Monday Cleaning

Here comes the Clean:

Karen Comes Clean page 12

And another fine weekend is laid to rest. Man, I sure do love weekends. This one was both relaxing and productive. Banged out a new script that I'm pretty pleased with. Spent a little time with Joe Ezsterhaus and his mammoth ego, reading Hollywood Animal. Pretty entertaining thus far. Also, I drank beer and ate a positively glorious chorizo sandwich.

I also polished off the collection of Black Summer by Warren Ellis and Juan Jose Ryp.



I'm a big Ellis fan and he really delivers the goods on this one. It's about a rogue superhuman operative who decides to assassinate George W. Bush 'cause he doesn't like his policies. You gotta love a premise like that even if it's a bit dated in the age of Obama. Since this is an Avatar book and Ellis can pretty much write whatever he wants, the superguy goes ahead and takes out President W, which as you might imagine causes a pretty big fuss. The rest of the story focuses mainly on superguy's ex-superbuddies and the government's attempts to eradicate them before they eradicate everybody else. Much graphic carnage ensues. It's very reminiscent of The Authority and you could even sort of imagine it as a kind of Authority: The End if you switched out the main characters with Midnighter and the rest of the gang.

The whole thing is actually a bit less simplistic than it sounds. Ellis puts across some interesting ideas here. Mostly though it's just a fun explosion of superfolks killing each other in the name of twisted ethics and self-interest.

Ryp does a bang-up job on the art. He's obviously highly influenced by Geof Darrow, but so what? We don't get nearly enough comics from Darrow and Ryp's stuff is gorgeous. He's a master of exploding heads.

Anyway, Black Summer is good ultraviolent fun and highly recommended to fans of Ellis' superhero work like The Authority.

On the movie front, I watched Whatever Works, Woody Allen's latest meditation on his favorite subject - hot young chicks who are inexplicably attracted to cranky old neurotic dudes. It was mildly entertaining. Larry David is Woody's stand-in as old neurotic dude for this go-around. Now I like Larry David, but boy howdy, the guy is no actor. He's all one note in this movie. He pretty much just goes around shouting at everybody. For whatever reason, that works in Curb Your Enthusiasm, but not so much here. Still, it was allright. Patricia Clarkson has a nice turn as Evan Rachel Wood's kooky southern Mom. Wood herself is button cute as per usual, but goes way over the top, probably in an attempt to keep up with Larry David's shouting. Eh, it wasn't so bad for a lazy Sunday evening.

I'll also shamefacedly admit to sitting all the way through My Life in Ruins. The woman made me watch it. This is the new one from the chick from My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Which I hated. I hated this new one too. So will you. Even the woman hated it. But we kind of enjoyed hating it. Richard Dreyfuss is also in this movie. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

So there's my weekend.

Here's an unrelated sketch:























Go on and have yourself a dandy week now, hear?