Gasping and Wheezing

I swear to God, at some point in the near future, the Rambler will flare back to life with a regular schedule, lots of content and a renewed sense of purpose. This, however, is not yet the future, so I'm afraid you're stuck with a little half-assed nothing until I can knock the rest of this shit on its head.

I sort of thought I was free tonight to catch up, but then KPMG called and approved the pencils and hinted that the deadline had moved up. Hinted strongly. Right, well, so I promised the inks on Friday morning, but decided to just get them out of the way tonight, so that I could color the thing over the weekend.

And let me zig here and point out that this entry is Rambler number 499. Seeing as how it's highly unlikely that I'll be able to mount an appropriately awesome Rambler number 500 (hologram cover, with trading cards) this week, just take a moment and celebrate with yourself. Ugh.

Before I forget: If I maintained a list of things that I never thought I'd get to see in this life, as well as another list of things I'd never want to see, right near the top of both lists is, "Seeing Rip Torn full-frontal, complete with actual genital manipulation." And now I have, so let me say, "Thanks?" to Nick Roeg, director of The Man Who Fell to Earth, which features this wholly unexpected and not entirely welcome sight.

Overall, the film is one that I believe the phrase 'an interesting failure' was coined for, with lots of neat stuff crashing up against goofy sixties hangover crap. David Bowie does deliver in a way that largely redeems it, managing an intense passivity that does an excellent job of drawing you in to the dreamlike state that the film creates. I also very much like the (kinda sorta spoiler) unannounced time jumps, with some adjacent scenes happening seemingly decades apart. And, what the hell - I'd say that Lynch probably got a lot from this film, the more I think about it. In fact, Lynch should remake it, with Bowie again. That'd be cool.

But only if we get Rip Torn, doing his own version of The Brown Bunny.

D.