Nip It in the Bud

Hmmm. It's been a busy few weeks for me. A few months ago I mentioned that something big was coming up. Well, it has. As of January 1st, I've been freelance. I took most of January off, but have been slammed since then.

I'll try to post as much as I can, but in an effort to keep the posts coming, I will doing more sketch posts. These will doodles and sketches I draw during the course of the day.

FYI, the illustration above was done on the Sunday that Don Knotts died and posted that night to my illustration site. I think I'll be combining this blog and the illustration side more and more. It will help the lack of posts here.

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And here's my top ten movies of 2005... like it matters at this point.

10. (Tie) Munich/War of the Worlds
Directed by Steven Spielberg

9. Batman Begins
Directed by Christopher Nolan

8. Cinderella Man
Directed by Ron Howard

7. Sin City
Directed by Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller

6. The Constant Gardner
Directed by Fernando Meirelles

5. Wedding Crashers
Directed by David Dobkin

4. The 40-Year-Old Virgin
directed by Judd Apatow

3. The Squid & the Whale
Directed by Noah Baumbach

2. Syriana
Directed by Stephen Gaghan

1. Good Night, and Good Luck
Directed by George Clooney

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I am one of the Crash-bashers and guess what... it had nothing to do with Brokeback Mountain. For the record, I was rooting for Good Night, and Good Luck (though I knew it stood no chance).

To tell you the truth, aside from the gay thing, I found Brokeback to be
standard story of forbidden love; a modern day update of Romeo & Juliet. Of course, this probably comes from my upbringing in San Francisco. Gays and lesbians are accepted here and it's not unusual to see advertisng and marketing targeted to that community. Nothing taboo or strange about that lifestyle to us.

I bash Crash because it has the subtlety of a ten-ton truck smashing into a nursery school. It's over the top, cliched script left me groaning. The connections between the characters went beyond mere coincidence; it smacked of lazy convenience for the writer. It was almost as if Paul Haggis took the racial epithat montage from Do the Right Thing and expanded it into a two-hour movie.

Honestly, I found it to be the worst among this year's best picture nominees. It lacked grace, realism and plausibility. I find it puzzling that so many critics have embraced it. To me it's not so much as a mirror, but a funhouse mirror, distorting reality and exaggerating the truth.