The Tailor of Panama, 2001, dir. John Boorman. From John le Carre's 1996 novel of the same name.
I have a memory of reading the novel well before the film came out - I suspect I picked it up in an airport (boy that sentence feels like it comes from the 'pre-times' ... it's been a decade since I flew anywhere, and even then it was probably a decade before that). The screenplay was jointly written by le Carre and director Boorman and Andrew Davies, so I'm guessing this florid language was approved by le Carre. Anyway, it felt less forced when read dramatically, from Jamie Lee Curtis and Geoffrey Rush. I feel as though here, in this comic, it comes across as too-stilted. That is the point of the 'Soap Strip' storylines, though, that they always feel overly dramatic. Even still, something about it makes me uncomfortable.
The modeling for the images is from the film as well. I recently re-watched it and was taken with the two lines (from the first and fourth panels); they spoke to me of folk separated by the gulf of poor communication.
The images here aren't actually Curtis and Rush, it's the scene of the British embassy in Panama City that shows the meeting of Pierce Brosnan and Catherine McCormack. The teapot struck me as a good visually engaging device, and there were usable subsequent closeups of the two. As always, I worried that I was plagiarizing the design and then sadly shook my head as I look at my result and realize I can barely reliably maintain a recognizable character between two frames, let alone plagiarize a film that uses recognizable actors. I just don't have either the skill or patience. The silhouette in the second frame, for example, is the result of a fuck up.
The dialogue in the first and fourth frames aren't from the same scene in the film, I don't think, but they linked together in my head as reminiscent of a discussion I had with a former girlfriend. She had said that she saw me as lying to her *unconsciously*, and this accusation has remained a poser to me, because I've long felt that my flavor of autism makes it very difficult for me to lie. I'd be a terrible sales person, and the occasions on which I've been enlisted to lie in order to keep a secret have very quickly unraveled as something about my aspect is flatly readable and the deception is uncovered.
I honestly don't know what it is that I'm obviously revealing. I don't think of myself as someone who is particularly socially inept, but clearly I have a tell in this case. As someone who worships the principle of Dunning-Kruger, which posits that we all have our areas of incompetence and that we cannot know when we have wandered into those areas, the idea that I am unconsciously capable of pulling off something that I am consciously incapable of is frankly maddening. It's a complicated set a variables that leaves me living alone with my cat, who seems unconcerned with my motivations as long as I provide her with food.
I guess this particular episode rates as a 'B' - it's not outright embarrassing, but I do look at it and see one disappointment after another. As noted, the dialogue comes off as oddly formal, but that suits the weirdness of coming across this scene and having a sense of disorientation about not knowing the context. The characters look stiff, and getting to the final form was a long slog of erasing and re-drawing in GIMP. Just another meditation on how the reality of my life doesn't come close to the Platonic idea that I envision.
The Tailor of Panama, 2001, dir. John Boorman. From John le Carre's 1996 novel of the same name.
ReplyDeleteI have a memory of reading the novel well before the film came out - I suspect I picked it up in an airport (boy that sentence feels like it comes from the 'pre-times' ... it's been a decade since I flew anywhere, and even then it was probably a decade before that). The screenplay was jointly written by le Carre and director Boorman and Andrew Davies, so I'm guessing this florid language was approved by le Carre. Anyway, it felt less forced when read dramatically, from Jamie Lee Curtis and Geoffrey Rush. I feel as though here, in this comic, it comes across as too-stilted. That is the point of the 'Soap Strip' storylines, though, that they always feel overly dramatic. Even still, something about it makes me uncomfortable.
The modeling for the images is from the film as well. I recently re-watched it and was taken with the two lines (from the first and fourth panels); they spoke to me of folk separated by the gulf of poor communication.
The images here aren't actually Curtis and Rush, it's the scene of the British embassy in Panama City that shows the meeting of Pierce Brosnan and Catherine McCormack. The teapot struck me as a good visually engaging device, and there were usable subsequent closeups of the two. As always, I worried that I was plagiarizing the design and then sadly shook my head as I look at my result and realize I can barely reliably maintain a recognizable character between two frames, let alone plagiarize a film that uses recognizable actors. I just don't have either the skill or patience. The silhouette in the second frame, for example, is the result of a fuck up.
The dialogue in the first and fourth frames aren't from the same scene in the film, I don't think, but they linked together in my head as reminiscent of a discussion I had with a former girlfriend. She had said that she saw me as lying to her *unconsciously*, and this accusation has remained a poser to me, because I've long felt that my flavor of autism makes it very difficult for me to lie. I'd be a terrible sales person, and the occasions on which I've been enlisted to lie in order to keep a secret have very quickly unraveled as something about my aspect is flatly readable and the deception is uncovered.
I honestly don't know what it is that I'm obviously revealing. I don't think of myself as someone who is particularly socially inept, but clearly I have a tell in this case. As someone who worships the principle of Dunning-Kruger, which posits that we all have our areas of incompetence and that we cannot know when we have wandered into those areas, the idea that I am unconsciously capable of pulling off something that I am consciously incapable of is frankly maddening. It's a complicated set a variables that leaves me living alone with my cat, who seems unconcerned with my motivations as long as I provide her with food.
I guess this particular episode rates as a 'B' - it's not outright embarrassing, but I do look at it and see one disappointment after another. As noted, the dialogue comes off as oddly formal, but that suits the weirdness of coming across this scene and having a sense of disorientation about not knowing the context. The characters look stiff, and getting to the final form was a long slog of erasing and re-drawing in GIMP. Just another meditation on how the reality of my life doesn't come close to the Platonic idea that I envision.