Just Sayin Again

- Channel 4 airs a starry, classy-looking adaptation of David Peace's Yorkshire novels, "Red Riding" in March (the way HBO should be doing Ellroy's America Trilogy), and it looks like it could be, well, ace:





- Lewis Trondheim is a French cartoonist, and the genius behind "Mr. O", one of my favourite comics ever, which makes me cry with laughter. For the last few years he's been blogging here mainly in the form of short cartoons, vignettes about the absurdity of daily life. They're in French but frequently the gags are utterly visual, so it translates. Theres also a book collection, in English; "Little Nothings: The Curse of the Umbrella". He's done an intimidating amount of other stuff too, the majority of it remaining untranslated.

- Vincenzo Natali. He wrote and directed "Cube" and "Cypher", two original, individual genre movies with a little more depth than is usual for American sci-fi cinema. A couple of years ago he directed one of the chapters in "Paris je t'aime" (he's highly regarded in France, naturally) and he has a new film, "Splice", out this year. But I remember reading an interview with him during production of his "Cypher" follow-up, "Nothing", which he said was about two friends who are playing video games one day then when they open their front door everything is gone. There is just a void. He said it was a black comedy, and I thought it sounded great. Only it never came out. In the UK, at any rate. It did everywhere else. The DVD, needless to say, has been ordered, although this trailer is interesting but not particularly enticing:



- Grant Morrison, in a Newsarama interview, on the similarities between Kirby's New Gods, Star Wars... and something else. I didn't realise it at the time, but of course he's right:
"Star Wars just can’t come close to Kirby’s transcendental vision. The Force doesn’t even have a Wall! Real fans out there will of course be familiar with the He-Man film, Masters of the Universe, which is the closest any movie has so far come to copying New Gods outright. They even have the Boom Tube, while Skeletor is played as Darkseid and He-man is very obviously Orion."

- I wrote a post about the "Mad Men" credits ages ago, and here is the Simpsons pitch-perfect parody:



Up top? Vonetta McGee. Just because.