Category: Better than Ebert

She knew how to pick a stagename

From Futility Closet:

Director Curtis Bernhardt was midway through shooting My Reputation in 1944 when he encountered some trouble with one of the stars. Robert Archer insisted on wearing a jacket and shirt while mowing a lawn under the hot California sun.

Bernhardt pressed him, and to his surprise Archer said, “Okay, okay, I’m a girl.”

She was Tanis Chandler, a 20-year-old typist in a local brokerage office who’d gotten tired of waiting for acting jobs. Posing as Archer, she’d won a part in 1943′s The Desert Song, where robes and a burnoose had hid her shape. She’d done so well that the casting office had sent her out for Bernhardt’s film.

“The studios are always yelling about the lack of men,” she said. “I thought I’d have better luck in male roles. Oh, well.”

What a great story. I wonder if it’s true?

Here is Tanis Chandler’s IMDB page, where commenter marymorrissey cites a book called “Hell Raisers, Heroines and Holy Women.”

via Cut! | Futility Closet.

Why Can’t I Quit You?

I came across this quick breakdown of sales figures for December 2011 for the comics industry on Tumblr, began to write some thoughts and decided to share them.

First, pie!

This also accompanied the graph:

Marvel Comics has come out on top in terms of sales last month, knocking DC Comics from its three-month streak as the leading publisher. This new report comes from the monthly sales estimates published by Diamond Comic Distributors that gives us the scoop on how Marvel accomplished the maneuver. According to Diamond, Marvel held a 34.43% dollar share and 39.05% market share while DC Comics held a 33.74% dollar share and a 37.72% market share.

Despite the new title earned by Marvel for the month of December, DC still managed to hold eight spots out of ten for the month’s best-selling issues, including Justice League #4 and several other #4 issues from DC’s ‘New 52′ relaunch while Marvel only held two spots in the top ten (Avengers: X-Sanction #1 and Defenders #1). It’s still tricky to see how these numbers are playing out given that DC is publishing around 70 titles a month while Marvel continues to publish well over 100 each month. Taking these numbers into account along with the fact that Marvel double-ships several different titles each month on average, it can be said that Marvel tends to flood the market in order to get a stronger foothold. Regardless of the numbers on quantities, there’s no denying that fans are clearly more impressed by DC’s offering given the top 10 books in the sales chart.

My thoughts:

I’m a bit fed up with Marvel’s practices as a company. The numerous “incentives” they push to retailers by giving a rare sketch cover for defacing DC titles, having a handful of “universe changing big events” every year, rebooting a series a few times in the past 5 years with a new #1 each time – or simply renumbering for a new storyline – to lure collectors, and rehashing stories decade after decade. I’m sure they’ve got some decent writers on their payroll, but they sure as hell aren’t putting them to good use. How many times have the Avengers and X-Men fought, Wolverine has enough trouble being in 100 books a month.

Their films have done well, but I don’t know how well they’ll hold up after Avengers. They have sequels for the stand-alone characters in the works, but Iron Man 2 was more of a lead-in for the Avengers and suffered as an Iron Man film. It will be interesting to see what happens with the X-Men franchise and Amazing Spider-Man has promise, but they’ve already rebooted both of them. Are they still kicking around ideas for the Fantastic Four?

And now they plan to publish novels of their biggest stories?* I’ve seen novelizations of story lines before in bookstores, but I’ve never had the desire to actually read one. I tend to just roll my eyes.

DC is also starting to piss me off with their new price for Batman and Detective Comics. I think it was less than a year ago DC started pushing their “holding the line at $2.99″ gimmick, and it looks like every popular title will be at least $3.99 this year. They had announced a few books, Action Comics and Justice League, would be $3.99 at the launch of the new 52, but then decrease to $2.99 after a few issues. That didn’t happen. DC’s excuse is that the books are longer, 40 pages as opposed to 32, but they’re padding the books with extras and not story. Look at the back of a JL book, character designs were in the first three. Action Comics #4 had a story to fill in the gap that occurred during the story they were telling. Why was that even necessary? If you need a supplementary story to fill in a gap of your story, rewrite the damn thing.

If the extra pages are dedicated to story as they claim, great! I just expect it will be little more than a chance for them to cram in a few more ads. I definitely don’t want to pay more for character designs and more space for letters to the editor. I’m sure that’s popular for some readers, but increasing the price 25% (didn’t check my math) for that seems ridiculous.

Rant over.

*If you haven’t read Gutters, you should look through them, especially if you’re a comics fan. It’s often topical, so if you don’t get a reference there is usually a blurb written by the author below to help you narrow down your Google search.

Wholesome Family Traditions

If you’re looking for family fun this holiday season, look no further than ROCKwell’s. This hot spot which opened in 1986 and closed in 1941 due to temporal difficulties is the brainchild of retired porn star actor Jack Nippleson. This place has everything; cranberry molded sofas, dancers dressed as grandmas, stray dogs, your drunk uncle, and who is that? Why it’s none other than telenovella writer Nacho Supremo.

And if you somehow don’t know the SNL Update character Stefon, here’s an introduction.
Christmas 2010
Christmas 2011

The Icy Grip of Death

Here’s an amazing time-lapse video from BBC Nature of a “brinicle” forming beneath sea ice growing to the sea bed. Dozens of starfish and sea urchins littered the sea bed directly below the “brinicle” and many were caught in it’s icy tentacle.

HOW DOES A BRINICLE FORM?

Dr Mark Brandon Polar oceanographer, The Open University

Freezing sea water doesn’t make ice like the stuff you grow in your freezer. Instead of a solid dense lump, it is more like a seawater-soaked sponge with a tiny network of brine channels within it.

In winter, the air temperature above the sea ice can be below -20C, whereas the sea water is only about -1.9C. Heat flows from the warmer sea up to the very cold air, forming new ice from the bottom. The salt in this newly formed ice is concentrated and pushed into the brine channels. And because it is very cold and salty, it is denser than the water beneath.

The result is the brine sinks in a descending plume. But as this extremely cold brine leaves the sea ice, it freezes the relatively fresh seawater it comes in contact with. This forms a fragile tube of ice around the descending plume, which grows into what has been called a brinicle.

Brinicles are found in both the Arctic and the Antarctic, but it has to be relatively calm for them to grow as long as the ones the Frozen Planet team observed.