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01-10-2016, 03:30 AM | #11 |
Mayor of Geek Creek
Join Date: Apr 2007
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Thanksgiving by Monte Williams, on Flickr The Whole Useless Baggage of Blood and Tribe by Monte Williams, on Flickr Every Friendship With a Snowman is Doomed by Monte Williams, on Flickr Long, Cold Winter by Monte Williams, on Flickr Confronting Vast Tenebrific Spaces by Monte Williams, on Flickr The Malebolgia Tribe by Monte Williams, on Flickr All Was Shadows, Emptiness, Echoes and Dust by Monte Williams, on Flickr And now a belated reply. Quote:
As for your question, yeah, I'm a relatively mild-mannered and content person, but my tastes and preferences and inclinations have always been a bit dark. I'm not sure why that is. That's just what speaks to me, I guess. Last edited by Monte Williams; 01-10-2016 at 03:48 AM.. |
01-16-2016, 04:05 AM | #12 |
Mayor of Geek Creek
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Both Reason and Weapons Will Eventually Be Resorted To by Monte Williams, on Flickr Alarga en la Pradera Una Pausada by Monte Williams, on Flickr The Raven King by Monte Williams, on Flickr The Habits of Whites Had Stopped Making Sense by Monte Williams, on Flickr The Meraudian Heresy by Monte Williams, on Flickr |
01-17-2016, 12:44 PM | #13 |
Mayor of Geek Creek
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With thanks to my dad for the kickass new addition to my Old West cast!
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01-17-2016, 01:13 PM | #14 |
Hisstank.Com General
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Your pics are about the only good thing that came from that awful movie.
My brother and I loved the Lone Ranger when we were kids and we listened to all the old radio shows. The movie made the character seem like a sissy and Johnny Depp basically played Jack Sparrow who was playing Tonto. |
01-23-2016, 12:43 AM | #15 |
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Thanks for the kind words, Dusty, and I hear ya. Had I been more of an established Lone Ranger fan beforehand, the movie would have left me quite agitated. As it was, I had no feelings about the character one way or the other before seeing the movie, and I was still mildly upset on the character's behalf.
It's good to have a sense of humor in a film, and I can see why they thought they could select their protagonist to be the butt of the jokes, since that approach had been so successful for them already with the Pirates franchise (which is to say nothing of the histrionic shitstorm that would have erupted had they made Tonto the fool to a larger extent than they did; they basically made him the hero and devoted large chunks of the film to the plight of the Natives and the corruption of the whites, but all anyone cared about was that a white dude was portraying a Native). But Jack Sparrow was introduced to the audience as something of a bumbling fool and a coward. The Ranger had decades of history as a hero. It was shortsighted of them to use the Ranger in the same manner as Sparrow, although to be fair I must admit I mostly enjoyed the movie. Oddly enough, the moment that bugged me most, in terms of the mistreatment of the character, was Tonto's response to the Ranger's famous cry of "Hi-yo, Silver!" He looked almost scared, or at least startled, which is fine and amusing, but the line "Never do that again!" came across as dismissive, and my feeling was that it implied a degree of franchise shame that suggests Disney probably should have just skipped making the movie altogether. Based on its poor showing at the box office, I'm sure they wish they had skipped it. I for one think it's a better and more thoughtful film than any of the pirate movies, and I wish it had done better so that we could have a sequel, not least because presumably the Ranger wouldn't be a sissy in the next story, since by the end of the film he was, well, The Lone Ranger. While we're here, I have two new photos to share. Across the Whisper of Old Storms by Monte Williams, on Flickr A Cattleman's Paradise by Monte Williams, on Flickr |
01-28-2016, 02:18 AM | #16 |
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Cross-posted from Facebook:
Warning: this is a long, weird post that discusses a movie everyone hates and explores my hobby on a level that can't possibly be interesting to anyone but me. I started watching The Lone Ranger last night. My third viewing. My feelings for the film are far more complicated than you might expect, in light of my having obsessively photographed Lone Ranger and Tonto toys for two years. Alongside my wife and daughter, I saw The Lone Ranger in the theater, which is a bit surprising, in retrospect, 'cause we usually only make it to the theater three or four times a year, and so we prioritize carefully. We weren't fans of the creative team behind the Pirates of the Caribbean series, and none of us cared about the Lone Ranger character, so I'm honestly not sure what compelled us to go. Whatever the case, we all enjoyed the movie quite a bit, but I had issues with it. There are the famously off-putting tonal shifts (Luke Thompson of Topless Robot titled his (very favorable) review "A Tone Stranger", and argued, rightly I think, that these startling shifts were intentional and indeed accounted for in the narrative), but what bothered me more was the humor. I've argued elsewhere that, while the gags are arguably one of the more successful components of the film, the story would nonetheless benefit from a significant decrease in emphasis on humor, especially humor at the expense of the protagonist. Worse still, much of the humor came across as an embarrassed attempt on Disney's part to somehow distance themselves from the material; the phrase "franchise shame" popped into my head in response to Tonto admonishing the Ranger to "Never do that again!" after his first and only cry of "Hi-yo, Silver!" Also, and this has always been one of those things that bugs me more than it perhaps should, but I *hate* that there are two or three moments when one or another of the heroes falls hundreds or thousands of feet and doesn't have a scratch to show for it. I have never understood why any action film would employ such implausible silliness. It never adds to the story. Instead, it pulls the viewer out of the story. (Think of John McClane's superheroic antics in the later Die Hard films, or Indiana Jones surviving a nuclear bomb *and* being tossed a mile or three across the mountains inside a refrigerator). Anyway, I'm nitpicking the few distracting shortcomings of a movie I mostly love watching and which most everyone else hates, so I'll (finally) get to my point. My initial enjoyment of the film was not sufficient to motivate me to buy the toys. But NECA did such a bang-up job on the sculpts and paint that I decided I'd like to photograph their Tonto figure... although I put it off for the better part of a year until it went on sale, 'cause I am routinely broke. Anyhoo, that Tonto figure captured my imagination in a huge way (obviously), to the extent that watching the film now is a strange, almost surreal experience. My concept of the Lone Ranger and Tonto revolves almost completely around the dark, weird, genre-bending tales that unfold in my head while I'm photographing the toys, and having done so now for two years, I've lived with these vaguely BPRD-inspired notions of the characters long enough and with enough depth and earnestness that the movie now feels like an ambitious but misguided adaptation of *my* take on the characters... which probably sounds stupid and/or Narcissistic, but whatever. Put simply, when I watch Armie Hammer and Johnny Depp onscreen today, it gives me that same thrill superhero fans get the first time they see a beloved character in a live-action context. I feel like, "Wow, they made a movie of this!" even though obviously the movie is where these designs for the characters originated. It's odd. Damn odd. I've never experienced this sort of layered, contradictory aspect of fandom. It's like a stuttering, awkward Möbius strip, made all the more insular and strange by the fact that *no one else* is still thinking about these characters two-and-a-half years after the movie bombed, and no one else is photographing the toys or reinterpreting them in any way. Last edited by Monte Williams; 01-28-2016 at 02:22 AM.. |
02-01-2016, 09:35 AM | #17 |
Mayor of Geek Creek
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Comanche Spawn by Monte Williams, on Flickr Up North Ain’t a Place—It’s a Direction by Monte Williams, on Flickr |
02-02-2016, 10:05 AM | #18 |
Hisstank.Com General
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Quote:
Thanks for the kind words, Dusty, and I hear ya. Had I been more of an established Lone Ranger fan beforehand, the movie would have left me quite agitated. As it was, I had no feelings about the character one way or the other before seeing the movie, and I was still mildly upset on the character's behalf.
It's good to have a sense of humor in a film, and I can see why they thought they could select their protagonist to be the butt of the jokes, since that approach had been so successful for them already with the Pirates franchise (which is to say nothing of the histrionic shitstorm that would have erupted had they made Tonto the fool to a larger extent than they did; they basically made him the hero and devoted large chunks of the film to the plight of the Natives and the corruption of the whites, but all anyone cared about was that a white dude was portraying a Native). But Jack Sparrow was introduced to the audience as something of a bumbling fool and a coward. The Ranger had decades of history as a hero. It was shortsighted of them to use the Ranger in the same manner as Sparrow, although to be fair I must admit I mostly enjoyed the movie. Oddly enough, the moment that bugged me most, in terms of the mistreatment of the character, was Tonto's response to the Ranger's famous cry of "Hi-yo, Silver!" He looked almost scared, or at least startled, which is fine and amusing, but the line "Never do that again!" came across as dismissive, and my feeling was that it implied a degree of franchise shame that suggests Disney probably should have just skipped making the movie altogether. Based on its poor showing at the box office, I'm sure they wish they had skipped it. I for one think it's a better and more thoughtful film than any of the pirate movies, and I wish it had done better so that we could have a sequel, not least because presumably the Ranger wouldn't be a sissy in the next story, since by the end of the film he was, well, The Lone Ranger. While we're here, I have two new photos to share. Across the Whisper of Old Storms by Monte Williams, on Flickr A Cattleman's Paradise by Monte Williams, on Flickr I read that Disney was wanting to start a franchise with this movie but they lost a bundle. |
02-02-2016, 08:02 PM | #19 |
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02-05-2016, 10:49 PM | #20 |
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I love your pics.
I liked the Lone Ranger movie, thought it was pretty funny.
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