Drawn and Quarterly
Price: $19.95
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Graphic novelist ADRIAN TOMINE shows and tells his new gem, Shortcomings followed by a screening of Killer of Sheep at 8 pm $5 and $15 tickets on sale now.
Harvard Book Store is pleased to welcome ADRIAN TOMINE for a presentation of his new graphic novel Shortcomings, followed by a screening of one of the "100 essential films" of all time, Killer of Sheep. About Shortcomings, Junot Diaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) had this to say: "Tomine's lacerating falling-out-of-love story is an irresistible gem of a graphic novel. [I]ts antihero, Ben Tanaka, is not your average comic book protagonist: he's crabby, negative, self-absorbed, über-critical, slack-a-riffic and for someone who is strenuously race-blind, has a pernicious hankering for whitegirls.... In Tomine's apt hands, Tanaka's heartbreaking descent into awareness is reading as good as you'll find anywhere."
After the reading and book signing, Mr. Tomine will introduce the restored 35mm print of Killer Of Sheep at 8 pm.
Tickets for this special screening are $12 for the general public and $10 for Brattle members. A $15 ticket is available for both the reading at 6 pm and the screening at 8 pm. All tickets involving the screening can be purchased at the Brattle Theatre and online at brattlefilm.org. Killer of Sheep (1977, 83 min.), directed by Charles Burnett, examines the black Los Angeles ghetto of Watts in the mid-1970s through the eyes of Stan, a sensitive dreamer who is growing detached and numb from the psychic toll of working at a slaughterhouse. Frustrated by money problems, he finds respite in moments of simple beauty: the warmth of a coffee cup against his cheek, slow dancing with his wife in the living room, holding his daughter. The film offers no solutions; it merely presents life—sometimes hauntingly bleak, sometimes filled with transcendent joy and gentle humor.
Killer of Sheep was shot on location in Watts in a series of weekends on a budget of less than $10,000, most of which was grant money. Finished in 1977 and shown sporadically, its reputation grew and grew until it won a prize at the 1981 Berlin International Film Festival. Since then, the Library of Congress has declared it a national treasure as one of the first fifty on the National Film Registry and the National Society of Film Critics selected it as one of the "100 Essential Films" of all time. "A flat-out treasure, impervious to time." –The Boston Globe
"An American masterpiece, independent to the bone…" –The New York Times
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Adrian Tomine is the critically acclaimed cartoonist of the comic book series Optic Nerve; the graphic novels 32 Stories, Sleepwalk, Summer Blonde, and Shortcomings; and the art book Scrapbook. He is also an illustrator for The New Yorker, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, and his stories have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading and An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Tomine lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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