Renaissance Drawings & new Mike Carey

We went to the Renaissance Drawings exhibition at the British Museum on Friday night, which was mostly excellent.  It was really interesting to see the artists' sketches, done to experiment with various depictions of things, or to plot out parts of a planned painting.  My boredom threshold for museum exhibitions is quite low, though, and my interest started to flag after about an hour, since a lot of the drawings were quite similar and there were very many of them.  My favourite, though, came quite late on (Cosimo's Landscape with a Penitent St Jerome), so I was glad we persevered overall.  Interestingly, I've just looked up the final painting for that one, and I don't really like it at all.


A shopping trip supposedly focusing on new clothes for me yesterday turned out rather differently, with the main purchases being a board game and a couple of graphic novels.  We spent much more time in the comics shops than anywhere else, and I wrote down a huge list of things to look up later and potentially buy, since I'm always looking for more really good comics to read.  However, a collection of the first five issues of a new Mike Carey series could not be left on the shelf, and I read it on the way home.  Carey is one of my all-time favourite writers (his Lucifer series is amazing) so perhaps my expectations were rather high.  The Unwritten is so far a good story, with intriguing mysteries and interesting characters, but I wouldn't say it's anything special - though the last chapter of this collection did add a whole new level of power and emotion to the arc plot and made me think I would perhaps pursue the rest of the series after all.

Angelina Jolie double feature

An interesting combination of films visited my DVD player this afternoon, the only connection between them being Angelina Jolie.

Changeling was long, quite slow, intensely serious, but extremely good.  I was a bit worried that it would be very depressing, as I've been burned by Eastwood films before but, though it certainly wasn't jolly, it wasn't too much of a downer, either.  Very good performances all round, and an interesting exploration of police corruption and the difficulties of going up against an organisation with that much power.

Mr & Mrs Smith, on the other hand, was fast-paced, very silly, and pretty much entirely taken up with shoot-outs of varying descriptions.  There was even less plot than I'd remembered from seeing it in the cinema, and the attractions of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in those kinds of roles really pass me by.  However, it was diverting enough for a Sunday evening, and made a good contrast to the previous film.