Monday's Inanity: Mamet, Blinky, and Napoleon Dynamite.

Ugh, it's Monday and it's been rainy and cold all day; the weatherpeople say it's supposed to keep up until tomorrow, so today turned out to be a great day to stay indoors and do laundry and vacuum all day, which is what I did. While I was folding laundry I watched David Mamet's House of Games for the first time. One of Peggy's fellow MBAs lent it to me after we got to talking about a Ricky Jay performance he'd seen in New York. Ricky Jay's pretty amazing -- he's probably the most accomplished sleight-of-hand man in the world, and he's steeped in all things related to confidence games. Scams. He's not a brilliant actor or anything, but he fits pretty good into a Mamet movie, which is probably why he's frequently featured in them. Anyway, House of Games (which is Mamet's directorial debut, which helps explains the film school thesis look to the thing) is a pretty good movie but it brings up all of those same "How in the hell can he get away with this stuff?" feelings I always have when I watch a Mamet movie. And by that I mean how is it people buy the crazy lines that come out of Mamet's character's mouths? The main character in House of Games actually says to another character, unironically, "Let's talk turkey." Totally straight face and she zips past it and starts saying her other lines like it's not actually worth stopping in the middle of the scene, turning to the guy behind the camera and asking, "You reallywant me to say that?" Any other movie you hear a clunker like that, you get walk outs (or Stop Button Pushes on the DVD Players in this case), but because it's Mamet, you're just supposed to go with the flow, and so you do. Good for him, I guess. He's carved out a niche for himself as the guy who's allowed to string any series of words together he wants, and have people like it. I'm one of those people. But still. I have these feelings of resentment.

Anyway, the image above is page one of a two-page comic I drew up in the last year or so. I don't much like the layout of the page, or the top three drawings very much, but I do like the bottom two drawings. I think they came out pretty good -- not too much inking, not too little. If I were so inclined, I would have liked to localize just the two bottom-most drawings and post only those, but I might as well give you the whole thing. Overall, though, page-wise, not so much. The horse looks retarded, for one, and it's a lot of page real estate to devote to a suspenseful stroll. This is what happens when you just start drawing comics without having anything written out beforehand. Comes out like this.


Also, before I sign off for the day, I wanted to mention this. If you hit the 'Next Blog' button at the top of this blog, usually you get seriously crappy blogs, but every now and again you get something pretty good, as I did with benerdwalkin's blog. He's a recent art school grad and does some really great stuff which he posts up on his blog. He also has links to a bunch of other art school grads who do great work. The image to the left is by an artist named Jeffrey Thompson. Here's the link. I thought this was a pretty great caricature of Jon Heder as Napoleon. A lot of the blogs linked to on Benerd Walkin's site feature good stuff -- I reccomend some browsin' if you get the chance. Anyway, that's all for now. More tomorrow.