Une formidable chasse a l'homme.

Good evening, and welcome to the Ministry of Rum and Ginger.

Here at the Ministry we will catalogue, analyse and admire the finer things in life. From Spy Films to Supermodels. From Cocktails to Comic Books. From Dining Room to Study to Lounge. All will be collected and displayed here, for your education and entertainment.

I am your curator, and this gallery of good-living is of my choosing. I will do my best to leave my ego at the door (and by door, I mean my other blog The Black Dog vs Ice Cream. A far more self-indulgent and, frankly, emo outlet for my creativity,) and focus instead on providing a run down of good, solid, trustworthy stuff. It will be brawny, beardy, and maybe even bacchanalian.

So to begin with, I'm posting these two posters I made up of The Day of the Jackal, Fred Zinnemann's adaptation of the Forsythe Best Seller. I was inspired by a French book on Samurai that I saw in Oxfam. It had a superb orange and black cover was ruthlessly simple and effective in design. I would have bought it, despite the language barrier, were it not for the mystery brown stain that ran through most of the pages. To be perfectly honest these posters look nothing like the cover of that book, but it was the starting point of a little time waster. I wanted a project with a French feel to it, and something about Edward Fox as gentleman assassin The Jackal seemed to fit. I knocked both of these up fairly quickly on photoshop, using screengrabs from the film and experimenting with various built in FX. Found out if I add a gaussian blur to the letters, I eliminate that clean and digital look that's made previous attempts at this sort of thing look artificial. Fascinating, no?

And that's all for now.

The image used up there in the title panel is a gorgeous shot of Lithuanian model Ilona Kuodiene. I have no idea who took it, but I love it*. She seems like the perfect ornament to sit in the passenger seat of a 1960 Fiat Abarth as it races along L'Avenue Princess Grace. Here is the untampered version.

Goodnight, darlings.

x

*After a bit of research I found out it was taken by former model, photographer and director Ellen Von Unwerth. Bravo, Ellen.