but in complete contradiction to my nagging about the book Me and Orson Welles I shall praise her existence. Katherine, scriptgirl-plus-personal-assistant, played by the classy Janine Theriault whom I've never seen before but now shall look out for, goes from seemingly powerless to actually powerful, and goes the through the full O.W. experience of alternatingly being frustrated, angry, challenged and charmed. There are some lovely visual homages to Welles as a director (the camera angles are obvious, but I clued in the Othello bit one only after I'd seen it; well-done, especially since Othello was the film Welles was needing the cash for). And in case you've never ever seen The Third Man - and what stopped you so far? - this is the scene Welles is rehearsing in Five Minutes, Mr. Welles. One of the all time classics and endlessly quotable. (And imitated and quoted from about a million times.)

Recently, a friend of mine wondered in an aside what a Watchmen adaption by Orson Welles would have been like. Clearly, this was an idea of pure genius. Because Welles had both the absolute fearlessness and cheek, and while managing to infuriate half the fanbase before ruthlessly jettisoning some of the main characters along with subplots and plundering other Moore works for dialogue inserts, he'd have created something breathtakingly original in its own right.

(Also the meta of it would have been fun. Because in Watchmen the book, one of the earliest excerpts from Hollis Mason's memoirs mentions listening as a fan to Orson Welles on the radio, playing The Shadow/Lamont Cranston, one of the earliest superheroes.)

This train of thought of course brought me inevitably to contemplating other adaptions of comics classics by legendary directors, or rather, which legendary director would match best to which classic comics. Here are some ideas:

Charlie Chaplin: Mad Love by Paul Dini. Come on, it would have been awesome. Given how Chaplin loved to branch out (see him playing both Hitler in The Great Dictator and a serial killer in Monsieur Verdoux), you know he'd have been utterly unable to resist casting himself as the Joker. And as Harley Quinn? Paulette Godard, of course. However, in my head this adaption is a silent one, because though I do like Chaplin's later sound movies as well, the silent film is his true and most perfect medium. It would have been the best and most unique of all Batmenverse based films.

Alfred Hitchcock: The Dark Phoenix arc, by Chris Claremont. Hitchcock, expert in neurotic heroines and heroes as well as people going mad and trying to hide it, would have excelled at the original Jean Grey tragedy. Mind you, given that as Joseph Cotten put it in his memoirs he didn't understand why actresses didn't dye their hair blonde for the privilege of working for him, he'd have been sorely tempted in switching hair colour between Jean and Emma (if the Hellfire Club would have shown up in his adaption, that is, and knowing Hitchcock, I think it would have), but in the end he might have resisted.

Billy Wilder: Alias by Brian Bendis. Noir look at the underside of the Marvelverse, first person narration that really works instead of coming across as superfluous, sharp dialogue, inner brokenness? So a Wilder thing. He'd have probably ended up having a hate/hate relationship with Bendis as he did with Raymond Chandler on their shared script for Double Indemnity, but the result would so have been worth it. Including Barbara Stanwyck as Jessica Jones.