I love the hapless ill-fated villains in Tintin And The Broken Ear, Alonso and Ramon. There’s also a talking parrot, an amnesiac, and general Alcazar makes what I believe is his first appearance.
As usual there’s some beautiful ‘bandes dessinées’ artwork from Hergé, the lushly rendered jungle being very evocative, and he pays his usual attention to detail, basing the ‘Arumbaya fetish’ on a real statuette from an ethnographic museum that, I believe, he discovered in his home locality.
Two key characters.
I think this one is perhaps really a four-star only affair. But as it was one of the very first Tintin adventures I acquired, and subsequently one of the first to fall apart from repeated readings, it has a special place in my heart.
The story is fine, if a bit of the run of the mill type, as Tintin adventures go. But it also belongs to the ‘first quarter’, one might say, during which the Tintin albums were growing into full maturity. So, despite the fact I did, I wouldn’t advise the Tintin newbie to start here.
Alonso and Ramon.
Still, good solid globe-trotting adventuring fun, and, like all of ‘em, essential for the true Tintinologist!
In Tintin’s fifth adventure Hergé gives his readers a first small but welcome taste of continuity and grander plot-structuring, starting the story with Tintin in India, and picking up some of the threads of the last adventure, Cigars of The Pharaoh. Whilst not quite as fully realised an idea as it will later become, this gently points the way to the later run of two-part adventures.
There’s also some continuity in terms of characters, with Rastapopoulos (who debuted in the previous adventure) reappearing, and two new characters who will recur later in Tintin’s adventures making their entry, namely Dawson (here police chief in the international settlement in Shanghai, and cropping up again later as an arms dealer in Red Sea Sharks), and Chang, who Tintin will search for in Tibet.
Whilst the artwork is still not Hergé’s best, it is improving (although the extensive redraws the series went through by Hergé and his team make this aspect harder to track accurately), as is his storytelling prowess. This said, he falls back on Tintin’s war against drug-smuggling again, as a central plot theme, but at least the transparently patched together episodic nature of his adventures in Africa and America is replaced by a more structured narrative.
Hergé’ and/or Tintin’s relationship to other races and cultures remains a little tricky in places, but he’s making improvements. Some black characters shown in frames depicting the League of Nations still resemble antiquated golliwogs (so not much different from his In The Congo stuff), and his portrayal of the Japanese is quite harsh. But he makes an effort, especially on page 43, to draw attention to the issue of cross-cultural understanding, in what looks now a rather heavy-handedly didactic series of frames in which Tintin and Chang discuss the inaccuracy of each other’s cultural stereotypes.
But all in all, the transformation from the ill-drawn, ill-scripted, patchily episodic propaganda of In The Land Of The Soviets to the much higher standards of The Blue Lotus is both massive, remarkable, and more or less complete. So much so in fact that by the time Hergé gets to his fifth instalment in what was to be 24 finished stories (not counting the unfinished Alph-Art), the series from then on would maintain a more less consistent level of excellence: after the sharp climb of the first five books, there would be a steady but gradual shallow slope of improvement.
Certainly a must for any serious Tintin-ophile, and arguably the first ‘classic’ adventure.
With a relatively smooth continuity between Cigars of the Pharaoh and The Blue Lotus Hergé gives his readers their first glimpse of what later became the classic Tintin ‘double-bill’ format.
In COTP which, like the later adventure The Crab With The Golden Claws, is basically a drug smuggling yarn, Hergé introduces the smoothly plausible but deviously villainous movie-mogul Rastapopolous, who will return in several future Tintin adventures, including, naturally enough, the Blue Lotus, it following on from COTP as it does.
COTP’s Dr/Prof, Sophocles Sarcophagus, is a kind of experimental forerunner of Cuthbert Calculus, particularly in his absent-mindedness and mis-hearing or misapprehending things. Like Shooting Star’s Decimus Phostle and (prof/doc?) Alembick (KOS), Sarcophagus allows Hergé to experiment with the ‘mad professor’ type. In this instance the scientist does become literally mad, and is left that way, whereas Calculus is just ‘dotty’, absorbed in his own world of experiment and inquiry, and not at all lunatic. We are also introduced to Thomson and Thompson for the first time.
Hergé’s craft is clearly developing, inasmuch as these two adventures are better plotted, drawn and generally realsed than either Congo or America. But his skills are evolving, and this work, whilst very enjoyable, is not yet on a par with his best (the next three double-bills, Calculus, Tibet or Flight 714). Although substantially reworked, as was much of his early work, traces of Hergé’s earlier ‘long-body’ style remain apparent, and at this point contextual/background detail is more cursory on the whole than in later adventures.
Having said all this, it’s still long on good old-fashioned fun.
This was the second Tintin book I got as a child, so I have a certain nostalgic attachment to it. Looking back now it’s not amongst the best of Tintin’s adventures. But, it being a very early work, that’s not so surprising.
As well as taking on the mob – although his main adversary in the adventure ends up being the fictitious Bobby Smiles, the very real Al Capone is the mobster behind the criminal network Tintin is initially pitted against (following on from mention of Al Capone in Tintin in the Congo*) – our young reporter is embroiled in, amongst other things, an oil discovery, leading to a surreal sequence in which a city springs up instantly around him, and numerous other scrapes.
Tipi to traffic and tower blocks in one day/five frames.
These allow him to narrowly escape being killed by Indians, lynched by rednecks, turned into dog food, or drowned in the bay by mobsters, and numerous other grisly ends. In this early adventure the serial nature of the original story is more apparent than in later, smoother works.
I wouldn’t recommend this as a starting point, but for those who know and love Tintin it’s an essential part of the saga. There was much better to come, but this story retains a place in my heart and my collection, both for old times’ sake, and for its own early Tintin-era charm.
An alternative edition; beautiful cover!
* These being, as far as I know, the only times Hergé refers to a real person in the Tintin books.
I was inspired to do this project by the amazing living hornbeam construction at Het Loos, in Belgium. Monty Don visits it in his excellent series Around The World In 80 Gardens, which is how I learned about it.
Monty’s globetrotting DVD.
Our entire garden would fit inside one of the green corridors you see in the picture atop this post! Ours is necessarily a more modest affair, being a small near square construction.
So far it’s just the basic framework. I did the floor in weed suppressing fabric and wood chippings. Alas, local moggies, inc. our beloved Tigger, have been delighted with the sudden appearance of a huge kitty-litter tray. Consequently one has to watch one’s step.
I have the cast-iron ends of a nice garden bench, found and filched from the local dump. Literally plucked from the scrap metal skip. Yet another project in the pending list is finding suitable timber to put that back together.
The idea is to have it inside the green room, as a place to sit and enjoy the dappled shade it’ll one day supply. Hopefully by then I’ll have found a way to stop cats defecating in the wood chips!?
Interesting as much for its ‘issues’ as its strengths. Neither the best of Hergé’s artwork – the original edition; it has now been redrawn! – nor storytelling, Tintin In The Congo is most notable for the ways in which it reveals itself to be a product of its times.
The second Tintin adventure, following the anti-Communist propaganda of Tintin’s debut In The Land Of The Soviets, the modern version of Congo is so heavily redrawn that it doesn’t quite sit easily, visually speaking, in its ‘proper’ chronological place. Tintin’s body shape is a key giveaway: early unaltered strips have a less naturalistic feel, with a longer torso and strangely compressed legs.
Hergé’s 1920s Tintin adventure has courted controversy.
I was very sad to discover that the version I have is, in an issue related to the redrawing, a somewhat sanitised or Bowdlerised one. Without spoiling it for you, whilst Tintin and Snowy do little to endear themselves to the conservation and wildlife movements, an infamously shocking rhinoceros/dynamite episode (from the early version) is, sadly in my view, toned right down.
The characterisation of native Africans is likewise potentially shocking to the modern viewer, belonging firmly to a bygone ‘golliwog’ era. But despite the rather patronising caricature approach, it’s largely (although not exclusively) the Europeans of the story who are actually the chief villains.
A mixed but interesting chapter then, and a curio worth having (and enjoying), in the extensive Tintin catalogue. Not the best, but nonetheless essential for any real Tintin fan.
This album, from 1973, is so good that mere human verbiage simply cannot do it justice. It’s the kind of wonderfully obscure gem you may once have overlooked, years ago, flicking through vinyl bins somewhere, not knowing that your fingers had brushed their soul’s salvation, just as I did many times with Valle’s album Garra, as far back as the ‘80s! (I could have had it for £4, on vinyl, from Reckless in Islington!!)
It must be 10-15 years ago – maybe more?- when I bought this album (and Vento Sul) from Dustygroove.com, in Chicago. After customs and UPS had finished with me I’d paid £70 for the two albums. £35 each!!! So don’t baulk at the prices you see these for nowadays. This album is worth every penny.
When I first posted an earlier version of this review, on Amazon UK’s website, this was the only ‘70s Valle on offer; just this one lone import, from the batch put out in Japan. A series which also includes remastered reissues of Garra, two eponymously titled albums (from ’70 & ’74), Mustang Cor de Sangue, Viola Enluarda and, possibly also a few others.
The Music on Provisao do Tempo is a mix of jazz, bossa, funk and easy/soundtrack textures. The two versions of Nao Tem Nada Nao (vocal then instrumental) are super mellow brazillian space funk, with mad analog synth noodling to boot!
Tira Mao has a similar feel in the chorus, but the verses are more ambient, with lovely arpeggiated chords on guitar. Mentira is also a funky nugget, here you get brass stabs too – tasty cheese!
The most downbeat and moody track is Samba Fatal (apt really), it’s brooding and poetic and utterly brilliant. It’s the only song that sounds like he wasn’t grinning like a Brazilian buddha as he recorded the vocals: the album is dripping with honeyed good vibes.
The title track is a fantastic instrumental – traces of the Italian and French mondo-pop-sountrack lurk herein. The strings rise and fall chromatically, in a Bond-ish manner. It should be observed at this point that the arrangements are simply superb – both rich and minimal at the same time. Every element placed perfectly. The organ stabs on the space-funk tunes mentioned earler are typical of the pared down approach.
De Repente, Moca Flor is perhaps the smoothest piece – only the bubble-machine synth near the close to hint at the more baroque & freaked-out feel of the music Valle had laid down the previous year, on the fabulous Vento Sul album.
Mais Do Que Valsa is a great slowly swinging 3/4 tune (valsa = waltz, obviously). The subtlety of inflection in the singing is a real treat. Fans of Fagen & Mike McDonald take note! Tu-Ba-La-Quieba is a slowly funky toon – beautiful falsetto vocals – Marcos is in fine voice throughout.
The band are – so I’ve read and been told – the guys who became Azimuth, and they play superbly throughout, understatement being the key theme. Every song is utterly magnificent. In an era where so much music is bland pap sold like tastless sliced white bread, this album, like Shuggie Otis’ Inspiration Information is a little piece of heaven on earth.
Interestingly, as I thumbed through the booklet (only Japanese and Brazilian Portugese I’m afraid), I noticed that they namechecked Stereolab, The High Llamas, Shuggie and Tortoise – all stuff I also dig – cosmick! Nem Palata, Nem Gravata is a little like a more sophisticated version of early Mo’ Wax era Money Mark.
I came to this stuff from Valle’s smoother Bossa era stuff, such as Samba 68, which is also fabulous. And he’s still going strong! We love you, Marcos. What inspires someone to such great deeds? I don’t know, but I’m very grateful. As James Brown once said: “If you got any kinda soul, you gotta feel it!”
Since originally posting this review, of the Jap’ reissues, the lovely people at Light In The Attic record label have had the decency and good taste to reissue several of Valle’s best albums from the early 1970s. At present they are: Marcos Valle (1970), also sometimes known as Quarentao Simpatico), Garra, Vento Sul, and this one, Provisao Do Tempo (1973). All of which are now available to us music lovers at far more reasonable prices than the only other former legit’ CD source to date, the aforementioned Jap’ imports.
Could’ve been pretty good: ends up being pretty lame.
I’m almost as certain Kiera Knightley won’t read this as I am that planet earth doesn’t in fact rest on a turtle’s back. Indeed, I sincerely hope she doesn’t, as I have nothing against her personally – obviously! – as I don’t know her personally. But as an actress… There’s a reason why pretty appears twice in my title: she’s pretty, but (in this movie at least)… pretty awful.
I started writing this review before the movie was even halfway through: having initially been surprised, but also intrigued, even momentarily charmed, by the strangely theatrical approach, it was only after watching Knightley destroy a few scenes that I started to dislike the film with a rapidly growing intensity. By the end of the film this subsided into puzzled disappointment. Consequently I’m submitting my review as it evolved, starting quite angrily but ending merely critically.
Like so much modern product – I don’t want to say culture, as it dignifies this in a way I don’t think it merits – this is all about surface appeal. And, frankly, that just doesn’t cut it. There are some aspects that could’ve saved it, such as the ultra-theatricality, but they don’t. Perhaps the chief reason, or reasons, are the people in some of the main roles; again this movie causes definition difficulties: I can’t say actors, as I can’t call what I see acting.
All lush imagery, with no depth or drama.
The biggest problem is Keira Knightley, who simply appears, in this film at any rate, incapable of serious/credible acting. In popcorn like Pirates Of The Caribbean, the only kind of movie I’ve seen with her in that appears to be suited to her, I can just about bear watching her. This is sad because most of the cast are decent actors (the inverse-parallel sub-plot of Levin and Kitty’s love is actually, and especially relative to the main narrative thread, quite good), but they’re wasted when the films focus leaves one not only not caring what happens to Anna – I was more interested in Vronsky’s beautiful horse, as it had more charisma and personality – but actually wishing something awful would happen to her, sooner rather than later.
The Judaeo-Christian ‘Garden of Eden’ myth, that effectively casts consciousness as a curse (rather than as a blessing, or a bit of both), might apply equally well to beauty in an instance such as this. Knightley is, to state the ludicrously obvious, beautiful. Very, very beautiful – although personally I can’t stand the overly cultivated mannerism that is her trademark pout* – as are many of the central leads, male and female.
It galls me deeply that modern culture seems increasingly about nothing more than surface and effect; there’s simply no depth whatsoever. Or, perhaps to be fairer, whatever depth there might be is effectively lost in the crass glare of the ‘celebrity effect’. Personally I can’t see why we can’t have both beauty and depth. Or better still, the range and diversity of appearance and feeling that there is in the real world. But you won’t get them in equal measure here.
With Garbo as Anna, in ye ancient 1935 black and white movie, I cared what happened to her, and felt emotionally involved. Watching Knightley simply irritates. The film fails because the main character is un-believable. All the other things around her, including some good ideas and good performances, are sucked into the black hole of her failure to be credible in the role.
More pop video Mills & Boon than Tolstoy.
So, passing finally to the brave and clever super-stagey production: many directors, let’s just pluck Derek Jarman or Ingmar Bergman out of the aether by way of example, carry off the trick of ultra-theatricality. But, in the end, Joe Wright doesn’t, with the result – and especially when Knightley’s in the frame – that this comes off more pop video than drama, kitsch rather than art.
*Woody Allen has actress Olga Georges-Picot parody the sex-kitten pout in his terrific Love & Death, which, whilst being an overtly slapstick comedy, is also a far better work of art, and far more profound (in so many ways) than Joe Wright’s weird soufflé.
When I first posted this review, on the Amazon UK website, I gave Prometheus two stars. Then I thought about it a bit more. The consequence? I went with my gut instinct, and gave it just the one. Here on my blog I can be more precise! So I’m going with one and a half stars.
The only Ridley Scott movies that I think succeed as what I think of as proper ‘old-school’ science fiction (I very nearly said as a watchable movie at all*), are Blade Runner, which is based on the work of a master of the pulpy end of that genre’s literary form, Philip K. Dick. That’s probably why it worked. And the first Alien movie.
Alien was good, but, speaking frankly, that was largely the result of the strong combination of the visuals, the music, the whole ambience – i.e. the production aesthetic – and some very strong performances. Much modern so-called sci-fi is just dunderheaded action or soap-opera set in space. The Aliens series, Prometheus included, seem to me to be more horror than sci-fi, albeit horror set in an imaginary future.
But the H.R. Geiger aesthetic is no longer sufficient to wow, and, in Prometheus most of the acting left me wondering if everybody other than Fassbender, who, rather ironically, plays the ‘android’ David, weren’t actually the automatons. Another Amazon reviewer use the term ‘heroically thick’ to describe the acting of some (most, I would say) of the cast. Not only did I not care about the ‘characters’, I was increasingly keen, as the movie hobbled along, to see them dispatched.
The hotch-potch of ideas, some of them attempts to imagine a near future (smart lighting, ‘drone’ surveyors, etc.), some pseudo-philosophical (the whole ‘answers to it all’ line, and the awful science vs. religion element), doesn’t add up to anything worthy of reflection. Indeed, the grab-bag of ‘ideas’ make for as as unconvincing an ensemble as do the actors.
I intend no offence to her personally, but Noomi Rapace, clearly intended as the Sigourney Weaver ‘strong woman’ type, was lame. And her love interest? Let’s put it this way, I was yearning for him to be killed off, long before the coup de grace was finally and mercifully delivered! The crew of the Prometheus came over as a bunch of cringe-inducing frat-brats. I’d have believed in them as pseudy teenagers. But as mature adults, astronauts and scientists, on a serious ‘scientific expedition’? Nah!
The best I can say of this movie is that it passes the time: one of the most enjoyably creative moments was the short ‘Scott Free’ title animation, before the film began! And my favourite part of the actual film was the opening sequence of grandiose landscapes, before the narrative proper even starts! The whole CGI aesthetic, such as is used for the human-like creatures, referred to as the ‘creators’, does nothing for me at all. In fact in the forms it takes here it just irritates.
In short, and put bluntly, it’s an uninspired mish-mash, poorly scripted and acted, about a mess of unconvincing ideas, some of which – like the ‘anti-soul’ hubris of science, for example – are trite, tired clichés of our contemporary culture.
Apparently some guy wrote a big doctoral type thesis on the links between this movie and the old Greek myths of Prometheus, and concluded that Scott’s movie is largely free from any meaningful connections to the many ideas that those myth engaged with. Indeed! It’s largely free of any engaging ideas at all, I find. As some other reviewers have noted, it makes Scott’s better films look like happy accidents.
My wife bought this (I’m glad it was only £3!), and seemed to enjoy it. So, I can’t say whether you’d like it or not. But I’m one of the many who remain unconvinced.
* Most of Scott’s movies don’t do it for me. Gladiator is enjoyable mainstream fun, and I love The Duellists (his debut), ’cause I’m kind of nuts for things Napoleonic.
Tintin’s first adventure to be published in a full book form (or rather album, as they were called), In The Land Of The Soviets is even more anomalous than it’s better known somewhat infamous follow-up, In The Congo, for several reasons. First of all it was never deemed worthy of a redraw, which might’ve seen it truncated to the normal length and format all the other Tintin albums share (62 pages), and would also have seen it colourised. So, at 141 pages, and in black and white, it remains an oddity in purely technical terms.
And not only this, but as a story, and as a work of art, it also differs markedly. Rather than hearing Hergé’s own voice, which only really comes through in the gentler humour (in itself mostly rather lame on this occasion, and also often anything but gentle: along with In The Congo, In The Land Of The Soviets finds Tintin at his most brutal), we are served up a very heavy handed dose of anti-Communist propaganda: Hergé is certainly the ‘company man’ at this point, doing the bidding of his Catholic employers. After this story, only his adventure In The Congo makes any explicit reference to the paper – Le Petit Vingtieme – for whom Tintin is allegedly a reporter. In fact In The Land Of The Soviets is also one of the very few Tintin adventures in which we ever see him writing up a report, to send back to the paper.
In addition to all of this, Hergé’s craft is very much in its infancy, which makes In The Land Of The Soviets an interesting rather than particularly satisfying document. The drawing, dialogue, and storytelling are all, by Hergé’s own later standards, really quite poor. In fact one of the most noticeable shifts in the whole catalogue of his Tintin work is the almost quantum leap between this and In The Congo, especially in terms of the artwork, but also in most other respects. Some aspects, such as the smoothing out of the episodic structures that originated with the weekly serial format, would take longer to iron out and improve. But there are precious few hints – some gags that will be recycled later, the odd well composed frame, or series of frames – of what was to come later. On the evidence of this adventure alone one would hardly predict the great lifetime achievement, with Tintin as the primary vehicle, that Hergé actually went on to.
Even more of a one-for-the-fans curio than In The Congo, but perhaps less so than the unfinished Alph Art, this would not be a recommended starting point for those coming fresh to Tintin. Even Tintin’s character differs from what it was to become, with him being less innocent and more thuggish, only Snowy resembling his character as it would remain (more or less) in future. So, although it was, in book form adventures, where the much loved reporter and his dog started out, I wouldn’t recommend any reader started here.
Still, for Tintin nuts like me, and there are clearly a great number of us out there, this is nonetheless essential.
