Just one week now until the Coronation of His Majesty King Charles III, and – look! – he's already gone to pieces!
As someone who is only a casual purchaser of comic books – new or vintage – but who, nevertheless, is a complete sucker for exceptional comic cover-art, I've decide to curate a personal collection of randomly stunning covers on this blog: beginning with Batman #135, cover 'H' by Jim Cheung (Special Foil Variant), May 2023.
Brian Sibley speaks with Barry Humphries
‘Delusional, brutal, totally lacking in empathy and, above all, hideous; he is one of the most unpleasant characters to have ever inhabited the cinema screen.’
The celebrated Australian actor and comedian, Barry Humphries is discussing his portrayal of the Great Goblin, King of Goblin Town in the Misty Mountains where Thorin and the Dwarves are taken prisoner and held captive. ‘He is a gigantic and repulsive figure, and yet, one of great charm, dignity, and erudition. We realize that, underneath it all, he is probably a New Zealand intellectual, fallen upon hard times.’
Recalling how he came to be involved in the project, Barry says: ‘I had a telephone call from someone called Peter Jackson. I was in London, where I sometimes live, and was busy, so I asked him to ring later. Then a penny dropped. I thought, “Could he be related to one of the most gifted people in the entire history of film?” He was and he asked me if I would like to be in his film of The Hobbit?’
It was an invitation not to be declined: ‘I immediately agreed,’ he says, ‘for a ridiculously small fee. But the money was not important, it was the opportunity to explore the thing that I like most in life and art: the grotesque. Normality has never interested me. I am drawn to the paranormal, the extraordinary, the bizarre and the outlandish.’
That is certainly borne out by his close association with Dame Edna Everage, housewife, investigative journalist, social anthropologist, talk-show host, swami, spin-doctor, Megastar, and Icon and Sir Les Patterson Australia's outspoken cultural attaché to the Court of St James’s.
For Peter Jackson, having Barry Humphries in the cast was both thrilling and, in anticipation, a source of some apprehension: ‘I’ve been a fan of Barry’s for over thirty years,’ he says, ‘I’d seen Dame Edna’s shows in the West End and when she toured New Zealand, but it’s always a bit nerve-wracking when you meet people you admire for the first time because you don’t want your heroes to disappoint you. Of course, Barry turned out to be everything I’d dreamed he would be: the sweetest, kindest, good-natured, funny, man who does really great work.’
For Barry’s part, he was understandably keen to know what his character looked like: ‘Jackson showed me a little plastic figurine of such ugliness that I really thought it was a part they should get someone else to play: perhaps Dan Aykroyd or possibly Danny DeVito in a fat suit. But they explained that the new techniques would make it possible for me to be extremely large, to begin with, and to conform to the ugliness of the figurine. And I think we’ve achieved that. People will shrink in horror, but then – to use a modish expression – embrace the character.’
Asked whether he had contributed to the screen realisation of the character, Barry says: ‘It is possible that I made a contribution. Lately, when I’ve looked in the mirror, I can see that they based it loosely on my own appearance. I’ve been a little worried, as the years go on – I’m now in the November of my life – by my double chins, which seem to be growing.’
The goblins’ brutally monstrous monarch is not only given voice by Barry Humphries, but was acted out by him in motion-capture, a process which he found both intriguing and baffling: ‘You get covered with dots – sort of white measles suddenly appear all over you – and these, apparently, attract little lasers or beams or something in the camera. If I were a twelve-year-old, I would understand all the technology of this movie, but as I’m not, I just go with the flow and enjoy myself.’
The actor was much impressed set built for the scenes featuring the Great Goblin: ‘The studio was filled with an amazing edifice. Because the Goblin King is a scavenger on a huge scale, his throne room is entirely constructed of rubbish: old timber, terrible skeletons and human remains. It’s a forensic paradise. Dwarves are his foe and he is a cannibal, so he’s very fond of having them in various culinary experiments. His horrible inner sanctum is filled with the skulls and bones and, sometimes, even the entrails of Dwarves to an extent previously unseen in movies. In fact, I know of no other film where the entrails of Dwarves are examined in such detail, so it’s an educational film.’
Of the throne itself, Barry notes: ‘There’s a hole in the seat, so it is both a throne and also a toilet. The Goblin King is, among other things, grossly incontinent so if he hears the call of nature it doesn’t need to interrupt his conversation and, from time to time, a beautifully crafted urn beneath the throne receives a compliment of matter from the Goblin King, generally speaking of ill-digested dwarf.’
Barry was particularly gratified to discover that the Great Goblin has a song to sing: ‘I’m convinced that it will be a huge hit,’ he says, ‘It will top the charts, as the young folk would express it. It could even go platinum. It is a song of extreme aggression: a hate-filled number, which children will enjoy and senior citizens will appreciate. It’s entirely about destruction, death, and torture. But I try to do it in a sympathetic way. I’ve tried, as a matter of fact, to bring out the loveable side of my character – although this attempt has been a total failure.’
Barry is no stranger to musical performance: he was Mr Sowerberry the undertaker in the original 1960 production of Oliver! and later played Fagin. However, singing for the Great Goblin proved challenging: ‘My character is tone deaf, and so I had to do what is an extremely difficult thing for a person like me, who sings beautifully – I had to sing it badly. Having to act and sing badly is difficult for someone who is in the November of his life.’
Of the Great Goblin’s eventual demise, Barry says: ‘I’ve never been disemboweled before, but it’s a pretty nasty death, and I think one that will be greeted by audiences with joy, but also dismay to think that they won’t see the character again. But, you know, in works of imaginative fiction, people do die and are reborn. They’re not really dead. And to me, this is an indestructible character.’
The Hobbit began life as a children’s book, so an obvious question is whether or not it has been translated into a children’s film? Barry is adamant: ‘The Hobbit is a film for children in the sense that it’s scary moments are the scary moments kids enjoy. Some tests have been made on young children, and they have enjoyed it, though they have not slept a wink since and some of them have also developed nervous tics that, apparently, will never go away. Otherwise, yes, it’s a children’s film, and it is also, not – as is often cornily said – for “the young in heart”, but for those who appreciate extravagance and imagination: qualities lacking in almost every movie you ever see these days.’
As a final reflection on his foray into Middle-earth, Barry Humphries says, ‘There’s much in this film for audiences of all ages, but I think what people will enjoy the most is my appearance as the Great Goblin. Although, as the years pass, you’ll forget most of it, my performance will be evergreen in your memory.’
From my Christmas Carol archive: memories of three theatrical Scrooges: Patrick Stewart, Anthony Newley (and Scrooge composer, Leslie Bricusse) and Tommy Steele.
I sent my programme for the Patrick Stewart one-man production – which one of the greatest pieces of theatre I have ever seen – to (what was then) The Albery Theatre and never getting it back, despite having enclosed return postage! But then, some 18-months later, long after I'd given up on ever seeing it again, the signed programme miraculously materialised, like one of Scrooge's ghostly visitors!
I can't recall how I got the Anthony Newley and Tommy Steele programmes signed, I probably left them with the Stage Door keepers (I was never one for haunting Stage Doors, waiting for the star to leave after a performance) but I certainly remember the circumstance of getting Leslie Bricusse to add his signature to the Newley Scrooge programme.
It was in Beverley Hills where I was interviewing Mr Bricusse for one of my radio shows. After he'd signed the programme, knowing his interest in Dickens and Ebenezer Scrooge, I gave him a copy of The Unsung Story, my book on A Christmas Carol. He received it enthusiastically and then, suddenly jumping up, he rushed from the room calling back over his shoulder: "I've got something for you that you absolutely won't have in your Dickens collection!" He returned with a copy of the Japanese libretto for the Tokyo production of Scrooge to which he added a typical inscription...
After the truly shameful live-action version of Pinocchio recently released by Disney (a total betrayal of their great animation heritage) the prospect of another movie based on Pinocchio could only come with the knowledge that it couldn’t be worse than the one we’d just been given! As it happens it is, proportionally, as wonderful as its forerunner was dire.
If one could pick any director to film the story of a puppet that earns the right to become a real boy, Guillermo del Toro – having a reputation for emotionally complex movies – clearly deserves a place in any list of contenders and, with this truly astonishing film, he has not only proved himself worthy of the task, he has delivered what is nothing short of a masterpiece.
The medium in which del Toro has chosen to present this cinematic work of art is the time-consuming, labour-intensive craft of stop-frame animation. It is a technique as old as cinematography: it was responsible for some of film’s earliest experiments in conjuring the illusion of life, the amazing films of Czech puppet film-maker Jiří Trnka, Willis O'Brien’s legendary behemoth, King Kong, Ray Harryhausen’s dinosaurs and demons and the adorable menagerie of Aardman Animations. For this project del Toro has collaborated with Mark Gustafson who was responsible for the animation direction in Wes Anderson’s 2009 adaptation of Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox.
Of course, del Toro’s Pinocchio is no closer to Carlo Collodi’s nineteenth century children’s story than was Walt Disney’s 1940 animated classic but – despite the undoubted moments of terror in Uncle Walt’s telling – del Toro has plumbed every nuanced psychological depth of the concept of a man-made creature given life that has been an ever-present narrative trope from Ovid’s Pygmalion and Galatea, via Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Chucky in the film Child’s Play and after.
Del Toro’s “little puppet made of pine” is no finely chiselled and polished marionette; he is a grotesque mockery of a child, crudely cobbled into being by an inebriated, grief-stricken Geppetto. We are in familiar del Toro territory: Pinocchio is a freak, a misfit, an outsider and a potential threat to everyone who conforms to societal norms. In a touching true moment of innocent self-understanding, Pinocchio compares his misaligned limbs with those of Geppetto’s finely carved figure of the crucified Christ (himself an image of the dangerous outsider) in the hillside village church.
The script of this – the 22nd cinematic variation on the Pinocchio theme – admittedly plays faster and looser with Collodi’s didactic text than even Disney’s script-writers: the explosive puppet-theatre showman is neither Collodi’s Mangiafuoco nor Disney’s (volcanically named) Stromboli, he is, here, Count Volpe: an amalgam of the original man-mountain of malignancy (his original puppet-persona is still to be glimpsed as one of the carnival’s background-freaks) combined with the wily Fox and his side-kick Cat who were the stand-out rogues of the Disney version seducing Pinocchio from the straight-and-narrow with the romantic dream of “an actor's life.” In this new incarnation, the film’s central villain focuses the myriad ideas and forces that oppose Pinocchio's naive integrity.
Collodi’s life-empowering Fairy with Turquoise Hair (Disney’s Hollywood-blonde Blue Fairy) is here transformed into an wondrous being: a mystical blue creature with wings of eyes like some Biblical phenomenon that del Toro names a Wood Sprite – the spirit not just of the woods, it seems, but of all things wooden – who with her similarly blue, many-eyed horned sister – are ancient, fantastical, creatures from a hitherto unexplored cavern in Pan’s labyrinth.
As in Disney, the talking cricket (so swiftly and violently dispatched by Pinocchio in Collodi’s novel) assumes the role of storyteller with the task of having charge of Pinocchio’s moral education given new meaning by his actually living in a knot-hole in the puppet’s chest.
The cricket (or to give him his new, grandiose name ‘Sebastian J. Cricket’ is spoken – and sung – for by Ewan McGregor in a mix of bug bemusement and human irritation while David Bradley (in his third movie for del Toro) gives us the perfect Geppetto – a damaged soul, haunted by the past, wounded by loss and wrestling with those issues that have – throughout history – confronted fathers and sons. There is a starry line up of supporting voices including Christoph Waltz (as the, by-turns, charming and malevolent Count Volpe), Tilda Swinton (and the Sprite and Death) and an impressive vocal performance from young newcomer, Gregory Mann, as the titular character.
Eschewing the original period of the book in favour of Second World War Italy under ‘Il Duce’, del Toro gives uses his seemingly innocent puppet show to address a vast agenda of topics including war and peace, faith and disbelief, trust and deceit, wisdom and folly, grief and joy, cowardice and courage and, ultimately – in Geppetto’s relationship with both his long dead son and his own self-carved replacement – we are asked to grapple with nothing less than matters of life and death.
The scenario hurtles towards its climax in narrative territory with which we are familiar from book and earlier films: Geppetto’s rescue bid to save his wayward puppet-child leading to Pinocchio’s quest to save his creator-father from the monstrous dog-fish that has swallowed him and his little boat. The ending, however, is not quite what we may have been expecting, but – without spoiling your discovery – it is one that not only feels true to everything that has gone before but also, perhaps, the only place where del Toro could possibly ring down the curtain.
There are many moments en route to that place when – so bound up are we in this story and its telling – that it is difficult to remember that all the characters in this intimate drama are puppets – not just the one who looks like a puppet!
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio achieves what only truly great animation can achieve: permission for an audience to invest in the sheer wonderment of story and characters and so allow themselves to be moved to laughter and tears by the age-old magic of puppetry.
I am a devout and devoted ‘Dickensian Christmas Caroller’! (Did you know I am obsessed with Dickens’ famous “Ghost Story of Christmas”? Or that I once wrote a book about it?) So it’s always a case of anticipated pleasure when a December rolls around offering a new version of the best-known Christmas story outside of those in the Gospels!
Netflix’s Scrooge: A Christmas Carol, is very much an animated movie for our times: slick, brittle-hard, animation (oh, how I yearn, instead, for the humanity of Aardman’s Plasticine world); cute (but oddly unlovable) doe-eyed moppets; clumsy diversity-realigned characterisations (Scrooge’s nephew with an Indian Raj bride and even a hajib-wearing Londoner spotted in the crowd scenes); ratcheted-up grotesquery and exhausting, eye-tiring, over-the-top special effects sequences. Oh, yes, and there’s a dog: a bloodhound inherited by Scrooge from his “dead to begin with” partner, Jacob Marley.
There is, of course, the obligatory starry voice cast: headed by the ubiquitous Luke Evans as Ebenezer Scrooge but with standout performances from a chilling Jonathan Pryce as the icy spectre of the late Mr. Marley and a cosy, quirky Olivia Colman as a mercurial Ghost of Christmas Past candle.
On the plus side (and every version of A Christmas Carol, although sometimes challenging to identify, will have occasional redeeming features), there are one or two smart plot embellishments such as having the young Scrooge working in a blacking factory and the put-upon clerk, Bob Cratchit, being (without knowing it) the son of one of those who, many years before, had been cruelly brought to ruin by Messrs Scrooge and Marley.
What really got me through this over-long, over-done interpretation were the sharp lyrics and fuzzy sentiment of the songs by the late Leslie Bricusse. It was, I admit, a case of chronic nostalgia for I first heard these songs on a December night, fifty-two years ago, when my best friend and I attended a royal charity premiere for Ronald Neame’s film musical, Scrooge, starring Albert Finney as Dickens’ “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!”
Later that evening, fuelled with the spirit of Christmastide (and a few ‘rum-and-blacks’) I recall we danced our way down Charing Cross Road singing Bricusse’s particularly catchy little ditty, ‘Thank You Very Much’ to the bemusement of passers-by.
In 1992, Bricusse reworked the musical for the stage with his long-time friend and creative collaborator Anthony Newley (Stop the World – I Want to Get Off) as the titular humbug, a role later revived by Tommy Steele. Obviously, being the Carol nerd that I am, I saw both these titanic (if idiosyncratic) legends in the role.
It is the case, therefore, that these songs have been part
of my musical psyche since I was 21-years-old and – alongside the carols that
I’ve known since my childhood – are an indelible element of my personal
Christmas soundtrack. Maybe that fact may have softened what might otherwise
have been a less tolerant review of the new movie, but – as is almost always
the case with adaptations of this book (think of the versions with Alastair
Sim, George C. Scott, Kelsey
Grammer, Mickey Mouse, The Muppets or Mr Magoo) something always
comes through – powerfully or obliquely – of Dickens’ miraculous concoction of jollity
and sorrow, hope and regret, the innocence of youth and the sagacity of age,
searing social commentary, warm-hearted, open-handed Christian compassion and
the very essence of ‘Christmasness’ as only this literary alchemist could
conjure.
FIFTY-ONE days to Christmas! How do I know? The first of the big store Christmas commercials have debut! For example, in a year when – to be fair – there has been so much about which to be doubtful, Lidl have come up the slogan:
LIDL, A CHRISTMAS YOU CAN BELIEVE IN!
I wonder what sort of a Christmas you can't believe in?
Maybe one featuring the story of a young, heavilly pregnant girl and her husband, finding themselves homeless in a strange city on a night in the bleak mid-winter...?
[Illustration: Lesley Fotherby; Sibley/Weeks Collection]
What the hell is happening to our language?
Why are we allowing our communities, society, country, world to be divided not just over our ideologies but in the manner we express our distaste, antipathy, detestation for one another.
Maybe it is a symptom of our willfully and irrevocably fractured twenty-first century human relationships, but as the UK’s Home Secretary hysterically – and disgracefully – refers to the arrival of immigrants as ‘an invasion’ and perpetuates the dangerous fiction that all immigrants are 'illegal', those who respond to the stench of smouldering hatred are driven to join in the same name-calling language of a playground for grown-up children.
Suella Braverman shouts across the chamber of the House of Commons that her opponents are ‘Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati’ and when, a few days later, she weaponsises the ever-present fear of ‘the stranger’, ‘the outsider’, those who are ‘not like us’ as being comparable to a hostile army, the opposition – by which I don’t just mean ‘His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition’, but everyone who doesn’t buy into her grotesque rhetoric – are seemingly left with no adequate response but reciprocal, equally meaningless, label-sticking.
One
of our British broadcasters whom I most admire (and whose political
stance I admit to sharing) is now referring to those who stamp and cheer
at Braverman’s rabble-rousing as the nothing more than response of the
‘gammon and pineapple’ brigade, while one of his colleagues (with whom I
am also, more often than not, in agreement) dismisses the fulminations
of the Braverman rant as a crowd-pleaser for the grey-haired oldies in
the Home Counties’ golf-clubs.
I don’t play golf (although I
have putted around a seaside crazy-golf course a couple of times); I do
read the Guardian; I’m not quite sure how often I’ve eaten tofu and I
certainly haven’t eaten gammon and pineapple for a good few years,
although I happily would because I think it’s a tasty combination – just
as I enjoy pork-and-applesauce or chicken-and-redcurrant-jelly – but
these idiotic disparagements are a poor, simplistic reaction to the
current degeneration of our social discourse. ‘Your mum’s an ugly old
cow!’ or ‘Your dad’s a stinky old poof!’ are but the prologue to the
post-2016 yells of ‘Brexiter’ and ‘Remoaner’ and enthusiastically set
the stage for red-faced, factioneers screaming ‘Communist’, ‘Fascist’
and any other incendiary invective that will arm and empower people
against other people.
When and how can those of us who want to
resist society’s Gadarene stampede to the cliff-edge stop ourselves from
embracing this grotesque communal hostility that aids no one other than
those who seek further division for their own self-enhancing ends?
What
language do we have left with which to speak reason to ignorance and
truth to power? Whatever it is we need, we’d better find it and start
using it pretty damn soon.
