Hi. My name's Rob Schamberger. I'm that guy who paints rasslers. And other stuff. She rings like a bell through the night and wouldn't you love to love her?

Double Indemnity (1944)

Watercolor on 9” x 12” watercolor paper

#25 in the 40 movies I haven’t seen from the AFI 100!

This is the first one on the list that I’m PRETTY SURE I haven’t seen before. I enjoy noir films and Double Indemnity is considered the mold that the others in the genre are cast from, so I could have seen it before but I’m PRETTY SURE I hadn’t. For being so early in the noir category, it’s interesting the ways in which it subverts norms but I put a lot of that on screenwriters Billy Wilder and (THE) Raymond Chandler. This is less a femme fatale corrupting an innocent man, and instead two sociopaths pulling one another into their orbits to allow each of them to commit the crime they want to commit. Fred McMurray plays an insurance salesman that, when he meets Barbara Stanwyck’s abused housewife character sees an opportunity to commit what he thinks is a perfect murder. Meanwhile, she wants to get a huge payout on an insurance settlement and commit (another) murder.

It’s that they’re both enabling the other that makes this stay in the imagination, I think. That and its visual language with high contrast and shadows cast through the slits of blinds, influencing every noir movie, illustration and comic to come after it. Maybe that’s part of why I feel like I may have seen it before, that everything else in the genre is so heavily influenced by the look and feel of Double Indemnity.

For the painting, yeah of course I wanted to play inside of that visual language. I’m a guy that grew up on Frank Miller, Jim Steranko and Sean Phillips comics so hell yeah I’m taking this opportunity! It’s right in my wheelhouse.

Next week: The emotional journey that is The Deer Hunter.

Here’s a preview of Thursday’s new Jon Moxley painting. Yes, seriously!

Card subject to change.

Rob’s Art on ShopAEW
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Rob and Jason Arnett's novella Rudow Can't Fail!
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Rob’s prints and shirts at Pro Wrestling Tees
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Rob’s gallery site Schamberger Art
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Katy’s book Oldest Kansas City

Friday night I went to see The Furious in the theater and yo, GO SEE THIS MOVIE. It answers the question of what if Taken and Death Wish were set in South Asia with a bunch of Uvalde cops and it’s shot like The Raid. The hour is one hour and fifty-three minutes of everybody kung fu killing. A mute man with a mysterious past’s daughter is kidnapped and he goes down the darkest paths of violence to get her back and it’s the kind of thrilling action experience I’ve only had with The Raid and the original Matrix movie, where it’s something wholly new. Am I speaking your love language here? Seriously, GO SEE THIS MOVIE.

I finally watched Richard Linklater’s first movie, Slacker (1991). I turned 18 in 1998, so I was kind of at the tail end of the life shown here. Pre-cell phone, where I would sort of wander from place to place that my friends also went to, trying to find a good hang. The movie is a fascinating sort of collection of short stories where the camera follows some subjects for a little bit and then moves to follow others. There’s no big narrative arc here, just a building of vibes. Now that I’m on my path to be a cinephile, I can see the direct connection from John Cassavetes’ Shadows through to this, which is fascinating. It’s also a very humanistic and empathic acceptance of neurodiversity and mental illness, where all of these different types of folks are treated as what they are: People. Way, way ahead of the sociological curve.

Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) is another collection of short stories with a little more of a narrative arc, following a society page writer as he tags along with the rich and famous. It gets to a lot of emotional truths, showing these people as living what’s perceived as glamorous lives but they’re all so fundamentally dead inside. As has been at the back of my mind with all of these 50’s Fellini movies, the post-Fascist reality is very present with this film, especially in the scene with a group of old money socialites wandering through a decrepit falling-apart castle. I kept wondering what their families were doing in the twenties through forties, y’know? And if that has anything to do with their need to be constantly inebriated? The movie doesn’t directly ask these questions, but it’s all presented to be asked.

Hell’s Angels (1930) is a mixed bag but the good side is something totally worth seeing. I’ve wanted to see this ever since learning about it in Scorsese’s The Aviator about its director Howard Hughes. It was a wildly dangerous production and people died in making it and one can see why. It has two aerial combat scenes that are unlike anything I’ve ever seen, especially for a movie released in 1930. These aren’t miniatures or rear production or what’s now known as greenscreen, it’s actual bi-planes in dogfights, it’s an actual blimp moving through the clouds, it’s a massive spectacle. That said, the stuff on the ground is just so-so and a weird artifact of that time in moviemaking. It was originally shot as a silent film and then reshots were done to transition to the talkies. Because of that, there’s a lot of very physical and emotive overacting as was the norm for the silents and it’s odd seeing them combined. But man, those dogfights are what I’ll remember about this.

Katy and I started watching Widow’s Bay a few days ago and are enjoying it a lot. It’s a sort of lovely mixture of horror and comedy without one invalidating the other. Similar in tone to Barbarian and Weapons, I feel, giving space for both screams and screams of laughter.

I also got caught up on the For All Mankind spinoff Star City, which is fan-freaking-tastic. Instead of just being the Russian side of this alternate history story, that’s a backdrop that allows for a story that owes more to The Conversation and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and allows for commentary about living in a surveillance state. Funnily enough, what immediately won me over was that they’re not speaking Russian or English with Russian accents, but with British accents. It works remarkably well.

I finished reading the omnibus Locas by Jaime Hernandez a few days ago, collecting all of the Maggie and Hopey stories from the original Love & Rockets series. I’ve read everything since then but this was my first time reading where these characters started. Now listen, art is subjective and it’s impossible to say what’s definitively the best comics series ever, but in my opinion watching these characters grow and live full lives is the best thing in comics. They make mistakes and bad decisions and it’s all so very human. These characters and the paths their lives take them through are so tangible and lived-in. No one’s wholly good or bad, they’re just people who feel and make others feel.

I listened to the audiobook for It’s Alive! by Julian David Stone while working. It’s a heavily-researched historical fiction about the making of the 1931 Frankenstein, told from the perspectives of Junior Laemmle, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi about the film’s troubled early production. SPOILER: The movie gets made. But it’s about the journey to get there, as Lugosi was originally cast to be The Monster but his ego wouldn’t stand to be covered in prosthetics and makeup. Karloff, who had yet to have a big break and is about to quit acting altogether to be a trucker, is considered but Laemmle is having a hard time selling his father, the owner of Universal Studios, on not just casting an unknown but making the movie at all.

My vegetables are coming in nicely so far. Several of my garden peppers are growing towards full size, so then it’s a matter of waiting for them to turn color. Though I’ve learned if I’m in a pinch that even if they’re still green that these don’t have that distinct green pepper flavor (of which I’m not overly fond) that you get at the store.

My experiment with doing potted tomatoes is also going well so far. I’m doing cherry tomatoes and also Roma’s, with a basil planted in each pot alongside them. A friend let me know about how tomatoes do well when planted with certain herbs as it helps with pollination, in the root systems and to keep pests away. In the future I won’t use black plastic pots for them again, instead a lighter-colored plastic pot to help keep the soil temperature down. I also have them up on the deck now instead of on the patio, as the stone gets very hot when the sun’s out, and I removed the dishes from under the pots so that the soil doesn’t get too soggy.

But I’ve got tomatoes coming in! I don’t have any area of soil in my back yard that gets enough sun so I had a hell of a time growing them on a consistent basis. The trick with the potted tomatoes I’ve read is to keep the moisture consistent, the soil not too hot and to fertilize every other week.

Friend, I’m up for this challenge.

Love you more,
Rob

PS: Trans rights are human rights. Abolish and prosecute ICE.